In my conversation with Jason Heinritz, what stood out to me was not simply that he “got more religious.” It was that he moved from hustle to holy habits.
That is a very different thing.
Jason’s story is familiar to a lot of modern people, especially in America. He grew up in a conservative Christian home, kept some connection to church, and still lived most of his life with what he called “one foot in the world, one foot out.” Sunday belonged to God, at least nominally. The rest of the week belonged to ambition, pleasure, recognition, sales, success, and the building of what he rightly called “Jason’s show.”
That divided life can work for a while. In fact, it often works better than people expect. You can make money. You can be well-liked. You can accumulate experiences. You can still tell yourself you believe in God. You can even do just enough religion to keep your conscience from screaming too loudly. But eventually, the internal contradiction catches up with you.
Jesus put it plainly: “No man can serve two masters… Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
That verse is not merely about money. It is about rival loyalties. It is about the impossibility of building your identity on two foundations at once. One kingdom must come first. One voice must rule. One center must hold.
Jason’s wake-up call came in the form that many wake-up calls do: not as abstract theology, but as lived crisis. A relationship, a wedding approaching, red flags he had managed to ignore, and then the growing realization that the life he was building could not hold. The pleasures that had blinded him were no longer enough to quiet what he knew deep down. At that point, the question was no longer theoretical. It was biblical in the most practical sense: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve” (Joshua 24:15).
What I appreciated was that he did not describe the answer in vague emotional terms alone. He got concrete. Morning routines. Evening routines. Prayer. Scripture. Journaling. Exercise. Sabbath. A daily and weekly structure that says, in effect: I am no longer going to drift. I am going to order my life around what is true.
That is deeply biblical.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33) is not just an inspiring slogan. It has to become a schedule. It has to become a pattern. It has to show up in when you go to sleep, when you wake up, what you put into your mind, what you do with your body, who you walk with, and what you refuse to let master you.
Likewise, Proverbs says, “Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left” (Proverbs 4:26–27). That is not merely moral poetry. It is practical architecture. Straight paths do not happen by accident. They are made by repeated decisions, repeated habits, repeated acts of ordering.
And that, I think, is the key. We often want transformation without regimen. We want peace without discipline. We want spiritual strength without structure. But scripture does not speak that way. Paul speaks of running the race, disciplining the body, pressing toward the mark, putting off the old man and putting on the new (1 Corinthians 9:24–27; Philippians 3:13–14; Ephesians 4:22–24). The image is active, not passive. Grace is a gift, yes. But giftedness still has to be trained into faithfulness.
Jason’s phrase “holy habits” gets at something many Christians forget: we do not usually drift into holiness. We drift into distraction.
That is especially true in a culture built on stimulation, appetite, and speed. If you do not intentionally sanctify time, the world will gladly colonize it for you. Your evenings will disappear into scrolling. Your mornings will begin in haste. Your body will sag, your mind will fragment, your prayers will shrink, and you will wonder why your spiritual life feels weak. The answer is often not mysterious. It is structural.
The Sabbath principle matters here too. Jason touched on it, and I think rightly. If God built rest into creation itself, then we are fools to imagine ourselves stronger than the created order. The Sabbath is not an inconvenience to productivity. It is a rebuke to the illusion that we are machines. “The sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27), and man ignores that gift at great cost.
What I heard in Jason’s story was not legalism, but alignment. Not self-salvation, but cooperation. Not “earn God’s favor,” but “stop living as though chaos is a virtue.” In a world that rewards hustle, performance, and perpetual motion, holy habits are a form of resistance. They say: I belong to another kingdom. I answer to another Master. My life will not be built on adrenaline, applause, or appetite.
That is a message younger people especially need to hear. Many of them have already discovered that the culture’s promises do not deliver. Pleasure does not produce peace. Freedom without form becomes bondage. Success without purpose becomes emptiness. And the soul that is never governed from within will always be governed from without.
So yes, the basic point is simple: if you want a holy life, you will need holy habits.
Not because habits save you.
Because habits reveal who rules you.
This same question of how to live wisely and faithfully continues in the next conversations—first with Tremper Longman on the enduring relevance of scripture, and then with Jennifer Wiseman on wonder, science, and the deeper questions that awaken awe. Different subjects, same pursuit: learning how to order life around what is true.
