Now Streaming Week 1: Breaking BadSample

Breaking Bad had the third most-watched series finale in cable history. The series' dark storyline chronicles a disheartened high school chemistry teacher whose stage-three lung cancer diagnosis drives him to secure his family's financial security by producing and distributing crystal meth. Talk about bad habits. 

Your own bad habits may or may not be as dramatic or destructive as those on display on television, but you can rest assured that everyone struggles with one or more. The Bible has a lot to say about the full spectrum of bad habits, from bad language to blasphemy and everything in between. The good news is that God has given us power over bad habits, or what the Bible calls "the flesh." And there's more good news: victory over the flesh doesn't depend on your willpower, which ultimately and repeatedly fails. It depends on the Holy Spirit living in you and working to make you more like Jesus.    

As followers of Jesus who are filled with the Holy Spirit but who still struggle with bad habits, we cannot simply say, "I have no control over my actions" or "This is just the way I am" or "It's the way I was raised." We can decide to "put to death…whatever belongs to your earthly nature….your old self with its practices" and "put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator" (see Colossians 3:5-10, NIV). If you haven't cast off the control that the old you—the old nature—has on you, let this be the week that you put on the new nature that you have in Jesus and be renewed.