5 Steps to Change Your Life

Filed under Experiencing God, God's Goodness, Nature, Reality, Relationship with God, Rules, The Gospel, The Law, Theology, Transformed Living, Truth, Worldview by on December 17, 2013 at 5:53 pm {no comments}

I have yet to meet a Christian who truly wanted to sin. They might say they want to sin, but if you dig a little deeper they would confess that any perceived desire they feel to sin is actually a torment to them. It’s a source of guilt and shame, especially if they give in to those temptations.

What these Christians need to hear is that, while God does call us to live transformed lives, He’s actually made it a lot easier than we maybe realize.

Here are the five steps God leads us through to have the transformed lives we desire:

Step One: Believe the Gospel

It should go without saying that we’ll never have transformed lives until God enters the picture. The good news (no pun intended) is that all Christians have already taken this step or they wouldn’t be Christians. We believe Jesus died for our sins and rose again to give us life everlasting with Him.

Step Two: Get Adopted

This actually happens at the exact same moment as Step One. One is the result of the other, or maybe better put, it’s simply a different way of defining our salvation. Taking Jesus as our Savior by faith also means taking God as our Father. You can’t have one without the other. So, dear Christian, congratulations on already completing the first two steps toward your transformed life!

Step Three: Receive Discipline

Hebrews 12:7 promises us that being a child of God means He will discipline you, which doesn’t often make us think happy thoughts.

However, it’s helpful for us to consider the means and purpose of God’s discipline. Deuteronomy 8:3-5 explains, “And [God] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD…Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you.”

God’s method of discipline was not sickness, death, destruction, or disaster; it was the daily practice by which He proved His word is trustworthy, giving manna just as He promised. Though every household was bankrupt of food at night, He met their need the following morning every day for forty years. The purpose of this was to teach them to trust His words, which included obeying His commands, but also included the promise that He would deliver a land filled with hostile giants and a multitude of strong nations into their hands. Without faith in His words, Israel would never enter the Promised Land.

That was why God, as a good father, trained them through discipline to live by His words instead of by their circumstances. God’s discipline in our lives will be equally gentle and accomplish the same purpose, establishing trust and faith that His words are true so that we will believe and live by them.

Step Four: Become Free

Jesus prays in John 17:17, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” He also said, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).

This is the exact process we are talking about—living in His words so that we know the truth, which then sets us free. It’s interesting that God’s words result in two things: 1) Us being set apart completely unto Him and 2) Us becoming free. Isn’t it wonderful to see the very thing that brings us closer to Him also sets us free from the things that would control us and cause us to sin?

Step Five: Be Transformed

It’s no wonder then that Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds.” Perhaps it’s easier for us to read this verse and apply it backwards—trying to be transformed in our actions first so that we can think differently about ourselves and earn a closer relationship with God—but that’s not what it says. We can try to transform our lives all we want, but there’s only one way it’s going to happen—by renewing our minds.

That means to make our minds new, to think in a new way. But how are we going to do that? By now the answer is clear. We learn to think a new way by listening to the truth of what God says to us. We regularly bathe in His view of us and become increasingly cleansed from who the world, our past, or any other voice says we are or ought to be. The result of this is that we no longer resemble the world around us, but instead live the transformed lives we always desired but could never attain through our own efforts.

Trying harder won’t stop your sin, but thinking in a way that agrees with God’s words will. This isn’t crazy. It’s biblical.

Transformation really isn’t as hard as we thought it was. That was a lie we believed, but God’s words today can wash away that lie so our new life can truly begin.

Trusting Fatherhood

Filed under Experiencing God, Faithfulness, Fatherhood, God's Goodness, Identity, Love, Nature, Reality, Relationship with God, Theology, Truth, Worldview by on September 10, 2013 at 4:58 pm {no comments}

Nothing damaged my trust in God as my father more than this mystery. I simply could not reconcile the idea of Him as a good father with the reality that he sent His Son to suffer and die when He could have come instead. After all, if God the Son can become incarnate for the sake of dying in our place, why couldn’t God the Father? And if He could, then why didn’t He? Was He unwilling? Was He selfish? More to the point, how can I trust Him in my life if He calls me His son, yet treated His Only Begotten in that way?

Intellectually, I knew that God is incapable of that kind of—there’s no other word for it—betrayal. But I lacked the key that would cause it all to make sense. I kept this question on a spiritual back burner of sorts, waiting until God brought clarity to the issue. When He did, it completely changed the way I think about Him.

Here’s some background for the thinking that led to this mystery: I had been taught that God’s purpose for mankind was to bring Himself glory. I was told that in anyone else, this would be disingenuous and self-seeking, but because God is truly worthy, there is no moral dilemma when we say this about Him. His worthiness makes it okay for Him to make all things about Himself.

I know. It doesn’t sound right to you and it never did to me either. Maybe it technically makes sense, but it doesn’t sound right. But that’s what I was taught, and by some very brilliant minds in Bible college. Here’s the problem with that theory and where it began to unravel for me:

God is love (1 John 4:16), and love is not self-seeking (1 Corinthians 13:5). If God is love then His very being is defined by unselfishness. He cannot seek His own benefit or He betrays the nature of His very existence!

Moreover, Ezekiel 28:12-17 says, “‘Thus says the Lord GOD… “You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God…Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor”‘” (Ezekiel 28:11-17). God is addressing Lucifer in this passage, lamenting over him, actually. What stood out to me here is the very last thing He says: “You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.” In other words, when Lucifer’s wisdom sought the benefit of others, it was pure, but when he turned his wisdom to seek his own benefit, it became corrupted. It may sound reasonable at first to say, “God can do things that look selfish to our finite human minds and it’s okay because He’s worthy,” but then I find that this kind of self-seeking is Satan’s very nature. I cannot possibly say that God can act like Satan and it’s okay because He’s worthy and Satan’s not.

This much helped reassure my confidence that God is not selfish or malevolent, but it didn’t help me understand why a good father, the best Father, would send His Son to die instead of going Himself. That answer came from Philippians 2:5-11, which says:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

These verses wrap the whole thing together, showing the perfect nature of God in the humility, sacrifice, and love of Jesus Christ. Yet because of His humility, God the Father exalted Him so that Jesus is exalted above everyone else. Jesus didn’t exalt Himself. His Father exalted Him, and there—right there—is where God gave me my answer.

God the Father knew that whoever went to save the Earth would also receive the greatest name and become the most exalted over everyone else. God the Father knew He could do that horrible task, and that He could receive the exaltation that would come with it. But that would have been self-seeking, so that’s not what He did. Instead, He set aside His rights to be the most highly exalted for the sake of letting His Son surpass Him. He asked His Son, Jesus, to suffer and die for us, not to spare Himself the pain, but so that His Son would be more highly exalted than He was.

That is the nature of a father, which is why this is the way God the Father is glorified. Look at the last line of the passage; God the Father is glorified when all creation is worshiping the Son. God the Father was nowhere to be seen through all those verses until the very end! He is far from center stage, yet while the spotlight is on the Son, the Father is glorified.

I finally had the answer to the mystery. This answer proved to me, once and for all, I also had a Father I could trust.

Living in Love

Filed under Experiencing God, Fatherhood, God's Goodness, God's Presence, Identity, Love, Nature, Reality, Relationship with God, Rules, The Gospel, The Law by on July 25, 2013 at 3:24 pm {no comments}

How would you like to know beyond a shadow of a doubt, at all times that you are loved? How would you like to really believe that? What would it be like if you could constantly live in the confidence that you are loved?

What if, even more than that, you could continually be filled with love? What if it was possible for every interaction that you ever have to be motivated and empowered by love?

If you’re like me, you want this. In fact, I believe that this is the core of every human longing and desire. We want to love and to be loved. No, we need to love and to be loved. Unfortunately, most of us don’t really believe we are loved, even when we know it’s true.

John, the disciple known as the one Jesus loved, helps us with this, saying, “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us…We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:15-19)

Starting from the beginning, we have a clear promise: If you confess Jesus as the Son of God, God abides in you. Now, my family abides in our home, but my three-year-old son is still learning this. We will be out and about for whatever reason and he’ll ask, “Where are we going?” Eventually the answer is, “We’re going home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” he says.

“We have to go home,” we say; “It’s where we live.” That’s the point. We abide where we live. We never truly leave that place. We always come back to where we abide. If you have confessed Jesus, God abides in you; you are His home. What’s more, He is your home. You live inside of Him.

The implications of this are powerful because of what John says next. “So we have come to know and believe the love God has for us” (4:16).  See that he said know and believe. See also that he said, “So.” In other words, this is how we come to both know and believe God’s love for us—God lives in us and we live in God, not because we did anything to earn it or win His favor, but simply because we made a confession. That single confession has permanently changed our address. We now live in God.

John further helps us understand this amazing transformation, saying, “God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (4:16). Listen, God is love, and you abide in Him by confessing Jesus as the Son of God. So when you begin to abide in God, the reality of that statement is that you are beginning to abide in love and love begins to abide in you.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Okay, now let’s meditate on it more: You live inside of love. You are surrounded by it. You can’t leave it and it can’t leave you. Everyone who looks at you has to look through love to see you. Everyone you see, you see them through love. Every word you hear or speak has to pass through love before it is received. Every thought you think is birthed in the presence of love. And all this reality came simply because you confessed Jesus.

Finally, “By this is love perfected with us” (4:17)

Love: Perfected. With. Us.

Did you ever think that you could be included in such a small phrase with perfected love? Yet it’s that simple. Drink deeply the reality that you live in God and God lives in you, which is the same thing as saying that you live in love and love lives in you. It doesn’t matter how little this feels real, because it’s the guaranteed reality of your life as soon as you confess Jesus as the Son of God.

Then, and only then, do we love. “We love because He first loved us” (4:19). We do not love because it’s right, or because of obligation, or because it’s moral, or nice, or because rules and laws told us so. We love because we are loved. Period. The only genuine love we can give is overflow love.

You are in love and love is in you. May you enjoy life today and every day in this reality until you both know and believe it, until then love is perfected with you. It’s completely possible, and it starts by just believing it.