Opening
Up to God’s Transforming Grace
February 22, 2009
Jeremiah 18:1-10
God’s Desire to Re-Form Our Lives
Read/Tell
the story of Jeremiah at the Potter’s Shop
”Therefore,
if anyone is in Christ, he [or she] is a new creation; the old has
gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
Our
Resistance to God’s Desire for Re-Formation
We have become
masters at ruining our own lives.
The choices we make, the attitudes we develop, and the
perspectives we take on ourselves are diminishing who we are. Albert Ellis formulated a
theory and practice for helping people overcome what he called
Cognitive Distortions. Cognitive
distortions are seemingly logical ways of thinking about our world and
about who we are—but these distortions are ultimately irrational.
Cognitive
Distortions (Or Emotional Myths)
Viewing The World In
All-Or-Nothing Extremes
You
see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls
short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
Over-Generalizing Your
Experience
You
see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
Mental Filtering and
Hyper-Focusing
You
pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that
your vision of all reality becomes darkened.
Disqualifying The Positive
You
reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count"
for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative
belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
Jumping To Conclusions
You
make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts
that convincingly support your conclusion. (Assumptions about
others’ thoughts; self-fulfilling prophecies)
Magnifying Or Minimizing
Behavioral Traits
You
exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone
else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they
appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or other fellow's
imperfections).
Factualizing Emotional Responses
You
assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things
really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
Manipulating With “Should”
Statements
You
try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn't, as if you had to
be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything.
"Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The
emotional consequences are guilt.
Labeling And Mislabeling Self
And Others
This
is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your
error, you attach a negative label to yourself. "I'm a
loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you
attach a negative label to him." (Usually emotionally loaded
labels)
Personalizing Responsibility For
Things Beyond Your Control
You
see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in
fact you were not primarily responsible for.
All of these responses are self-defeating behavior and these
behaviors limit our ability to create a beautiful and meaningful life
as God intends for us to have.
Opening
the Door of Our Hearts to Transformation
In the Middle
Ages there was a practice known as Alchemy. In alchemy, the
practitioner known as an alchemist, sought to transform cheap metals
into gold or silver. They
also hoped to find a way to prolong human life indefinitely. Although
these alchemists were merely magicians or more likely, crooks, alchemy
was in many ways the predecessor of modern science, especially the
science of chemistry.
If you think
about it, it’s not a bad idea—turning lead into gold. Because God
is a creative God, we’re also inspired by the idea of creating, of
taking nothing and making it into something. Not only do we want to make
things better, we want to make our selves better too. God put this
desire for transformation in us, and he enables it by his grace.
Perhaps the greatest alchemy is the alchemy of the soul. This occurs
when we're changed and transformed by the grace of God, and then able
to bring that transformation to life in the world in which we live. How can this happen:
1)
Recognize Your Need for God to Transform You
When God called
me into the ministry, my father was not happy about the idea. And he had every right not to
be happy about it. He knew
that the person I was at the time was incapable of fulfilling the life
and work of a pastor. There
was only one mistake he made—he was looking at who I was—God was
looking at who I could be. God
wasn’t finished with me yet. He
still had some more work to do. Eventually,
I became the person I needed to be in order to fulfill God’s call in
my life. It reminds me of
a passage in Jeremiah where God was showing Jeremiah about how “what
was” could be transformed into “what could be.”
“This
is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Go down to the
potter's house, and there I will give you my message.’ So I went down to the potter's
house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from
the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another
pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘O house of
Israel
, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord.
‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house
of
Israel
.’” (Jeremiah 18:1-6)
God wants to be
at work in you—re-creating you and helping you to become the person
he wants you to be. Like
clay, you can be shaped in whatever way God wants to shape you. But God doesn’t force himself
on you—he waits for you to submit to his hand. All you have to do is ask God
to be at work in you and he will be!
2) Brace Yourself for Painful Change
I have a very
low threshold for pain. When
I was in college taking a human growth and development course, we were
watching a video of a woman in childbirth. It was “natural”
childbirth—which didn’t seem so natural to me. All the screaming and cries of
pain were overwhelming. The
reality is, birth is a painful process of radical change for all
involved. Just as there is
pain in childbirth, there is also pain in the process of growth and
sometimes we would rather just avoid it.
As in childbirth, if we go with the natural process of birthing
something new, after the fact, the pain is inconsequential to the
outcome. The difficulty is
enduring the pain in anticipation of the outcome.
“For
God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light
shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of
clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from
us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but
not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not
destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so
that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (2 Corinthians 4:6-10)
This is
Paul’s definition of change. The
question isn’t if we’re going to change—the question is how
we’re going to change. Most
of us think that if we can avoid change then we can avoid pain. But there is no way to avoid
pain—so we might as well be open to the creative process of growth
that God wants to implement in our lives. Yes, there will be times of
pain—but we’ll never be crushed by the change, we will never have
our hope stolen, we will never be abandoned, and we can never be
destroyed. Paul said,
“we carry around in our body the death of Jesus” as a way of
describing how old things must pass away. But Paul continues that just as
Jesus’ body was resurrected, so will our lives be resurrected. Through the painful process of
dying we are moved to new life.
Too many of us
want the new life but we’re not willing to go through the painful
death of the old self to get there.
If you’re not finding the joy of a new life in Christ, then
chances are it’s because you’re still holding on to the old life.
3)
Approach Life from a New Perspective
The number one
reason why we don’t change is because we choose not to change. It’s not our circumstances
that limit us—it’s not our lack of resources—it’s not our lack
of knowledge—it’s not our lack of being able to envision a new
reality that waits for us beyond the experience of change—it’s
simply that we refuse to change. And
this is sin because we never realize the potential God has placed
within us.
“For
we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,
which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians
2:10)
Spiritual
Realities That Foster Creativity
1.
Whatever I have to give is significant in God’s eyes.
2.
My past failures don’t count against me because God has
forgiven me.
3.
My weaknesses can’t limit me when I rely on God.
4.
God’s love for me validates my worth.
5.
I can’t control what others think so I must live only to
please God.
6.
The Holy Spirit can give me a good perspective on my strengths
and weaknesses.
7.
Feelings aren’t reality but God’s love for me is true.
8.
I am motivated by love; not by rules.
9.
I will look for the positive in everyone and everything.
10. I’m only responsible for the
things I have control over. God
covers the rest!
4)
Expect to Be Overwhelmed with Miraculous Results
“[Jesus said], ‘I tell you
the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.
He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the
Father.’” (John 14:12)
In his book, If
You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of The Boat,
Pastor John Ortberg tells a wonderful true story about the power of
prayer. It involves
a Christian leader in
Washington
,
D.C.
named Doug Coe. Doug became a spiritual mentor to a new
Christian whose name was Bob. One
day, Bob came in all excited about the verse in the Bible where Jesus
says, “Ask whatever you will in my name, and you shall receive
it.”
“Is
that really true?” Bob asked.
Doug
answered with a qualified yes, it is true. Christ answers prayer.
“Great!”
Bob said. “Then I gotta start praying for something. I think I’ll
pray for
Africa
.”
Doug thought
that was pretty broad and suggested Bob to narrow his prayer to just
one country. Bob decided on
Kenya
. So Doug challenged Bob to pray every day for six months for
Kenya
. Then Doug made an extraordinary challenge to Bob. He said that if
Bob prayed every day for six months for Kenya and nothing
extraordinary came from his prayers, Doug would pay Bob five hundred
dollars. But if something remarkable did happen, Bob would pay Doug
five hundred dollars. And if Bob did not pray every day, the whole
deal was off. Now, that’s quite a wager on God!
Well, Bob began
to pray, and for a long time nothing happened. Then one night he was
at a dinner in
Washington
. He met a woman there who helped run an orphanage in--where else?--
Kenya
. It was the largest orphanage in that country. When she discovered
how excited Bob was about
Kenya
, she invited him to pay a visit to her orphanage.
When Bob
arrived in
Kenya
, he was appalled by the poverty and the lack of basic health care.
Upon returning to
Washington
, he couldn’t get the place out of his mind. He began to write to
large pharmaceutical companies asking them to send some of their
surplus drugs to
Kenya
. And some of them did. This one orphanage in
Kenya
received more than a million dollars worth of medical supplies.
The woman who
ran the orphanage was overwhelmed with excitement and gratitude. She
called Bob and invited him to come to
Kenya
for a big celebration. So Bob flew back to
Kenya
. While he was there, the president of the country came to the
celebration, because, after all, it was the largest orphanage in the
land. The president of
Kenya
offered to take Bob on a personal tour of
Nairobi
, the capital city. In the course of the tour they saw a prison. Bob
asked about a group of prisoners there.
“They’re
political prisoners,” he was told.
“That’s
a bad idea,” Bob said brashly. “You should let them out.” Absurd
thing to say to the president of a country, wouldn’t you agree?
Bob finished
the tour and flew back home. Sometime later, Bob received a phone call
from the U.S. State Department. It seems that the State Department had
been working for years to get the release of a certain group of
political prisoners, to no avail. But now the prisoners had been
released, largely because of Bob’s intervention. The government was
calling to say thanks.
Several months
later, the president of
Kenya
made contact with Bob again. He was going to rearrange his government
and select a new cabinet. Would Bob be willing to fly back to
Kenya
and pray for him for three days while he worked on this very
important task? So Bob--who was not politically connected at
all--boarded a plane once more and flew back to
Kenya
, where he asked God to give wisdom to the leader of the nation as he
selected his government. Wow! All that from one man praying for
six months!
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