Working Hard or Hardly Working—Spiritual Habits and the Pitfalls of Legalism

Do you want to cultivate good spiritual habits but avoid soul-crushing guilt and shame when it all comes crashing down five days into your new plan?

Me too! 

Before I hit you with the hard sell of “Please buy my new creative spiritual journal—it will help, honestly”, let’s talk about spiritual habits and legalism.

I was brought up in a church with, let’s say, “varied” theology, where personal performance was seen as vital and salvation could easily be “lost”. I was a constant mess of neuroses and anxiety. As I entered university, I reached religious burnout, held my hands up and said, “I can’t do this anymore!”

Then God, in his grace, grabbed me by the shoulders and showed me that it was never about me and my performance—it was about Christ and his. The gospel wasn’t just the initial doorway, something that would get me to the moment of salvation and after that I’d be on my own; it was for each day. I would fail all the time, but God’s love wasn’t dependent on me getting it right. Crucially, I read Romans 5 v 8 for the very first time: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”.

God, in his grace, grabbed me by the shoulders and showed me that it was never about me and my performance—it was about Christ and his.

But old habits and patterns of thought drilled in since childhood die hard. I was still finding myself waking up with the old 3am guilts. “Am I trying hard enough?” With each new attempt to start new daily habits of prayer and Bible reading, I found they either petered out or just became a kind of dutiful tick-box exercise. Either way it left me feeling like I was failing or falling short of God’s blessing on my life. Once again, I was incorrectly behaving as if my standing before God relied entirely on my consistency at Bible reading. 

So, as I came to designing a spiritual journal, something that would help others to help cultivate the good and helpful practices of a close walk with our God, how could I avoid the same pitfalls of shame and legalism I had spent my entire life battling with?

Two Compartments

God had spent some time answering those questions for me. Depression and anxiety are family friends to me, showing up unannounced for extended stays here and there. During one bad stint, I found my eyes incapable of staying on the page long enough to read the Bible, and my thoughts were scrambled and foggy. But I started to see a way that I could manage to meditate on Scripture: by doodling a few verses. As I hand-lettered and embellished each verse, I was letting the truth gently sink in. 

But now, at last, I started allowing the artistic nature that God had created me with to seep into my quiet times—into all the areas of my life. 

I realised that I’d always had two separate compartments. One was labelled “quiet time”, and it was about sitting quietly, reading, praying, then shutting the Bible—done for the day. The other was labelled “life” and it was about creative thinking, problem-solving, art-making, family life. God had given me artistic gifts but weirdly enough, before then I had never thought to incorporate them into my communication with God or use them as a way of responding to what I was reading. But now, at last, I started allowing the artistic nature that God had created me with to seep into my quiet times—into all the areas of my life. 

Discipline and Creativity

That’s why the spiritual journal I’ve designed is a creative one. I wanted to show that theological thinking and discipline are not separate from a creative response. We are holistic embodied beings in relationship with our Creator. 

I made sure there were sections each month for a little miniature exegesis of a passage, with space to illustrate, doodle, letter or journal what has been discovered. That gives you a guided start to each month. But then there’s also space each day of the week for your own journaling to start: space for you to muse and let your thoughts take shape and note down what God is saying, without the overwhelm of a blank page.

I wanted to show that theological thinking and discipline are not separate from a creative response. We are holistic embodied beings in relationship with our Creator. 

I made the journal undated. That allows the reader to pick up the book with ease and to restart afresh any week or month without feeling the need to either “catch up” or ditch the book entirely out of guilt.

I also added a habit tracker element for each day of the month, where you can mark or colour whether you’ve read your Bible, prayed or managed both. But to try to avoid the shame of seeing whole chunks not filled in each month, I wanted there to always be an extra section. So, whether you have managed all or none of the disciplines on any given day, you can still mark it as a day when you are loved by God. A day where, regardless of your performance, you are yet found in Christ. 

That is something I desperately needed as an unsure, anxious younger Christian—and I still do. I want this for my readers too. To know that to pursue holiness and what God has for you is good and right, but to do it under a banner of his tender compassion, knowing that God knows you and loves the whole person. To enter wholly into life with God, not feeling pushed away by your own insufficiency or inconsistency, but in fullness. To draw near.

Draw Near by Sophie Killingley is a 365-day creative devotional journal that adds a unique combination of structure and creativity into your time with God. Just like a bullet journal, it includes monthly, weekly and daily sections, creative prompts, space for sermon notes and doodling, habit trackers and blank dot pages for extra journaling, lists or notes.