WHAT IF MY WAY & GOD'S WAY WERE THE SAME WAY?! 

DOING WHAT YOU WANT—GOD’S WAY: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? It means that they will then for the first time be able to do what they want to do. Of course they will be able to steal, lie, and murder all they want—which will be none at all. But they will also be able to be truthful and transparent and helpful and sacrificially loving, with joy—and they will want to be. Their life will be in this way caught up in God’s life. They will want the good and be able to do it, the only true human freedom. The mind set on the spiritual is in that sense “life and peace” (Romans 8:6), because it lives from God and, “sowing into the spirit, out of the spirit reaps the eternal kind of life” (Galatians 6:8, PAR). So—and this is of utmost importance to those who would enter Christian spiritual formation—life as normally understood, where the object is securing myself, promoting myself, indulging myself, is to be set aside. “Can I still think about such things?” you may ask. Yes, you can. But you increasingly won’t. And when you do, as formation in Christlikeness progresses, they simply won’t matter. In fact, they will seem ridiculous and uninteresting. Jesus’ words on not being anxious about what will happen to you and his admonitions to consider the flowers and birds (Luke 12:13-34) will seem obviously sane and right, whereas they previously sounded obviously crazy and wrong, or “out of touch with reality.”

Those who are not genuinely convinced that the only real bargain in life is surrendering ourselves to Jesus and his cause, abandoning all that we love to him and for him, cannot learn the other lessons Jesus has to teach us. They cannot proceed to anything like total spiritual transformation. Not that he will not let us, but that we simply cannot succeed. If I tell you that you cannot drive an automobile unless you can see, I am not saying I will not let you, but that you cannot succeed even if I do.

The ruined life is not to be enhanced but replaced.

By contrast, if they give up the project of being the ultimate point of reference in their life—of doing only what they want, of “sowing to the flesh” or to the natural aims and abilities of a human being—there can be hope. If they in that sense lose their life in favor of God’s life, or for the sake of Jesus and what he is doing on earth—remember the ongoing world revolution he is now conducting—then their soul (life) will be preserved and thus given back to them. pp.65-66 TRANSFORMING SOURCE


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