The problem is the last two are still regular habits. Every morning before I leave my apartment (assuming my normal schedule of wake up, frantically get ready, and run out the door to wherever I'm supposed to be in 5 minutes), I brush my teeth. I also do it before I go to sleep every night, and frequently at some point during the day. It's a habit that my mother instilled in me since I was young. I wash my sheets every Saturday morning, a slightly more recently developed practice but still a persistent one.
However, I obviously have lapses in other habits. It's fairly common knowledge that good habits take time to develop, yet they can be demolished with only a few I'll do it laters or It can waits. The same is true for digging into Scripture and praying. When I purposefully set aside time during my day for a week or two, it becomes normal and tends to continue for a while. But as soon as I take even one or two days off, it is much too easy to lose that part of my life altogether. Perhaps I'm viewing those things in the wrong way.
Instead of simply being good habits, I want my prayer life and tendency to crack open my Bible daily to be a constant desire. The end of Acts 2 says that the people who accepted the gospel devoted themselves to prayer and learning about Christ. I don't want to read my Bible out of habit. I want to desire the richness of God's teaching so much that I wake up in the morning yearning to read, and go to sleep at night wishing I had more hours in the day to speak to Him.
The only way for me to be transformed in that way is for me to accept that I am inconsistent, and I need Him to open my heart to desire Him more.
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