Reframe: From The God We've Made…To God With UsSample

Restarting Change

In John’s Gospel, Jesus visited a giant pool structure known as Bethesda. Its ruins remain to this day in Jerusalem. While there he had an encounter with a man who had been disabled for thirty-eight years. Rather than just healing the man, He asked him a question. “Do you want to be made whole?”

This is really the question of just about every change we contemplate in our lives.

But change is the hard part. Nobody likes it much. Shifting away from what is familiar in exchange for the work of reorienting our lives in a new way is hard, and it exposes just how deep the ruts in our lives are sometimes. Look at how hard it is to keep those New Year’s resolutions!

The work of change in our lives is a necessary part of growth, but changing our relationship with God feels a little dodgy, doesn’t it? We have a sort of “permanency complex” with Him—like nothing is supposed to ever change. This is borne out of our fear of getting something wrong, of believing the wrong thing and heading down the wrong spiritual path. So we stay with the pack. We listen to all the hearsay and build the model and gather the data. We follow back through the loop we’ve always been on when God has always been inviting us into a personal relationship—not a group friendship.

Don’t get me wrong. Living in community and walking through life together with other believers is critical. This is absolutely heralded in Scripture and forms the body of Christ in the world. Our friends and allies are irreplaceable in our faith journey in every conceivable way. But they’re not a replacement for a personal relationship with God. You can’t have a “group marriage.” That would be . . . weird. In the same way, you can’t have a group relationship with God.

God is inviting you into a first-person, collaborative relationship with Him. Replacing this with anything less is how things stay shallow. The relationship can’t go deep enough to penetrate our hearts and change us irreversibly. We want to experience spiritual growth, but we don’t always have the life-or-death urgency we would if, for example, our house was on fire.

That might need to change.

After all, this whole thing is all about you—this beautiful, extravagant, decadent, over-generous life that’s been given as a gift—and it’s all about what you do next.