... How God Transforms Us.1

I have a friend who is struggling with “changing” his life around. He has struggled on and off with things for most of his adult life. Part of the problem is bound with how he is wrapped, his personality. Medication, when it is prescribed corectly, seems to help with some of that. But, part of it is a spiritual problem at its core. It’s now all come to a head. Call it midlife; call it whatever you want. His main struggle right now is believing that God can help, that God can change (I prefer the word: transform) him, and how God can do that. God can help. There are thousands of examples in scripture and history of just that aspect of God: his helpfulness. He changes people, transforms them. It is up to us to trust, like a little child does when jumping into daddy’s arms. We know we’re going to be caught.

This is a challenging, yet hopeful place to be. Challenging because it seems like a daunting task, this recreation of you. Hopeful, because well, God is God, and, to start with, he is the one that created us in the first place. Remember Genesis 1:26 does not say, “Let’s try out a creation of something that is sort of, kind of, like us and we’ll see how that goes.” No, it says, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature” (The Message). Once upon a time we looked like God. He looked down at Adam and saw himself looking back up at him. Over time we have decimated, destroyed, and devalued that image.

The bottom line is this: Jesus is the incarnation of his Father. Our whole emphasis on sin, and how it separates is from God, and Jesus died on the cross to bring us back into relationship with him is fine, BUT only if we realize that his dwelling here, his incarnation, was designed to transform us back into his likeness. This takes an initial turning around, a confession, a beginning, but it also takes time. God isn’t finished with us yet; we will only be perfected when Jesus comes again. In the meantime, we are being changed, molded, and shaped (or whatever other word you want to use there). Maybe we need to get the process started. If so, jump!