PROCESS OF LIFE TRANSFORMATION

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” – Ephesians 2:10

God fully superintends the entire PROCESS of LIFE TRANSFORMATION: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). When we give our life to Christ, our eternal destiny is altered. There is a radical reorientation of priorities, a new life purpose, and the indwelling Holy Spirit. However, rather than instant liberation from every vice or character flaw we've ever possessed, what takes place is more like the landing of an army on a beach and the routing out of the enemy as the army forges its way inland. At salvation God establishes a beachhead. With progressive and persistent pressing, total occupation occurs in time.

The event of salvation is the beginning of a journey, as God commences in us His work of transformation. A process led up to our conversion; a process moves us toward total life transformation. God transforms lives if we let Him. He does numerous feats of beauty and pleasure, even in nature, but His most amazing feat is how He takes warped souls that have been bound by drugs, alcohol, prostitution and other sinful deeds, cleans them up and transforms their wasted lives into brand new and useful lives. As God begins His work in us, He uses these main three tools in the process of transformation:

God uses His Word to transform us by teaching us how to live; touching and changing our appetites and tastes. The story is told of a converted cannibal in a remote island, who sat by a large pot, reading his Bible when an anthropologist approached him, asking, “What are you doing?” The native replied, “I'm reading the Bible.” The anthropologist scoffed and said, “Don't you know that modern, civilized man had rejected that book? It's nothing but a pack of lies. Don’t waste your time reading it.” The cannibal looked him over and replied, “Sir, if it weren't for this book, you'd be in that pot.” God’s Word had changed his life and appetite. We must commit to living according to the Bible: read, study, memorize, meditate on, and apply the Word.

God uses the Holy Spirit to transform us, as He provides the power, conviction, and direction for life transformation. The Holy Spirit acts like an internal warning system when we begin to make wrong steps and like an applauding crowd when we take the right steps toward becoming like Jesus. God's number purpose in life is to make us like Jesus Christ. The Spirit of God uses the Word of God to make the child of God more like the Son of God.

God uses circumstances to transform us: the problems, pressures, heartaches, difficulties, and stress of life. Suffering gets man’s attention. According to C. S. Lewis, God whispers to us in our pleasure, but shouts to us in our pain. God uses the painful circumstances – whether we bring them on ourselves, or other people cause them, or the Devil incites them –to help us grow in likeness to His Son.

We must learn to thank God everyday as He works in our lives to change me. God cleans us up by taking our sins away and making us a new creature in Christ. Every day He works in us and on us to make us what we need to be for Him in this life. We have many flaws in our lives, but God daily helps us to change and to become the person that He desires us to be. Like Paul, we must “press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phi. 3:14). God never stops loving us and molding us with His gentle touch, transforming us from death to life. Jesus came to this Earth for the purpose of transforming flawed, squandered lives, worthless waste, and depleted destinies into precious and valuable masterpieces!