In the last post, I expressed that the best path to personal change is first through Christian spiritual transformation and development. Here are some examples in my own life of personal changes coming as a result of the work of Christ in my life.
– Become a nicer, friendlier person – Initially, I come across to people as an aloof, kind of grumpy person and I think, as a younger person, I drew some of my identity from that but as Christ began to show me how he views his created people I began to demonstrate more outward love and acceptance of others.
– Enjoying reading scripture – I used to have the mentality that I had to approach the Bible as I would a regular book. In other words, the only way to get anything out of it was to read whole books and try to get through the thing cover to cover. But, my intense study of the Sermon on The Mount opened up a desire to study the Ten Commandments and that led to a desire to study 1 Corinthians 13 and that led to a desire to study Colossians 3 and on and on. Before I knew it, I wasn’t just reading scripture but I was memorizing scripture and was letting scripture tell me what to read next. All of scripture opened up to me in a brand new way.
– Made me appreciate church more – I used to be very critical of church and romanticized the stories of people who I had heard about who left the church out of “devotion.” But it is hard to read the New Testament and not see the effort that Christ went through to establish his church and it is hard to ignore the terminology of the church being the Bride of Christ. To reject the church is to reject one of Christ’s greatest achievements and 2000 years of God’s work on Earth. My church, your church, everyone’s church has problems and is incredibly limited and distracted but our individual church is the work of God and his will and we need to be sensitive to that. Christ showed me this and I have become much more willing to serve the church rather than just criticize it.
In Part 2, I will discuss what Christ has done in my life regarding anger, sex, and personality.
Grow Up Blog 