I found the following quote years ago and saved it in my files. It comes from David G. Myers, who is a professor of Psychology at Hope College.
“If social psychologists have proven anything during the last 30 years, they have proven that the actions we take leave a residue inside us. Every time we act, we amplify the underlying idea or tendency behind it. Most people presume the reverse: that our traits and attitudes affect our behavior. While this is true to a certain extent (though less so than commonly supposed), it is also true that our traits and attitudes follow our behavior. We are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into a new way of acting.”
There is much that could be profitably explored in what Dr. Myers wrote. Many have resonated with the idea expressed in that last line, but it is the first sentence that I find most striking. If “the actions we take leave a residue inside us,” we had better understand what that “residue” is and what its effect is on human flourishing.
First, we must ask what does Dr. Myers, and the social psychologists he represents, mean by “inside us.” Are we talking about something that happens inside our brain or our soul? Does this residue deposit amount to a neurological condition or a spiritual one?
The question, as I stated it, is misleading. It separates what God has joined together, as if humans are part spiritual and part physical. Instead, humans are spiritual beings that interact with the world through a physical body, or say rather, humans are fully embodied spiritual beings. This is true whether or not they ever pray, attend corporate worship services, or believe in God. Everything that happens “inside us” (as well as “to us”) has spiritual implications because Homo sapiens is a spiritual being.
Another question: What is the residue that is left inside us? If this question implies the “residue” is some foreign substance that originates outside us, it is also misleading (see Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7:15). It might be better to think that what is already “inside us” will become either a residue of evil or a reserve of holiness as we interact with our world. Outside events serve as a kind of spiritual catalyst, and what forms inside us will depend on whether we “live according to the flesh” (Romans 8:13) or are “led by the Spirit.”
During the Second World War, C. S. Lewis addressed this fundamental spiritual process. He said, “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature…”
Lewis saw human volition – our ability to choose – as key to this process of formation. That ability, which is constantly being influenced by thoughts and feelings, sensations and perceptions, is the mechanism by which we are currently – at this very moment – being formed. I said earlier that what is “inside us” will become “either a residue of evil or a reserve of holiness,” but that is not quite right. We become that residue of evil or we become a person of holiness. What is “being made new” (Colossians 3:10) on the one hand, or being deformed on the other, is nothing other than us.
Lewis warns that “Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”
From there, Lewis went on to give this helpful advice. “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
That sounds a lot like what Dr. Myers said the social psychologists learned: “We are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into a new way of acting.”
The takeaway is this: the God who made us is now remaking us with our input. We play a vital role in the people we are becoming. We may claim that we are simply the product of our past—the abuse we suffered, the neglect we endured, or the poverty in which we were raised, but the reality is that we are a product of the choices we made in those (and all other) situations. We are “coworkers with God” in making the persons we are becoming. That is a both high honor and a momentous calling.
The Way Home 
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