DEALING WITH CHANGE

 “Once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people. Once you received no mercy; now you have received God’s mercy.” (1 Peter 2:10)

We continued to look at the subject of change. We acknowledged that prayer is a conversation with God that leads to change in our lives.

“Often we make our prayers about change, but we haven’t yet admitted to how we currently feel, act, and understand; and so we need to use prayer to be honest with ourself and with God, this is the difference between denial and transformation” (2024, Manning, Lent Course Meditation two). 

But change is not easy, and we resist change even when it is positive. It is good, therefore, for us at this point in our Lenten Journey to deal with the subject of resisting change.

Fear is a reason to resist change. But Scripture says “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” (1 John 4:18). Love requires us to be vulnerable to and trust the one loving us. If God is our lover, then we need to trust the promises that he has made to us. Trust is something that takes time and effort to build up and it is this task that we are to give ourselves to.

Christ Jesus has ransomed our lives from Sin and he has purchased us for God. We belong to him and God has invited us into his Kingdom and made us members of His body. Our task is to respond to this by building our trust in God through worship, scripture reading, and prayer.

Love is not hard work, but you have to work hard at it. It requires commitment, and God demands that of us. But everything that God requires of us, he gives to us first. God makes covenant with us and promises to keep that covenant, and that covenant has been renewed with us in Christ. We have been reconciled with God through the transformative life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

When we read the story of Scripture, we see that God has demands on us who he has called to be his people, but we also see that God is patient and merciful. This makes God trustworthy. God lays down requirements, then tells us how to meet them and gives us His Holy Spirit to empower us to do His will.

What this requires of us, is a lifelong process of repentance, submission to Christ. St Paul teaches us that this submission is not a legalistic adherence to a standard, but a falling in love with the God who has this perfect standard and wonderful desires for us, his creation.

Let us fall in love with God again this Lent.  Let our repentance be a process of responding to God’s love by doing the things that he requires of us.  

Clothing ourselves with the gifts that God gives us: armour, (Ephesians 6:11) “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, ( Colossians 3:12).

Changing should not be a process of running away, it is not abandoning who we are, it is embracing who we are, and who we are becoming, for we are a new creation. We are the beloved!

*Meditation*

Think about how the things that God requires of us are ways that we can love him? Consider the demands of God as ways that he loves you!

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

 *Prayer*

God our Father, thank you for loving us. Give us the courage and the strength to do whatever is required of us to love you back. Amen.

‘And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stoney,

 stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.’   (Ezekiel 36:26)