If you’re serious about changing your life, a well-known leadership expert offers this advice:
‘Don’t just change enough to get away from your problems – change enough to solve them. Don’t just change your circumstances to improve your life – change yourself to improve your circumstances. Don’t do the same old things expecting different results – get different results by doing something new. Don’t see change as something hard that must be done – see it as
something helpful that can be done. Don’t avoid paying the immediate price tag of change – if you do, you’ll pay the ultimate price of never improving.’
The Bible says, ‘When your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.’ Character building is a slow process; don’t expect it to be easy. When you try to escape life’s difficulties you short- circuit the process, delay your growth, and end up with a worse kind of pain – the useless kind that accompanies denial and avoidance. We want improvement but we don’t want to pay the price that goes with it. And that’s a problem, because you’ll never become what God intends you to be by remaining what you are. It’s not enough to want change, and be open to it, you must pursue it!
One way to pursue change in our life is not to neglect the discipline of corporate worship. Although we worship God solely because He is worthy, and not to get something out of it, because God is so good, when we worship something happens to us!
We are confronted with God’s greatness and given a new perspective on life,
“When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God…” Psalm 73
Like Isaiah, who experienced a revelation of God in the sanctuary, we too are humbled and able to diagnose the condition of our own heart,
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips… and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 6
We are filled with courage and hope because we remember we are not alone,
“One thing I ask from the Lord…that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life…. for in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock.” Psalm 27
It’s why the Psalmist says:
“I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord” Psalm 122
because it’s a place God uses to change us.
– Phil.
