God Wants to Thoroughly Change You into His Likeness
Change isn’t something that I necessarily love. Sometimes I totally stick my toes down into the sand and resist the waves trying to topple me over.
When God wants to change me, it is for my good but how often resist instead of yielding to His loving hand on my life!
Do you sit in church listening to the message week after week without responding or interacting with the Words that are falling on your ears?
God’s Wants to Change You
How often are we like the listener who hears but doesn’t DO?
Our minds can wander.
Our thoughts can think and plan what we are going to be doing that afternoon after church.
Our stomachs rumble and we think more about filling our bodies with the breakfast we missed than filling our hearts with God’s Words that are falling on our ears through the pastor’s message.
I’ve done that and if you are honest with yourself, so have you!
Not saying that was what was happening to me this past Sunday but sometimes I can come away thinking “That was a good message” without thinking how “I need to change up something in my life!”
God Wants to Thoroughly Change You
God desires to change you so thoroughly that you will love him from a sincere heart. (Pastor Lane Jones)
Satan desires to devour you and thwart your efforts to change into God’s image. If he can’t get you totally on his side, he will distract and disarm you so that you are changed for his purposes. He will try his best to keep you from having a sincere heart after God’s own heart.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8
Suddenly I was writing down everything that our pastor was saying as I could see how these things had played out in my life.
I can’t totally remember the context of the other things that he shared because God has a way of working them into my life and thoughts in a way that will move my heart.
Here are some nuggets that might encourage your heart to change in some way today:
- God repeatedly limits Satan’s schemes
- Be alert to Satan’s slander!
- Do not live in dread of Satan
- BUT also do NOT ever think yourself too godly to fall! 1 Corinthians 10:12
- Pray for each other!
- Remember that God can truly change the heart
- You are NOT hopeless!
- Others are NOT hopeless!
Don’t ever catch yourself saying that someone can’t change!
Culture a Sincere Heart
All this reminds me of two verses from the book of Jude where we are reminded to keep our eyes on Jesus so that we do not fall. We can’t rest in our assumed godliness and think we cannot fall. We must rest in Jesus who will keep us from falling.
Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. Jude 24-25
The King James Version is my favorite “go to” version of the Bible. I know those two verses as a song.
The change that God is looking for in us is for us to have a relationship that is totally dependent on Him. Without depending totally on Him, we are apt to ‘fall’ and then it will not be possible to be presented to God as faultless.
Faultless because Christ’s likeness is totally covering our likeness with Himself.
Don’t stick your toes down into the sand and resist what God is trying to do in your life.
Just like the soft sand will slip from under your feet as the water goes back down the beach, your footing, without Jesus will not hold you fast!
Did this resonate with you today? What did you learn from what you heard in church this past Sunday or from your time alone with God?
