How do people change? Is it from the outside in or from the inside out? Or is it both? To think of it in biblical terms, how does sanctification take place? Do we become holy by our habits or by our hearts? Or is it both?

A bundle of recent books has contended that being intentional about our habits can have a significant impact for good in our daily lives. These books are complemented by a cluster of Christian authors who have proposed that such insights are cordial to a biblical view of change. A worthy and popular representative of this latter group is James K. A. Smith, author of You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit.

The Power of Habit

Smith’s essential thesis is that certain practices provide the primary catalyst for change in a Christian’s life. We should think of these everyday habits as rituals or “liturgies.” These liturgies are shaping us, for good or for ill. For example, a casual stroll in the mall, he posits, inevitably nurtures a consumeristic outlook, whereas observing the Lord’s Supper beside other worshipers encourages a desire to participate in the body of Christ. For Smith, the power of such habits is rooted in their repetition, whether it’s driving a car, playing baseball, or practicing a musical instrument. As liturgies, they are fashioning the supple clay of our inner, worshiping self. They change us from the outside in, whether we think about them or not, because this whole process happens on a subconscious level. As Smith puts it, “The way to the heart is through the body.” This is how the heart changes.

Smith believes the heart is essentially about desiring, not thinking. Christian discipleship since the Reformation (Protestant discipleship in particular), in his view, has been dominated by an approach that puts far too much emphasis on the intellect. This, he concludes, is a stunted view of who we are. It makes us nothing but “brains-on-a-stick.” For Smith, a more holistic approach is needed, one that sees the connection between our embodied liturgies and our desiring hearts. The gateway for that connection is the imagination. The imagination indicates how the heart is governed by what takes place “under the hood”:  by unconscious, intuitive, and pre-intellectual activity. Since the imagination is deeper than the intellect, it wants rituals, not books. It craves stories and poems, not a lecture. It is shaped by practicing, not catechizing. Since the center of imagination for Smith is love, this proves that we are lovers more than we are thinkers. Discipleship then is about what is “erotic,” not about acquiring information. Love is what shapes our knowledge, not the other way round. Love is not something we think about. It grows from the imagination. We love that we may know. Since all of life is liturgy, according to Smith, what we love is shaped by our habits. It is through various “Spirit-infused” or “Spirit-empowered” practices that the Word “seeps” into our hearts. After all, the heart for him is our “subconscious orientation to the world.”

There is truth in what Smith and others say. It is important to be intentional about our practices, even those that are mundane. Being thoughtless about them will bring hard consequences. One can see this profoundly with the impact of modern media. The field of media ecology, which marches forward under the banner of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message,” has laid bare manifold ways that modern technology has imposed itself on humanity. For example, the smartphone—the crown jewel of modern electronic technology—has come at a heavy cost. As the pawn of social media, it has inflicted great damage. Spending hours before any screen is a habit that profoundly shapes a person, and its pernicious impact is, in part, unobserved. It’s not just the content. It’s the medium. The admonition to use media with greater care is welcomed, as is the sober reminder that change encompasses everything we think, say, and do. All our practices are of great interest to us. What issue, then, could one possibly have with what Smith is saying?

The Habits of the Heart

It’s not so much what Smith says. It’s what he does not say. It’s what he does not say about the heart and what he does not say about how we are sanctified. To begin with, Smith focuses on the desires of the heart as if this is all that the heart does. What the Bible describes is much more than that. It is true that one of the heart’s functions is what we love (or, what we desire, want, seek, crave, yearn for, and feel). But the heart also encompasses what we know (our intellect, knowledge, ideas, meditation, imagination) and what we choose (our volition, the ability to resist or submit). The heart is a cooperative network of these three: the mind, the desires, and the will.

Ironically, the one function of the heart that Smith wants to minimize is the principal thing that the Bible claims is true of the heart: it thinks. A few examples will have to suffice. The heart is enlightened with knowledge (Eph. 1:17–18). “Out of the heart come evil thoughts” (Matt. 15:19). The heart is where we know that the LORD is God (Jer. 24:7). Asking God to “search my heart” is asking him to “know my thoughts” (Ps. 139:23). God saw that “every intention of the thoughts” of man’s heart was evil (Gen. 6:5). The Word of God is a sword that discerns “the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). The parables of Christ exposed the hardness of people’s hearts, which cannot understand (Matt. 13:15). English versions of the Bible will often translate “heart” with words like “understanding,” “sense,” or “mind”—particularly in the wisdom genre of the Bible (e.g., Prov. 6:32; 12:8; 28:26). To pit the heart against thinking is simply not tenable according to Scripture.

An example of this is seen in how Smith focuses upon the imagination as the supposed centerpiece of the heart. He offers no scriptural proof for this view. As a matter of fact, in Scripture the imagination is simply a function of the mind. For example, Ephesians 3:20 is rightly translated either as “more than all we ask or imagine” (NIV) or “more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (ESV). The imagination reflects the heart’s ability to reflect, remember, and meditate (Ps. 19:14). As is true in all our thinking, the imagination does not operate independently of the heart’s desires or will. The three are in league. We are not capable of reasoning without passion or motivation. This is true whether our heart is hardened by sin or regenerated by grace. Impure desires give rise to impure thoughts, just as a renewed heart sees more clearly (Rom. 1:21–22; Matt. 13:16). Yet Smith treats the imagination as if it were something uncontaminated by sin. Any Christian striving to “keep the heart with all diligence” knows the challenge of restraining our roaming thoughts that want to break free and wander off into the forbidden pastures of self-indulgence and fantasy. The false prophets of Ezekiel’s day went wrong because they spoke “out of their own imagination [heart]” (Ezek. 13:2, 17 NIV). Every aspect of our heart’s thinking (and imagining), desiring, and choosing is entangled with sin, just as every aspect of our heart is renewed by grace.

Furthermore, Smith’s view of the heart means that he inevitably passes over a core aspect of the Bible’s teaching on sanctification. When Paul completes his long exposition of the gospel in Romans, what is the first thing he addresses? How Christians change.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:1–2)

Notice that Paul urges an embodied view of sanctification. It concerns the body as well as the inner person. He implies the “outside-in” change that comes by presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. But then Paul explicitly emphasizes the “inside-out” change that arises through the transformation of the believer’s mind. A Christian’s sanctification is impossible without this inner change. The essence of this change comes by God’s Word and Spirit which dwell within us (Westminster Confession of Faith 13.1).

Smith often attaches the Spirit to “Spirit-endued” practices. But God attaches the Spirit to his Word and his truth. Both the “Spirit of truth” and the truth of Christ are ministered to his disciples (John 16:13–14). In other words, God’s Word is vital to the consecration of our thinking. Smith says we do not need a book. The Bible is a book. And its words are life. Scripture purifies the heart (Rom. 10:8), and by it our mind is constantly “being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10). How can one “grow in the grace and knowledge” of Christ (2 Pet. 3:18) without engaging God’s Word with the mind or without meditating upon it day and night (Ps. 1:2)?

For us to change, it is true that “the way to the heart is through the body,” as Smith says. But for sanctifying change, the way to the heart is by the Spirit of God and the Word of God. They are no less vital for our sanctification than for our regeneration. We are “born again . . . through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:23), and we enter the kingdom of God by being “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5). In the same way, we look for God’s gracious promise to “bring . . . to completion” the “good work” that he began in us (Phil. 1:6). As Christ prayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). This is the hope of all those who believe in Christ.

Supernatural Faith

All this serves to accent the indispensable role of faith in sanctification. The very nature of God’s work in transforming our hearts assumes what is the lifeblood of Christianity: supernaturalism. The spiritual blessings that we lay hold of by faith are not from this world. It is an “alien word” that enters us and reforms us. It is the Spirit of God who indwells us and transforms us. The change that befits the kingdom of God is one born of a transcendent power that comes to dethrone the power of sin and the evil one. It comes to signal the beauty of an eternal holiness. Such truths invigorate our faith in Christ. Every saving benefit of Christ can only be received by faith, and there is no spiritual blessing received without it—whether for justification or for sanctification.

And yet this faith is noticeably absent from the discussions of spiritual habits. But this makes perfect sense if it is true that liturgies shape us, whether we think about them or not. Practices do not require faith. Biblical sanctification does. Faith is essential for the change that takes place from the inside out. We do change by caring about our habits, but we become holy by the supernatural and transformative work of God’s Spirit and Word in our hearts.

It is good to watch how we can be changed from the outside-in. It is better for the “inner self” to be renewed day by day. Better for the inside than the outside of the cup to be clean. Better to choose “the good portion” by sitting quietly at the Lord’s feet, listening to his teaching, and believing, than to be anxious about the habit of serving.

The author is an OP minister and professor of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California. New Horizons, June 2024.