Undergoing the Change ...

If you don’t work at a power plant you probably could not describe in detail how the electricity reaches the light bulb to light up your home.  It just does.  There are occasions when a power outage keeps the lights from turning on, and during these events, you could probably not describe what the utility workers do to fix the problem.  They just do.  There is a process.  Electricity does not reach your home by magic; nor do the utility workers simply wave a wand to fix an error.  But it is not the work that YOU do.  It is the work YOU benefit from.  Your part of the agreement is to provide funds to the utility company for this service.  They do the work, you get the electricity.  Very many things function this way in our modern society.  We have learned to depend on them.  We don’t try to do them all ourselves, it would be impractical, perhaps even impossible.  Instead we learn to rely on others to do certain work for us, and we use the results of their efforts for still other things.  Yet when it comes to spirituality, we fail the same basic test that Lucifer failed so many years ago, to trust God.  God (our spiritual physician), promises He will heal our disease of evil.  He will remove it from us as far as east is from west.  He will bury our evil at the bottom of the sea.  But we refuse to believe He will do what He has promised, and so we attempt to do it for Him, or with Him, or ahead of Him.  We try again and again to take control, put things on our time line, with methods that please us.  It is like trying to build the power plant ourselves, mine the coal, build and operate the reactor, install the wiring and circuitry, and even make the individual light bulbs we need.  Instead we could simply take God up on His promises and start enjoying His light.

To undergo the change God has promised we must begin by realizing there is no control for us.  This process of healing does not occur with us acting as the surgeon, that job is God’s, and He does not need or want our help.  We do not set the timelines for how long this process will take.  We do not identify the tasks that will need to be performed.  In point of fact, we are blind to just how bad our condition is, and were it fully revealed to us in an instant, it would kill us.  Instead our job is to let our Doctor do the work only He can do to cure us.  We let Him.  And frankly we CANNOT understand how He does what He does.  He just does it.  Our cure is not some combination of known techniques, actions, and prescriptions we could reasonably learn to imitate.  He is not trying to teach us how to save others.  Instead He asks us ONLY to refer them to the author of love.  The work He does within us is one ONLY He can do.  For only God can change a heart.  Without Him, the heart merely gets older, more set in its ways, more inclined to degenerate further and further into the disease of self service.  But under His control, the heart can be re-created, reborn into what He intends for it to be.  He cures us individually, not in a group session.  Each human heart is reborn through a process of God’s design custom tailored for each patient, according the needs and abilities of each patient.  The procedure of rebirth is timed on God’s timelines, not our own.  We do not determine how long it will take for us, or how long is should take for us.  Nor do we set the timeline for anyone else.  What God fixes first, is up to God, NOT up to us.  We may think we know where we are suffering the most, or feeling the most pain from, but only our God knows truly what must be fixed and in what order.

Self is a terrible disease.  It shows symptoms in the most unlikely places.  What is being cured within us is all too often beyond our capacity to see, let alone to understand.  All we need to know is that we need a cure, and that God alone can provide it.  When Lucifer in his perfection began to question what would be the results of pursuing love to self rather than serving others, he had no idea where it would lead.  God tried to warn him, tried to counsel him, tried to show him the value of loving others instead of loving self.  But Lucifer would not trust God.  Instead he trusted his own wisdom.  He simply had no knowledge of evil, so he refused to believe that evil was even possible.  It did not exist prior to that time so how would loving self bring it about now?  We face the same exact question.  The work of healing the sin sick heart is something we simply cannot dissect and understand.  If we are to be healed, we must trust that God can and will heal us.  We must trust despite our complete LACK of wisdom on the topic.  In effect we are trusting our lives to God, our futures to God, our hearts to God.  We are putting everything we have into the hands of God.  But we also have the benefit of scripture, history, and the testimony of those He has healed before – He has never failed.  And His entire desire, His entire wish, His entire yearning is for nothing more than to cure YOU – to fix YOU – to bring YOU home again.

To undergo the change is to let go.  To start to heal is to quit entirely looking at the faults of others.  Our hospital was not meant for one poor patient only, but for the entire world.  All are hurting and in need of the cure.  What the patient in the next bed is doing has nothing to do with you.  What our doctor God does for him/her is between God and them.  The symptoms of the disease of self that you can so easily see in the lives of others are not a license for you to start practicing medicine.  They are a cry for help to our Lord, the only doctor who can heal them.  We all hurt.  We all ache.  We are afflicted with the disease of self.  Each may show different signs of our affliction, and may be relieved of them at different times – but only through the work of our God.  We are free to talk about the wonderful work our God does for us, but we are not free to pretend that we are the doctor.  To criticize another sick person for being sick, is the height of hypocrisy.  Instead we should take tremendous joy in the fact that we are in the process of undergoing the change, and praise God for EVERY single other sin-sick soul who shares the same road – no matter where they happen to be on it at the time.  To obsess of the sins of another, or even the sins of our own, is to take our eyes off the cure and keep them squarely on the disease.  Nothing is gained by this.  Instead we must let go.  We must change the focus of our eyes away from the disease that would drag us down, and place it on Christ who is here to remove it from us.  We must let go and trust.

The work of removing the desire for evil from our hearts is a work of great mystery.  Like the light bulb that turns on when I flip the switch, I cannot begin to fully explain it.  This is because I am NOT the one doing the work.  God is.  Sometimes in an instant, sometimes over a period of time, I find that something I once treasured in indulging myself in no longer has any appeal.  I simply do not want it anymore.  It is impossible for me to explain why I am no longer addicted to the very thing I craved just yesterday, but it is so.  And with such a radical change, comes a radical change in thinking.  All the time spent in obsession, all the effort spent in pursuit, is now gone.  It frees me.  I have tons of time I did not even realize were spent obsessing about my former desire.  Without the chains to bind me to evil, I am free to see something more than evil.  I am free to see how the power of love has changed me.  For it is because He loves me that He changes me.  It is love alone that motivates my God, and perhaps love alone that empowers Him.  It is impossible for me to describe to you, “how” this works, because it is not my work.  It does not come because I work for it.  It does not come because I deserve it.  It does not come because I wish it would.  It comes because I allow it to occur.  It comes because I am willing to let the Doctor change me, no matter what that may mean.  It comes because I ask Jesus to do the work He has promised to do, inside of me, wherever that may lead.  Then He does.  He really does.  Not just words on a page, or chapters in a Bible, but here and now, inside me, inside my heart, inside my mind.  I experience a freedom that I cannot describe adequately in language or printed page.  There is an exuberance that comes when the chains of evil are finally broken by the only One who could.  You will not understand what I am talking about, until you allow it to happen to you.  Then you will not be able to imagine how you could have lived any other way.

The transformation Christ offers and performs is life altering.  We’re not just talking about a mild reduction in the propensity to sin.  We are talking about the complete revocation of some deep-seated core-level personality encompassing addiction you though you could never be rid of.  It can change the core of who you are.  It can change the core of how you think, what you want, what you need.  It alters your perception, your vision, and how you see truth.  Scripture opens and has entirely new found truths present that in times past you never understood.  You begin to see the love of God in every truth, and realize there is no truth absent love, as there is no truth absent Christ.  For Christ is truth, life, and love.  There is no other.  The reason God declares Himself the only true God, is because He is the only true God.  It is no myth, no superstition, no contrived story by power hungry men of ancient days.  Instead it is a living abiding truth that carries the power to change your life in the here and now.  No need to wait for heaven as the Kingdom of God is come.  It is here.  It was here in the flesh of Christ and has remained here by the power of His Spirit since His ascension.  Our God is still among us, if only in Spirit instead of in flesh.  He is still able to inhabit the willing heart and remake it into His image.  He is still able to restore our brokenness and remove our disease, and longs to do it right now.  The effect of the cure changes everything.  Nothing you will ever read, see, or experience will be same again.  The effect of witnessing Christ save you from yourself, from the evil you have been slave to, is the fundamental basis of the entirety of the gospel.  Nothing else ever written can compare to the work done inside of you.  For to you, this is heaven, this is salvation, this is the reconciliation of you to your God.  What else could possibly compare with it?

A single change opens the eyes to what else is possible, and what else is needed.  As we are too often blinded to our disease, we fail to recognize how severe our current condition is.  We think if we can just let Christ give us the victory over some cherished sin, that we will be “pure” once it is gone.  Wishful thinking.  The removal of any sin is life altering, but with the removal of evil in one form or another, often comes a better ability to see deeper problems we were not even aware existed there.  The man who is given the victory over an adulterous affair and praises God for it now finds the deeper problem he faces was objectifying women and spending a lifetime of only pursuing them like so many other possessions to toy with.  Upon being released from what he thought would be his most pressing sin, he finds the entire way he has viewed women must now be re-created and rethought.  As he begins to be given the gift of seeing a woman not as a thing but as a precious soul who our God loves, he begins to realize the lust that drove him to pursue his former “objects” was merely another form of self-gratification that must now find its end upon the surgical table of our Doctor God.  As the lust that enslaved him and drove him into the affairs which wrecked his relationships is now removed, he begins to see what it truly means to love another ahead of himself.  Pleasing others begins to become more important to him than he ever imagined it would.  Learning how to truly love someone else begins to show fruit in his relationships.  His parents, his children, his siblings, his spouse all begin to benefit from the changes God is working in his life.  His marriage becomes something he never dreamed it could, nor could his spouse.  What is NOT possible for man, is child’s play for our God.  We have only to allow Him to do it in us.  When once a change is made, an entire chain of events begins.  It does not matter what kind of symptoms we were showing, all evil is traced back to some form of self-service, self-indulgence, self-gratification.  When evil begins to vacate our lives by the power of God, we see where it had deeper roots and what must be done next by God to see it fully gone from us.

Too many Christians have looked forward with longing to the twinkling of an eye at the last trump of God to see the sin within them removed finally and fully forever.  Those who now sleep in the Lord will awake to such a full transformation.  But those who are alive today, need not live in pain until that great day.  Instead we are free to seek a cure in the here and now.  For how can we truly be saved, if we are unwilling to allow ourselves to be saved?  The beauty of heaven, and absence of disease, and end to death, is NOT our ultimate reward – they are trinkets.  The real gift our God is offering us is an existence without evil, a life not bound in chains to serving self.  That is salvation.  That is our true reward and His greatest gift to us.  And that is not something we have to wait to receive.  We can begin today.  It is not the threats of eternal death, or burning in hell that causes the soul to change.  Threats bare no fruit but to scare.  Love however changes the soul, and gives one the relief of a life spent in the “hell” of a selfish existence.  Those bound in a terminally degenerative condition will ultimately seek the release of death on their own.  No one wants to live in a state of torture forever.  And this is all an existence of evil has to offer, ever increasing levels of pain, until death alone is thought of as a better choice.  That is the punishment, the cause and effect, that Christ is offering to free us from now.  Why would we ever even consider delaying that cure, putting off that effort?  It makes no sense to choose to live in bondage to pain for just a while longer before we finally and grudgingly accept happiness and joy in its place.  The idea of waiting for heaven to seek a cure is one the devil avidly markets to Christians today.  It is only another warped, misguided way of thinking, that blinds one to pain they inflict on themselves so as not to seek a cure that could be implemented immediately.

But while the healing can begin immediately the process takes longer than an instant.  Not all evil is removed from us in one felled swoop until Christ does return.  Instead, as we begin to trust Him and allow Him to remake us, He carefully and gently begins the work of removing one sin, and one desire for evil at a time.  This process is by design.  When it begins we do not fully know how much work He has yet to do.  It takes time to remove every instance of self-focus from our lives.  It also takes trust that builds with Him more and more as we begin to allow Him to do this work within us more and more.  If it were over in an instant, we would not appreciate what it means to learn to trust Him.  To learn by experience what it means to let go, and let Him save us from ourselves – this is the process of redemption and it is not one that can be rushed to fit our own ideas of need.  As it progresses we find ourselves yearning more and more for an end to the evil we see in ourselves.  Where once we thought to prolong our days to “enjoy” our evil, we now begin to pray in earnest to remove the evil from within us right here and right now.  Daily we begin to follow the example of our Lord who sought first to seek His Father’s will and not His own.  If our perfect Savior submitted Himself daily to the will of His Father, how much more do we need to do the same?  Our lives are built one day at a time, so must be the process of our healing.  We must daily entreat the Lord to do His work within us, and then release any thoughts of control over to Him to allow Him to do what must be done.  As this work begins to show fruit, He gives us victories over sins and desires we could never hope to have undone.  This gives us hope and knowledge that even more can be done.  And so the seeds He sows within us to trust Him take root and the work He does grows and over time takes over our entire being.

The change itself is a paradox.  While becoming ever more evident in how we think and what we want, our actions just seem to fall in line with our new found ideology and motives.  We cannot explain why.  While we cannot measure our success we cannot seem to avoid it either.  Obedience to the commands of God is not possible without the transformation of rebirth in Christ.  What does it mean to truly “keep” the Sabbath, or to truly “honor” our parents?  No list would ever be complete enough.  No amount of don’ts could ever fully encompass it.  But when a heart is recreated in the love only Christ can make, honoring and loving our fellow man becomes a natural part of how we think, and of what we want to do.  We long to have time to spend with our God, in worship and gratitude, but also in actions of love intended for those He longs to reach.  “Keeping” the Sabbath becomes way more than a mere ritual or set of traditional actions set to predefined schedules – it becomes a living embodiment of worship that loves the un-loveable more than words could possibly express.  Our parents become a treasure to us whose value we finally begin to realize.  Our children become more prized to us than we thought possible before.  And those we used to condemn for carrying the signs of sin just a bit different from our own, are now valued, loved, and needed at our sides in order that we dare not lose them to the pain of an existence away from the source of love.  Love alone rules the thoughts, the motives, the intents and therefore the deeds.  Love, not of human origin that is frail, fickle, and easy removed – but love that comes from God reflected through us where the source is Him.  A love that never tires, fades, or loses interest, but instead grows and breeds more passion that will never let us go.  We believe ourselves filled beyond what we thought possible, only to find it grows again tomorrow.  We wish to measure our progress only to find we are farther along, but still have far to go.  We find ourselves full of love, but see we still need more love for others.  The change itself is a paradox, yet it is.

It is impossible to find truth without recreation.  To read scripture to prove a doctrine is the wrong use of our Bible’s.  It comes with presupposed ideas and beliefs and attempts only to validate what we already think or have been taught rather than to find the truth He would lead us to.  To espouse doctrine without understanding the love that by definition must have inspired it, is to espouse mere ideology of a Biblical theme.  Doctrine is meaningless absent love, and cannot be taught properly until the love of the God who stands behind it is clearly seen.  Truth is found in Christ, not in the teachings of men.  Life is found in Christ, not the pursuits of happiness we so vainly attempt to supplement Him with.  Love is born of God and reflected through us, not created from a source inside us.  Revelations of this kind are revealed to the surrendered heart, and the surrendered will.  They are not new ideas.  They have been taught from the writings of Moses, to John, to the sermons in local pulpits of the day.  But absent the reformation of Christ in the heart, they are merely more words.  Nice ideas are not the goal of the gospel.  Great ideals are not the goal of scripture.  Actual life altering change is the core of the message of the gospel; change that IS possible, not through work or words that we read, but through a surrender to Christ.  The values of Christ are not just aspirations preached to us on the weekends, they can be an intrinsic part of who we are.  All we need is the cure.  All we need is a daily surrender to Christ, and truth will open to us in His time, using His methods.  It is an individual thing, but it is meant for every single individual who has ever walked this earth or will walk it until the day of His return.  No one is beyond the redemption He offers.  No one is so far gone that our Lord cannot remake them over again.  No act is so heinous as to cause the Lord to forsake His work in us, save that we constantly refuse His offer.  A life spent saying no to God is a wasted and sad painful life.  A life spent trying to heal oneself from the disease of sin, is a wasted sad and painful life.  But a life given over to God in a humble submission to His will and not our own, is a life that will change the world.  It will begin with you, as you daily allow the Lord to cure you of the disease of self.  So let it begin right now.