How People Change--Part 1

There will be seveal posts on here in the next week that I am taking from a sermon I preached a few weeks ago about change. With New Year's right around the corner, people will soon be talking about their New Year's resolutions. Sadly, most of our resolutions fall through the floor. But I think it is helpful to get a biblical perspective on change. From conversion to true sanctification, not just moral conformity. Here goes. Read 2 Corinthians 3:15-18 We all have things in our life or about us that we would like to change. And we would do anything in the world change them. Some things we want to change are things that we should want to change because they are bad or unbecoming of us. In particular these things are mostly sin that we struggle with. We want to change some things because we just don’t like them. They are not bringing any harm to us or anyone else but we want to change them because we simply don’t like them. I have things like that. One thing in particular is my voice. I hate to hear myself recorded. When the JMB produces a new CD, I never listen to it after it’s finished. The last time I purposefully listen to it is in the studio for the final mix. Once it’s done, I’m done. I don’t want to hear it because I don’t like to hear my voice. But I continue to sing despite my voice, because I want people to hear the truth in the lyrics. I don’t have to sing as well as Mac Powell of Third Day, I just want to write music like King David. It is not my first priority to sound like Steven Curtis Chapman, but to write music that is as solid as his. I would change my voice if I could but it’s really not that important and it doesn’t keep me from doing what I feel the Lord has called me to do. Some of you have the same issue here. Some things you want to change don’t really matter that much. But some things do. And that is what I want us to look at today. How do people change? But not just for a little while, how do we change for good? It is really silly that people think that Christians are the only ones trying to convert people. The following is an article from the New York Times written by Mark Lilla. He starts off the article talking about how he had a "conversion experience" as a child but now totally denounces all claims to be a Christian. He goes to a Billy Graham Crusade in queens to write about it for the paper and talks with a young man who had gone forward and surrendered his life to Christ. Here is what he had to say: “I found it hard to conceal my bafflement, since Billy had not said much at all. You must be born again - that was it. I felt a professorial lecture welling up in my throat about the history and psychology of religion. I wanted to expose him to the pastiche of the biblical text, the syncretic nature of Christian doctrine, the church's ambiguous role as incubator and stifler of human knowledge, the theological idiosyncrasy of American evangelicalism. I wanted to warn him against the anti-intellectualism of American religion today and the political abuses to which it is subject. I wanted to cast doubt on the step he was about to take, to help him see there are other ways to live, other ways to seek knowledge, love, perhaps even self-transformation. I wanted to convince him that his dignity depended on maintaining a free, skeptical attitude toward doctrine. I wanted. . .to save him. I thought I was out of that business, but maybe not. It took years to acquire the education I missed as a young man, an education not only in books but in a certain comportment toward myself and the world around me. Doubt, like faith, has to be learned. It is a skill. But the curious thing about skepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytizers. In reading them, I've often wanted to ask, "Why do you care?" Their skepticism offers no good answer to that question. And I don't have one for myself.” (emphasis mine) You will be converted by something. The writer says that we should stay skeptical of all doctrine.....all doctrine but his doctrine! All beliefs but his beliefs! Everyone has a set of beliefs and everyone has been converted by something. Even the most post-modern of the post-modernists have a set of beliefs that they, deep down, believe you should conform to. How silly it is to think that Christians are the only ones concerned with converting people. So, the question is not "will you be converted?" The question is, "What set of beliefs will have it's way with you?" I will continue with more of the sermon on Friday.