I was hit hard a few weekends ago with the conviction that I am thoroughly judgmental. It wasn’t a coincidence that I had spent the evening at the Des Moines Arts Festival: my convictions were doubtless catalyzed by the thousands of people that had surrounded me for the past three hours.

Throughout the evening, I just did what I normally do when in public—size up strangers in my mind as they pass by, writing abridged life stories to explain their every action that I disapprove of. The moment I walk out the front door, this little internal criticizer flickers to life and begins to simmer just beneath the surface, hidden from the sight of my always-vigilant sentry of a conscience. But as I waded through the sea of thousands of people that night, my criticizer must have gotten a bit careless due to the amount of work it had to do, because it broke the surface just long enough for my conscience to spot it and sound the alarm.

And the clarity came to me all at once as I realized this is a terrible habit to have. To reduce a human being from three beautiful and vivid dimensions down to one, dull and faded; to rewrite his biography to read like a coloring book instead of a complex character study that would make Dostoevsky look like Dr. Seuss—a terrible and poisonous habit.

Jesus told a story in Luke 11 about a demon who leaves a man, but decides to return after realizing it has nowhere else to go. Upon arriving, it finds the house clean and orderly—but vacant. So it brings seven other demons with it, and as Jesus says, “the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

I didn’t understand the relevance of this parable until a few weeks ago. Now, I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the subject matter, which is literal demonic possession. But this is a divine perception into the root problem behind habitual sin: the house may be in order, but it’s still empty! No matter how hard we try, we can never just stop doing or quit thinking something, and this is why so many of us give up after repeatedly failing.

No, the only way to overcome these habits is to deliberately push them out of our minds with something else to fill the void—something as good as the habit was bad. An eviction is nothing more than an idle threat if the landlord doesn’t change the locks and rent out to someone else.

And for me, with my demon of criticism, this means chasing away “Well, the choice of food in his shopping cart explains the need for a motorized scooter” with a picture of that person standing right next to me in eternity, in his glorified and perfect body, singing praises to our Creator with notes and scales that don’t exist in this world. It’s very difficult to have wrong thoughts about another person when you understand what they’re made for.