“A Resolution That Won’t Fail” by Jennifer Williams
I have been swimming at the YMCA for years and one thing that always interests me every year is how busy the Y becomes the first week of the New Year. It’s not surprising because, of course, the majority of people resolve to lose weight and get in shape. This year, however, I feel like things have become so clear to me. Instead of feeling simply interested, my heart was hurting as I drove into the normally empty parking lot and saw it full of new people eager to change their behaviors, which will statistically end in failure yet again. Because let’s be real, most people won’t last more than a few weeks or a few months, at best, only to be back at the beginning of the cycle of failure, trying hard, short-term success, and failure.
As a believer, have you ever questioned whether God can really change people? Whether YOU can ever really change? Are you caught in a cycle of sin or bad choices where you continually cry out to God to change you, yet nothing ever changes? If Christ conquered sin, and if we are new creations in Christ, why can’t we ever seem to change our patterns of behavior? I understand these questions personally and have wrestled with them ever since I became a believer in college.
I took a step away from God for eight years for various reasons. At the time when I walked away from God, I believed that God really doesn’t change people. But, thankfully, God came after me and revealed Himself to me in a way that I had never experienced before. He became so incredibly personal and real this past year, and my faith is deeper and solid in a way it never was. I was a believer before, but my faith was more knowledge-based, and I began to feel so exhausted with trying to do and be who I thought I was supposed to be as a believer.
The tool God used to put me in a position to experience Him personally and begin to understand my identity in Christ is Transformational Prayer Ministry by Ed Smith. TPM opened my eyes to see that the fruits of the spirit are a gift and an overflow from heart belief. Before, I was trying to force my behavior to reflect what I knew in my head to be true of my identity and what the pastor was telling me was true (that I was loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled as a new creation in Christ), but as much as I was told to just believe it because it was the truth, that wasn’t cutting it for me. If you are honest, I don’t believe it is cutting it for you. We can’t MAKE ourselves believe anything based on sheer knowledge no matter how hard we try or how many times we repeat a verse. What we need is for God to show us at a heart level who we are.
When we become believers, we often expect God to be a magician and wave His magic wand over us and change our life-long behaviors. When we cry out to Him repeatedly change us, and He doesn’t, we question other believers and are maybe given answers like, “Well, sin is in the world, so we will always struggle with it.” That doesn’t sound very victorious, does it? If, as a believer, I’m still struggling with the same sin as every other non-believer out there, then, really, where is the victory I claim to have to all my non-believing friends?
I’ve come to see that my problem was that I was focusing on my behavior rather than the driving force behind the behavior. Bad behavior is NEVER our problem. The behavior is A problem, but not THE problem. Anytime we try to change our behavior out of our own effort, it will always end in failure. We may have success for short periods of time, but in the end, your effort alone cannot change your behavior for the long term. What we need to realize is that our behavior is indicative of a deeper problem.
When we behave badly, it’s because we are trying to “numb” out and not hurt from something that is causing us pain. Instead of looking at our pain as an indicator that there is a lie we are believing, and instead of embracing our pain and searching our hearts for what that lie is and taking it to God so He can renew our minds, we choose to do something to distract us from our pain, we don’t know what else to do, we just know it hurts and we want it to stop. For example, if we hate ourselves and our life seems to be falling apart, if we don’t know how to handle the pain in a healthy way (by bringing it to God), we choose to deal with our pain by “doing” something that numbs us of the pain (at least temporarily) like drinking, eating, exercising, doing drugs, keeping busy or watching pornography (and the list goes on and on).
If we believe we are worthless, failures, abandoned and that God doesn’t love us, our feelings are going to match that, and those feelings are awful, so we choose behaviors that keep us from feeling. The relief from the pain is all temporary though, which is why we always have to go back to that behavior, which makes a lot of the behaviors addictive in nature. What a mess we are!!
As a non-believer, there is no solution and you are left in a hopeless cycle. If you don’t know Jesus and don’t have the Spirit who is in you waiting to renew your mind, how can you ever experience freedom from lies? But often we, as believers, are in the same exact cycle because we just don’t know how to put ourselves in a position before God and the Spirit, so He can renew our minds of those lies. When God renews our mind of the lies, we believe the Truth of who we really are and who He really is, we begin to actually believe the new identity we have been given. That identity has been there always from the time of our salvation, but the lies we believe block us from believing it.
Freedom is part of the salvation package, but so few of us are experiencing true freedom. Instead, we keep trying to “fight” the battle, but the battle was won way back at Calvary. Even though the battle has already been won, we keep trying to put ourselves back in the fight. That is Satan’s strategy – he throws lies at us left and right, day and night, trying to make us believe we are not free and questioning our identity and making us believe we are not victorious.
But, as new believers, God has miraculously given us a new identity through Christ. We are new, free creatures, and the old is gone. So why do so many believers still look in the mirror and see the old self? It is because even though the gift of freedom in Christ and the gift of a new identity has been given to us requiring no work on our part, there is work that must be done to allow God to show us who we are. Why do I call it work? Because in order to be free and live in our identity with complete confidence rather than living legalistically and “trying” to be who we are told we are to be as a new Christian (exhausting), we have to begin to change our thought process and begin to recognize that we believe lies. Once we figure out where those lies originated in our childhood and life experiences, we can then ask God what He wants us to know about that belief.
This process can be painful and tedious, but the pain is short-lived when God shows up and renews your mind and replaces those lies with the truth of who you really are and who He really is. So often we spend our time talking and talking and talking to God, pleading with Him to take something away or change us, but I believe that if we just shut up for a few minutes and ask Him what HE wants us to know about those things and listen, really listen, He will speak into those things and reveal to us at a heart level who you truly are and that He has already taken those things away and you are already free. No counselor, friend, pastor, or Godly teacher can convince you of this, but only the Holy Spirit.
My passion is not for the unbeliever rather, for the multitude of believers who are living an exhausted, self-loathing, suffocating, legalistic Christian life full of lists of what you should and should not do. Christ came for our freedom and so many don’t want to admit that we really are not experiencing this. Maybe because we have been preaching this for so long that we don’t want to admit that we really aren’t experiencing it ourselves. Maybe it’s because we don’t really, at a heart level, believe that freedom like this truly exists. But I’m here to tell you, I used to be that person and God has shown me this past year that there truly is freedom. I really am a new creation in Christ and when I look in the mirror, I finally see that.
Once you begin to finally believe who you are in Christ, the need for “numbing” your behaviors disappears because you no longer need something to distract you from feeling so bad. God has filled you with His truth of who you really are in Him and that leaves you joyous and full.
So for the New Year, if your resolutions reflect your desire to change your behaviors, and you are a believer, I would challenge you to change your resolutions to things like being committed to recognizing that when you have bad feelings or behaviors, it indicates you are believing a lie or trying to numb out from the feelings that result from the lie. Once you identify the lie, resolve to tell God what you really believe (ex, I am disgusting, I am alone, I am abandoned, I am dirty, I am unacceptable, you don’t love me, you aren’t personal etc) and ask God to show you what He wants you to know about that lie. Then LISTEN.
When God begins to speak to you, and when He renews your mind of those lies and replaces them with His truth, watch your behavior begin to change. This new behavior change is a lasting change, not based on self-effort that will eventually lead to failure and the same resolutions in 2020. This behavior change is actually freeing and requires no effort; it is simply an overflow of finally believing who you already are. That is true freedom! Why would we accept anything less?
~ Written by Jennifer Williams ~
My name is Jennifer Williams. I work full time as a Rehabilitation Liaison at Encompass Health, have been divorced for about 9 years, and have 3 daughters ages 26, 22 and 20. Everything I have learned this last year is through the gifted teaching of Ed Smith’s ministry, Transformational Prayer Ministry. He has a website if you want to learn more and have your mind blown by the relatability and realness of his message. My email address is jen7williams7@gmail.com. If this topic sparks an interest in you, I’d love to talk more about it.
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