This is the second piece inspired out of a course on prayer that I’ve been taking. The first is here.
“If nothing changes, things stay the same.”
(I love tautologies; they’re so true. This is my favorite flavour of Einstein’s classic quote, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”)
What does transformation mean to me?
It means that if you put me into the same old situation, something different happens, without any extra effort on my part. It means that I haven’t changed anything, and yet something different happens. Something different happens, not because I did anything different but because I am different. As an example:
You say, “Butter,” I say, “Chicken”
*Transformation occurs*
You say, “Butter,” I say, “safe than sorry.”
I haven’t done anything different, in fact, I’ve only done the same simple thing in both cases – supplied the first words that came to mind. Obviously in this case I’ve been transformed from someone who’s obsessed with food into someone who’s obsessed with jokes so rank they border on cheesy. That the words coming out are different means that I am different.
I didn’t have to do anything to support this new reality, I don’t have to work to keep the words coming out the whey they do. I just have to be. That’s transformation.
Now, because I’m talking about transforming people, I have to talk about God. People don’t change people. God changes people.
God doesn’t just want us to follow his laws. He tried that (it didn’t work). He wants us to give him permission to change us, to transform us. This is a happy thought. Among other things, it makes theology much simpler.
When you pose the question, “Why shouldn’t we sin freely because God will forgive it all anyway?” as a changing behavior question, it makes a certain amount of sense and is tricky to debunk.
When you pose the same question as a transformation question, it is immediately revealed as self-contradictory nonsense. Faith, the basis of salvation, means letting Jesus live within us and transform us. It’s a commitment to allowing him to change us into people who hate sin the same way he hates sin.
If the reduction of sin in our lives is the result of giving God the keys, then seeking to sin more means actively resisting God’s transformation, which means denying Christ in us and walking away from the entire basis for our being forgiven. Um. Okay… Let’s not do that.
A Struggle
In those areas where we haven’t allowed God to change us, the only thing we can reasonably expect is the same struggle that we’ve always faced, the same draining, daunting, depressing slog. There’s no basis for expecting anything else. We can quote Scripture and sing psalms all day long, but until we change, we’re merely setting ourselves up for disappointment and a bitter fall. It kinda feels like Romans 7.
If something we do comes as an effort on our part, there is always be struggle involved. The effort we exert means that there’s a struggle.
God says we should rejoice in suffering. It takes a special kind of person to rejoice in suffering and to come out of it hopeful. I’m tempted to say, “The kind of person that only God can make.”
God says we should have peace in every circumstance. I’m tempted to say, “The kind of person that only God can make.”
The point of this is not to deny the things we can do ourselves.
This isn’t to deny that we can build up good experience for ourselves, that we can be courageous and mature and happy.
This isn’t to deny that we can make good choices and reap the rewards of our good choices.
This isn’t to deny that we can work very hard and modify our behaviors, to the point where we look like completely different people.
We can do all this, but, barring some manner of transformation, we can never make the struggle go away.
If we could have, we would have by now, no?