If you’re a Jesus-follower, you know God is in the defect-correcting business. At least you know it intellectually. Enjoying that experience is often elusive, though, because we aren’t always interested—or determined enough—to cooperate with God in His change process.
Or really believe and grab hold of His promise that He can do it.
What does God have to say about defect changing?
One of the most well known Scripture passages that addresses this issue is Romans 12:1-2.
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (NIV).
I love the way Eugene Peterson said it in The Message:
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
Let’s turn these passages into defect-changing bullet points.
- God is merciful.
- Our bodies are important to Him.
- Offering our bodies (that includes our mind) to Him is an act of worship.
- Thoughts determine our feelings, and feelings often determine our actions.
- We get ourselves into trouble when we allow the world to conform and mold us.
- Our mind is the problem—if we want change, we need to start there. We often forget that our mind is a part of our body.
- In order to change, our mind needs renewing.
- In order for us to know God’s will for our lives, we must have renewed minds. No way around it.
Changing your defects sounds so basic, but it’s so difficult. Why?
The world and its forces are powerful. They don’t take kindly to people that push back against the status quo or current thought wave. We war against the principalities of darkness.
And we war against ourselves, our old, defect-laden nature. It’s hard to fight against yourself. It’s always much easier to give in, at least initially. Then it becomes something like feeding and satisfying the beast, and we find ourselves venturing down a road of darkness and perpetual frustration, anger, and sadness.
NEXT WEEK, we’re going to delve into the processes we need to go through to rid ourselves of those defects and effectively change. But for this week, I invite you to prepare.
Focus on your feelings, how you react emotionally to triggers or life events.
And then note your behavior. What is your autopilot fallback response to those feelings?
Is it anger, yelling, withdrawal, self-harm, eating, avoidance, giving in, shaming or shunning someone?
Behavioral psychologists often recommend that you write these feelings and responses down, so you get a better handle on what causes or triggers you to behave the way you do. It’s like writing down an, if this (happens), then that (happens) chart. I suspect you’ll find it eye-opening.
Then we’ll come back together next week to focus on the steps we need to take to change our defective behaviors, one defect at a time!
Until then, do some mind and feeling exploration. No blaming; just noting.
And remember, God is merciful!
Blessings,
Andrea
“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien