When Good Habits Become Idols

A good habit  become an idol. I learned that the hard way when my workout routine slowly stopped being a tool and started becoming my foundation, and I didn’t even notice the shift until God interrupted my schedule.

I’m Troy, and I’m sharing a recent confession from my own life: exercise started to replace dependence on Christ. The drift wasn’t dramatic. It looked responsible, disciplined, and even “healthy” on the outside. But as workouts got longer and more intense, my quiet time with God got smaller, my focus in prayer and Scripture got weaker, and my identity started leaning on performance instead of grace. We talk through what idolatry really is, why it often grows in the most ordinary routines, and how the enemy uses small wedges that disconnect believers from Jesus.

You’ll hear the Bible passages that helped me name what was happening, including Jeremiah 2:13 on broken cisterns, 1 Timothy 4:8 on the limited value of physical training, 1 John 5:21’s direct warning to keep away from idols, and Matthew 6:33’s call to seek God first. I also share the practical changes I made: putting devotional time before everything else, reducing workouts to twice a week, adding structure to prayer and reading, and inviting accountability through my wife and our life group. If you’ve been searching for help with spiritual discipline, a consistent Christian morning routine, or reclaiming quiet time with God, this conversation is for you.

Listen, share it with someone who needs a reset, and then subscribe and leave a review so Kingdom Chaos can reach more people. What’s one good thing that might be crowding out your best thing right now?

Transcript

Welcome And A Hard Confession

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Welcome to Kingdom Chaos, a podcast for anyone trying to live a purpose and faith-filled life in a loud and messy world. Jesus said his kingdom in another story, yet here we are navigating real life and real struggles. I'm not a guru, just someone learning that God's grace meets us even in the chaos. This is Kingdom Chaos where faith meets real life and purpose is still found in the mess. Hey, welcome back to Kingdom Chaos. My name is Troy, and today I want to share a personal story in my life that happened recently. It was a slow drift into idolatry. So I'm gonna do some confessing here on the podcast today. Before I do that, could you do me a favor and leave us a five-star rating, give us a review, share this on social media, get it out there. We really want to be able to help people. So if this has impacted you, share it with somebody so maybe it'll be impactful in their lives. So I had a healthy habit that became an unhealthy idol. And I think the way the enemy works, he works off of who we are and what we're doing. And so if you're a non-believer, he probably pushes you towards success, fame, or money or something like that. Or if you don't have anything and you're just sitting there, okay, well, God didn't exist. If he loved me, then I would be doing better. So it's uh it's probably easy for him in that way. I don't know. But if you are a believer, he tries to separate you from God with these you know wedges in your life and they're slow and they're little daily things that disconnect you from Jesus. If that doesn't work, then maybe he pushes you as far toward Christ as possible so you look unattractive by have being pious or proud or even arrogant in a religion rather than a relationship. Uh, these are just things I think about. I don't know if they're they're real. I mean, you can talk about them, but uh this is just the things that I think about how Satan works on the things that uh we already have in our minds, because I think we give him too much power sometimes. It's the things in our mind that actually uh we start to listen to and drift us away from Christ. And I didn't know that my workouts had become an idol in my life. I work out for two main reasons. One, I want to be in physical shape for God. So if he calls me somewhere, I'm ready to go. The other thing is I have six grandkids, I want to be able to play with them long in life, but the enemy used that to push me away from God. So, what is an idol or what is idolatry? So, an idol or idolatry is anything that you place your identity in that's not God or that replaces God. So my workout routine became the foundation of my daily source of personal strength, and it replaced my dependency on Christ. This is significant because of how slowly it happened in my life, and I wasn't aware of it. So, what was my daily routine? So, my daily routine was I would wake up, I would go cook breakfast, I would eat, I would go work out, and then I would spend quality, quiet time with the Lord, and then I would go to work. So, what's wrong with this? Well, one, what would happen is I would tell myself, well, I need to get up because and work out first and eat breakfast so I get the blood flowing and I could wake up and all these things. Great, awesome, that's fantastic. The problem, what would happen was my workouts became longer and more intense. So, how that affected my quiet time was I only have so much time in the morning, so my workouts would start to take more of that time, so my quiet time become less and less, and because my workouts became more intense, my focus that I could have on Christ in the mornings in my quiet time, it started to waver. And I tell you what, right now in my quiet time, my quiet time and quality time with God is at a high, it's really good, and I can tell you the shift from a consistent quality, quiet time with the Lord in the morning is remarkable. I feel much more confident in myself because I know I've spent that time with the Lord and I've built my relationship with him in the morning, and that gives me my security throughout the day. Now, I've talked about in previous episodes while there are good things like work and providing for your family, they actually can become idols, even though themselves they're not inherently bad. But when we use those as our stability and we depend on those rather than God, that's when they become our idols. In Jeremia 2.13, it says, My people have committed two sins. They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. We should not seek fulfillment in things that are not God. My physical training became my broken cistern, and it couldn't sustain me. And what's crazy is I could actually feel the leaking out of me, and I didn't see it in the moment, but there was something that happened in my life that God revealed things to me. So it's not that my quiet time was gone, it was still there, it was just shrinking. God was there in the moment and he showed me what was going on. How did he do this? So there was a week that was really physical at work, and so I decided I was gonna get my physical needs from work that week instead of working out. So I didn't work out that entire week. I got my physical needs from work. The next week, it was long days. Woke up really early in the morning, got home really late at night. So I was like, you know what, not gonna work out, and take another week off. So in those that two-week period, God revealed to me what I was doing and what was happening, and it was up to me to make a choice at that moment. Now, in 1 Timothy 4, 8, it says, for physical training is of some value, but godliness has the value for all things, holding promises for both the present life and the life to come. So in that verse, it does say that physical training has some value, but it only has some value. So I'm gonna make a choice to change my routine, which I'll talk about in a minute, but I'm not gonna take physical training completely out because it has some value. But then that verse goes on to say, but godliness has value for all things. So I want to make sure that my connection with Christ is what I put at the top of the pyramid, and that is my priority. So this verse directly addresses the balance I'm seeking in my own life, acknowledging the benefit of exercise while emphasizing the eternal priority of spiritual discipline. So, like I said, God showed me what was going on in this area of my life, and once he did, I had to make a decision. I had to take action. I could do nothing and continue on with what I was doing, or I could change my routine. So I decided to change my routine because I want to be obedient to Christ, I want him first in my life and everything. So once he revealed this, I took action. Now I wake up, I eat breakfast, and then I immediately go into my quality, quiet time with the Lord, and then I'm gonna work out later on. In fact, I've changed my workouts from four or five, six times a week to only twice a week. So I'll I'll work out, I'll take three days off, I'll work out, I'll take three days off. So it's only twice a week. So I changed a lot in my life. Another thing that I've done is I want to make sure my quiet time was structured. I have a prayer, I have a reading, and I have a prayer, and within that reading, I have certain things I want to read. I used to be kind of chaotic and sporadic in in the readings that I would do, but now I'm more structured. There's a third thing I've done. I've also talked through this with my wife and my life group. I'm being held accountable by both. So in the mornings, me and my wife, while we're doing two separate quiet times, we're doing this together in the same room. So we're holding each other accountable, but also with my life group, we have a group text message in the morning. Every morning, me or my wife say, Quiet time done. So they know that we've done our quiet time the way we should do it. I want to make sure that I rely on God first, but I also need that community around me to hold me accountable. So I want to highlight a couple of verses. In Colossians 3 5, it says, Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature, these desires that we have in our heart, the earth, earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. So this verse highlights eternal desires that we have in our hearts, and greed can become modern idols. These things that it talks about, like these sexual immoralities, impurities, lust, evil desires, and greed. There's so many things in our modern day lives that we can call idols. A sports figure or superstar could be an idol. If you need to go and travel the world to see this particular sport or person, uh if you put that person on a pedestal above God, uh if if your job replaces God, if that's what you build your identity on, all these different things that happen in our lives in this modern day life, if money becomes uh more important than you to you than going to church or building a church community or reading the Bible or prayer, so many things that become our idols that we need to get rid of, that we need to make sure we have that community to hold ourselves accountable so that we can put God first in every area of our life. In 1 John 5 21, it's a direct statement here. It says, Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. This is a direct command to be vigilant against anything that might take God's place in your heart. So this directly references anything that takes God's place in your heart. We need to uh you know identify that as an idol and get rid of that and place God in the first place in every area of our life and make sure he is first in our heart. In Matthew 633 it says, Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all things will be given to you as well. This serves as a reminder to prioritize your connection with God before any other daily task. In the morning when you wake up, make sure we prioritize God first. Now, if you need to wake up and go to the bathroom and and eat breakfast and then go in your quiet time, fine. But it needs to be the thing that you do in the morning that everything else revolves around, not something that is just thrown in at the last minute or just because you have a couple of seconds, like what's happening to me when I slowly made working out my priority. Reclaim your quiet time, and that requires a daily alignment and a daily surrender. It's not a one-time fix as we talked about in previous episodes, but it's a choice to give the best part of your morning to God before the noise begins throughout the day. We need to embrace the stillness. It is so important that real strength comes from that quiet, quality connection with God that we have. So prioritizing sitting in that quiet space, allowing God to speak to us, for us not to, you know, supply the noise. Now it's great to pray and whatever's on your heart to give that to God and allow him to hear your prayers and you to be transparent and have that connection. But we also need a quiet time for him to be able to speak to us, to hear his words, to be able to hear his guidance in our life. So make sure you're giving him that time, that quiet time, that true quiet time, where there is no noise, there's no distraction, no phone, no kids, no spouse, no work, no notifications, no watch, that you are in that quiet space and allowing him to talk to you. Now I want to make it clear that this is a recent event in my life. I know that previous episodes we've talked about the history, the testimony, all these things that have happened in my life and in Amy's life and our life together. These are recent events. These are things I have to daily uh work on in my life, daily surrender to God. This isn't something that happened 10 years ago. This is something that happened in the last couple of months of my life. I want to share this because as Christians, we need to be open. I've confessed this to others, like I said, to my wife, to my life group, and ask them to hold me accountable. You should be doing the same thing. Let the light in to those dark areas of your life, the things that you recognize that are going on in your life that are pulling you away from God. Confess those to other people. Let them hold you accountable. A life group, a mentor, a spouse, a close friend, a Christian brother or sister that can hold you accountable to put God first in your life every day. Don't allow guilt or shame or isolation to keep you from God. Don't give the enemy power. You know, just think of the guilt that you have. Oh, nobody knows what I'm going through. Nobody's been through this, or the shame that I can't confess this, that nobody will understand. That's giving the enemy the power over your life and keeping you in a cage, keeping you away from people in isolation. Let the light shine in. Find those brothers and sisters that won't judge you, that will pray for you, that will help you get out of that pit and confess to them so they can walk alongside you in life and bring you closer with the Lord. Let's pray. Lord, uh, I just pray for everyone that's going through a situation uh where they have put something like an idol uh work or money or working out or kids or even a spouse, that they've put that above you, a lay a relationship that is uh taking them away from you. I pray that that is revealed to them and that they take action to start to put you in the center of their life in every area of their life, Lord. Lift us up. I just pray for blessings upon people's lives so that they can grow spiritually, they can know you more, they can build a relationship with you, they can pour out to other people, be a blessing to other people, Lord. Help us in that way. We all need help. We're always trying to uh be more like you, but we need help in that. Nothing can come from us, it all comes from you. You are the source of everything, and we need you. Help us, Lord. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.