How Do I Change? Part 1: Define Change

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The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject

Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty

God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the

Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us. Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

Listen and enjoy this latest episode as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions. Here's Pastor Tim.

On this episode of Bible Bashed, we'll begin a series on sanctification called How Do I Change? In order to do this series, one of the things that we'll do is we're going to have a series of episodes that are basically walking through some fundamental principles of sanctification that can be applied to any area of sanctification in general.

So what we're going to do this week is we're going to be talking about how do you define change? Now, you live in a world right now where change is significantly rare.

Now, we obviously are living in a society that believes that individuals can fundamentally and radically change the very nature of who we are, so much so that we can, you know, basically, if you're a man, you believe you're basically a woman trapped in a man's body or something along those lines that you can transition your gender.

But the reality is that real change is exceedingly rare, and we all seem to know that it's exceedingly rare, despite the fact that we may pretend to be a different gender or something along those lines.

When it comes right down to it, we all realize that if you are an individual who is born a man, just, you know, drawing your hair out, putting on some makeup, putting on a dress and putting some pieces of plastic on you and chopping things off doesn't actually make you a woman.

You can't fundamentally change who you are to your core. If you're an individual who's insecure about your appearance, one of the things you'll realize is that you can stare at the mirror all day long, but your reflection is going to stare right back at you, and there really isn't a whole lot that you can do about it.

You can't change fundamentally who you are in that kind of way, but then the psychologists tell us essentially that we are who we are, and our personality is essentially fixed, and you can't really change who your personality is.

You know, if you're an introvert, you're going to be an introvert. If you're an extrovert, you're going to be an extrovert. And all these categories fundamentally that are meant to define different types of human beings, they're basically fixed, and we are who we are.

Now, if you look around at the world, one of the things you'll realize is that people typically,

I mean, there's some insight to what the psychologists are saying at this point, even though it's short -sighted, but people typically are who they are.

So, you know, if you have a loved one who is engaged in certain habits or practices that you find morally repugnant, one of the things you'll realize is that they're going to engage in those practices, and there really isn't much you can do about it.

If you're living with a loved one who has a temper, you know, how often have you seen individuals like that who are characterized by angry outbursts, who essentially, they'll have periods of time where they're nice and kind, and then they'll go back to their temper, and fundamentally, they don't seem to be all that different.

The temper remains, and there's just, you know, periods of pausing in between as it relates to those temper problems that don't seem to go away, but they are fundamentally who they are.

If you have individuals in your life who are engaged in sloth or have a lack of self -control as it relates to their lifestyle, if they're a bit of a couch potato, if they're overweight, it's very rare.

I mean, despite all the, you know, radical transformation stories that you're going to see on the internet, in actual real life, it's very rare to see individuals all of a sudden start to adopt healthy lifestyle choices and fundamentally go from being significantly overweight to being reasonably proportioned and in shape.

I mean, it really is a fairly rare phenomenon. It really doesn't happen very often.

It's something that you can look around the world and you see that people who are who they are.

If you're an individual who spends most of your time dominated by entertainment, then, you know, how hard is it to put on different habits?

How hard is it to start learning to desire to read books and things like that?

I mean, in fact, I mean, most people who are addicted to entertainment at that point, trying to get them to learn how to read, it's just fundamentally, it's just so hard because you have an attention span of a goldfish and it's just very difficult to sit down and to concentrate on something for any significant length of time when you're watching types of entertainment, which are basically training you to have to have different forms of stimulation every few seconds.

I mean, you know, if you go back and you watch old movies at this point, you'll realize that the scene changes were very infrequent compared to what they are today.

And I mean, you have to have a scene change every few seconds in order to keep people's attention going. And you imagine like how hard it is for an individual trained with that kind of attention span to sit down and to read words on a page, whether they're good words like in the

Bible or just words in general, and it's very difficult. You know, individuals who are readers, they typically like to read.

If they learn to read early on, they'll keep on reading. Individuals who never prioritize that, they won't. Individuals who, you know, never knew what it's like to diet or exercise or put on good habits, like as it relates to taking care of themselves physically, they seem to just get bigger and bigger as time goes on.

You know, individuals who are characterized by gossip, you know, like you can imagine like the older gossipy woman who basically at this point in her life, she's spent her whole entire life gossiping and now she's got to a point where she's just a bitter old woman that is filled with complaints.

And I mean, you can all imagine scenarios just like the one that I'm describing. And if you have any kind of self -awareness about the nature of sin in your own life, one of the things that you'll realize is that even thinking about the sins in your own life, it's so difficult to put on new habits.

It's so difficult to try to change fundamentally who you are and these things which seem to so characterize you.

And so if you're going to talk about a study on how do you change, one of the things that you need to do besides just acknowledging the difficulty in general of changing is to define the kind of change that you're talking about.

So when the Bible talks about change, the Bible has a bit of a realistic perspective of how difficult change actually is.

And it goes so far as to say that change fundamentally for the unbeliever is absolutely impossible.

But then the type of change that the Bible declares to be fundamentally impossible is a specific type of change in general.

So Jeremiah 13, 23 will say, can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard change his spots?

Then also can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil? John 8, 34, Jesus answered them.

And he said, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave of sin. The slave does not remain in his house forever, but the son remains forever.

So if the son sets you free, he'll be free indeed. John, or Jesus tells us in his high priestly prayer, which a prayer which is recorded in John, apart from me, you can do nothing.

But through me, you can bear much fruit. So when you talk about biblical change, the kind of change that we should be pursuing or what might be described as sanctification, which is the doctrine essentially of a

Christian basically progressively being conformed to the image of Jesus over the course of their life. Putting on biblical change is not only hard and not only rare, but it's impossible apart from God's grace.

And so we need to try to define the kind of change that we're talking about here. And the kind of change that we're gonna talk about in the course of our study is going to be the type of change that involves trying to seek to live to the glory of God over and against just making wise, helpful habits or practices.

Now, when you talk about just making wise or helpful habits or practices in general, like trying to get in better shape or lose a little weight or stop spending so much of your time doing worthless things and maybe learn a new hobby or learn a new skill.

It still remains to be the case that change in general, even in these areas that are not necessarily moral in nature, it seems to be very rare.

But the kind of change that we're gonna talk about is the kind of change where an individual seeks to go from an individual who doesn't glorify

God with their life and changing into putting on godly habits, putting off godly, ungodly habits, putting on godly habits and trying to put the death, the sin, which remains in their own heart and their own life and put on godliness, righteousness, self -control.

And so we're gonna talk about what it means to follow God and what it means to kill the remaining sin in our own heart and our own life.

And so the kind of change we're talking about at this point is biblical change. Now, when you talk about biblical change, surely it might be for many individuals a component of biblical change, a helpful godly habits and practices might involve some of the things

I mentioned like losing weight, getting in shape, getting on a Bible reading plan, some of these things like that, like learning not to be so much of a couch potato, learning to redeem the time for the days are evil.

Certainly biblical change does involve how we spend our time, things we put inside of us, how much we move.

Certainly it involves these things, but fundamentally you can pursue change for a variety of different reasons.

You can pursue change that's fundamentally gonna be self -centered. Basically, there's many people who go on some sort of weight loss journey so that they can feel better about themselves and so that they don't have to be so insecure and so that they can have more self -esteem and all this stuff.

And certainly in that kind of way, there's been a great many people who try to do exactly that kind of thing and they find that they're failing because they're not pursuing a biblical change for the right kind of reason.

But they are pursuing change, they're just not pursuing it for the right kind of reason. And if we don't pursue change for the right reason with the right motivation,

God has a way of standing in opposition towards us. But then for the purpose of our study, we're gonna be talking about pursuing biblical change.

How do we pursue biblical change? And biblical change involves putting off certain behaviors, thoughts, emotions that are unpleasing to God and learning to put on certain specific thoughts, actions, behaviors, and emotions which are going to seek to honor the

Lord. And really there is no more fundamental master key, if you wanna put it that way, to sanctification than learning to live to the glory of God.

And so the type of change that we're gonna talk about over the course of these series in general is gonna be the type of change that's devoted to helping an individual to pursue sanctification by God's power, for God's glory, through His enabling in reliance upon Him.

And so we're gonna talk about pursuing biblical change in that way. So if you'd like to be a part of the

Bible Bashed podcast at gmail .com and consider supporting us through Patreon. If you would like to be

Bible Bashed personally, then please know that we also offer free biblical counseling, which you can take advantage of by emailing us.

Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.