You're listening to the Family Discipleship Podcast, a podcast of Training the Church.

All right, this is Adam Griffin.

And before I introduce you to our distinguished guests, let me first introduce my two lovely co-hosts.

First, the habitually

happy, Cassie Bryan. How you doing today, Cassie? I'm great. I loved how you worked in habit.

Oh, thank you. That's very nice.

Well, I think our guest gets a nickel every time we say habit on this podcast.

Sure. You're going to be rich, Justin.

And of course, we're joined by the consistently stunning Mrs. Chelsea Griffin. How you doing today, Chelsea? Happy to be here. Great. And what a distinct honor to have with us on today's episode, a lawyer, an author, a husband, a father, Mr. Justin early. How you do today, Justin? I'm doing great. I'm doing really great. It sounded like somebody chucked on doing when he said lawyer. I did because I was thinking we are boring lawyer is how he described himself. Yeah, that's right. But lawyer's not the only thing you do. You also speak a lot into people's habits. And I think of you as like the king of habits. Man, do you write so much about habits? Are habits hard for you? And that's why you write about them? Or are you leading the most disciplined life? And you're just helping the rest of us along. Wow. Bingo, Adam. We're getting right to it. I write about this stuff not because I'm so qualified or good at it, but because I need it so badly.

So I actually started on anybody who's read my first book, The Common Rule, knows.

I got onto this whole train of thinking about habits because my life fell apart in an anxiety crash.

And then a big part of the Lord bringing me through recovery was figuring out that the spiritual disciplines really do change your

life. Yeah. Yeah. I loved the common rule. I read it in early 2020, I think, or late 2019,

which is perfect timing because the pandemic hit. Yeah. And it gave us an opportunity to really, like,

scale back on a lot of our time commitments and then kind of create some of those things in our lives. It was such a blessing to us. That's great. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so thankful to hear that. I feel like if I had written the book, The Common Rule, I would feel extra guilt and shame any time my habits fill apart. You feel like you're able to operate a lot of freedom? You feel like you're able to walk a discipline life and give yourself a break when your habits fall apart?

You know, I do, I do.

And I think that is mostly just the Lord's grace.

But I think because it is so true that I came to habits by way of failure,

I mean, I really did get to a low point in my life. And because my

experience with habits has been thinking about ways that the Lord can habitually interrupt your day

with these levers of grace, like small actions on our part that seem to have outsized effect

on our life. Like, the only reason for that is grace, right? And so when I think about it, when I mess up or when I get off my routines, I just often think about going back to the arms of the father, the arms of grace. Like life is better there. I'm not doing this stuff to impress God. I'm doing this stuff because he loves me. And this is a better way to live. So I really do. And I really do. And I encourage anybody listening. It really is possible to think of discipline and habits in that way. It's nothing legalistic, but everything gracious. That's great. So good. Man, that's great. All right, for those who are listening who don't know you, Justin, maybe they haven't read the common rule yet or don't know about the book we're about to talk about. Would you just introduce yourself, but also could you tell us a little bit about your family? Yeah, I could do both. I'll start with the family. So I'm married to my wife and friend and compatriot and all things, Lauren, and we have four boys. They are wit, ash, cult, and Shep. They are, as of the recording of this podcast, 9, 7, 5, and 3. So we have a wildhouse with a lot of things that get broken all the time. I am a lawyer. That's my main job business lawyer. But as I said earlier, my life fell apart in my early years of lawyering. I used to be a missionary in China,

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