![]() What it does is what the Old Testament excels at doing – it provides an incredible example of the power of faith. Almost everyone can remember The Ten Commandments, a movie about the Israelites escaping bondage and slavery in Egypt during the Exodus, although it has strangely become the preferred Easter movie without teaching anything about Christ. ![]() Reading the Old Testament is greatly underestimated, and this passage of scripture proves the point. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” Exodus 14:10-12 NIV ![]() They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. How do we become emotionally stuck?Īs Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. Only then can we pursue God’s dream of who we are meant to be. In short, we cannot change until we move on and move forward, until we get emotionally unstuck from yesterday’s thinking and living. Learning new things is not the difficult part, but rather letting go of the old things, those old stories of who we were, how we use to do things, and what everyone feels comfortable with and thinks we ought to be. While there are many reasons that change is hard, one of the primary reasons is our resistance to moving on and moving forward. The inevitable question from these encouraging truths is the following: if Christianity is a growth religion, then why is change so difficult? Why doesn’t God make it easier, so we can grow into this person we are meant to become? That is to say that when we read, pray, and obey, the Spirit is going to change us, setting us free from who we have been so we can become who we are meant to be. II Corinthians 3:16-18 teaches us that walking with God is what makes Christianity a growth religion, that it is impossible to focus on God through Christ and remain the same person. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. This transformative experience is what it means to walk with God and is the one described in II Corinthians 3:16-18.īut whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. This is a life of faith where we achieve and fail, rise and fall, suffer and recover, experience loss and gain, and then after having pursued and endured, fulfill our destiny. He never meant for this full life to be boring ( John 10:10 NIV) but intended for us to experience the excitement and inspiration of perpetual transformation. ![]() God wants us to experience continual restarts, rebirths, redefinitions, and to literally rebrand our lives. So the LORD blessed Job in the second half of his life even more than in the beginning… Job 42:12 NLT Can I change?Ĭan I change completely, not improve, but a wholesale redefinition of myself, a total course correction to follow a path and pursue a destiny unconsidered? Something akin to the restart Job experienced after disaster struck, when he began the second half of his life. ![]()
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