“Life Change”
So, I was at one of the largest churches there is, and one year, I was surprised to see a celebration video of how many people had experienced “life change” through their efforts. It was in the hundreds of thousands. The problem that I began to ponder was that at this church, even though it maintained the highest standards of excellence in music, branding, technology, design, and many other things presentation-wise, the true gospel was often obscured and the Bible was rarely, if ever, actually taught. It seems many churches today are focused on the idea of “life change” rather than heart transformation. If we remember, Paul unashamedly tells us that the gospel, just the gospel, is the power of God unto salvation. That’s it! We can have fancy light shows, secular music to draw a crowd, every last detail organized down to an exact science with our branding and demographic statistics, and that’s all well and good, but if we’re not telling people the full gospel, if we’re not shouting from the rooftops warning people of their sin and why they need the Savior, what are we doing?
“Life change” is the new way it’s being communicated. We first tell people how awesome God thinks they are. We leave out sin, leave out hell, leave out God’s perfect moral standard that we’ve all broken and stand in judgement against, and instead just deliver grace, which ultimately falls flat when you don’t actually understand what it’s for. In place of all that, it’s the idea that if you come to Jesus, he’s going to fix your marriage. He’s going to help you achieve something great. He’s going to fix that problem you have. He’s going to bring you fulfillment in this life. The truth is, you can still have motivation, achievement, success, a better marriage, business opportunities, and even morality without the crucified and risen Christ. Self help tips for this temporary situation we all find ourselves in here may indeed lead to legitimate life change, but eternal salvation and heart transformation only come from the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we aren’t fully embracing and communicating that, even if it offends people, we aren’t being obedient to the true call.
We don’t need life change (I just switched deodorants last week and it changed my life), we need death to self. We need God to remove our dead stone hearts and put in living ones. We need the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the actual truth of this universe: That God became a man in Christ Jesus, lived a perfect life which none of us can do, died on the cross and took the payment for all the sins we’ve committed, rose again three days later, is coming back, and those who believe will reign with Him forever. If we sincerely apologize to God for our sin and place our trust alone in Christ for salvation, God WILL forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).
Does Jesus change your life? Yes, but let’s not redefine the hard edges of God’s Word to make it more preferable to those who will reject it. He has not called us to that, but rather, the opposite. So many people are looking for new revelation from heaven, and they ignore the final revelation from heaven that we already have! We don’t need self help tips from some guy’s interpretation of a cherry picked verse. We need men in churches who are unashamed in being God’s mouthpiece for what He’s already said in an ever increasingly dark culture. Life change is great, but it only lasts this life.
