Transformation
TRANSFORMATION
Sublimation of the Instincts
Romans 6:13; 1 Corinthians 15:9-10; 2 Corinthians 5:16-17
Being “in Christ” . . . [means] identification with his purposes so that his victories become our victories. We must now see some of the results of being “in Christ.” Paul says, “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17 KJV). This translation says, “old things are passed away,” and yet they have not passed away, they “are become new.”
There was a sense in which old things had completely passed away, and yet there was a sense in which they had come back again completely transformed and new. This “new creature” is entirely different from the old creature, and yet fundamentally the same, only new.
Victorious Living
(Week 20, May 13)
The Moral and Spiritual Bases of Disease
Psalms 31:9-10; 32:1-5; Isaiah 1:4-6
One lady put her case this way, “. . . The Lord is truly transforming our home from a morgue to a sanctuary.”
“From a morgue to a sanctuary!” Not only are many homes morgues; many bodies are; they harbor death cells of anger, fear, self-centeredness, and guilt. Many a person, instead of having a living vibrant body, awake in every cell and harmonious in every relationship, has a body of death. That body of death can become a sanctuary.
Abundant Living
(Week 24, Saturday)
One Greater Than the Temple Is Here
Revelation 1:17-18; 3:7
We have been studying the naturalness of the Christian way. If we get hold of that, it will transform our attitudes toward the Christian way. We will no longer tend to be afraid of it. It will be easier to surrender to it, for in doing so we find ourselves and our own way.
The Way
(Week 8, Sunday)
Isaiah 1:18-20
Now we are seeking transformation. That involves throwing the will on the side of transformation. That can be done only in an atmosphere of inner prayer. Inwardly commit yourself to follow simply and humbly the steps to the Way.
The Way
(Week 11, Sunday)
In Which We Share Our Victory
Psalm 66:16-20
When people expressed these needs, did anything happen? Did release come? To some, no. They couldn’t get beyond themselves. But they were very few. For the most part, those who honestly faced their needs and turned them over to God found release and power and were transformed.
The Way
(Week 27, Tuesday)
The Way of Transformation
Psalm 139:7-12
Transformation . . . is the only workable way [to deal with life]. By transformation we mean facing life as it comes day by day and transforming it into something else. Life will come to us as justice and injustice, pleasure and pain, compliment and criticism. We must be ready to take hold of it as it comes and make something else out of it. In that way, we face life with no subterfuges, no dodging out of difficulties, no rationalization; we face life honestly and simply and masterfully.
Look at Jesus. He refused an escape into Israel’s glorious past, refused to escape into the glorious future of the kingdom of God on earth, refused to retreat into detachment (as the Pharisees who were the Separatists did). He marched straight into life and took everything into his hands and made something else out of it. He took the job of a carpenter, and as he made yokes and plows, made himself ready for the great mission when he would be the architect of a new humanity. He met temptation in the wilderness and made temptation strengthen him; he transformed temptation into a tempering of his soul. He took hold of the ordinary, garden variety of humanity, chose twelve uneducated people, and made them into the teachers of humanity and the transformers of the destiny of the race. He sat by a well with a fallen woman, led her into a new experience, and then made her an evangelist to her village. He touched everything and transformed everything. That is mastery.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 29, Thursday)
Taking the Worse and Turning It into the Best
2 Corinthians 10:3-5
We look again at Jesus using the method of transformation. He was criticized for eating with publicans and sinners. Jesus took that criticism and transformed it into the three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son—the most beautiful parables ever uttered—showing the heart of the seeking, redemptive God. He transformed a reviling into a revelation.
He took the ordinary facts of nature: the man sowing seed, the fisherman casting his net, the woman kneading her dough, the shepherd attending his sheep, the man building his house, the gardener planting his vines and pruning them, the children playing in the marketplace, the merchant seeking pearls, the women grinding the meal, the watchman watching his goods, the man threshing his wheat. He took everything commonplace and made it uncommonplace. He glorified everything he touched, and he touched everything.
Sin put him on a cross, and he used that cross to save us from sin. Hate nailed Jesus, and through that nailing, he showed love, the hate producing love. The cross was humanity at our worst, and through it Jesus shows God at God’s redemptive best.
Jesus transformed the world’s darkest hour into the world’s brightest spot. He took a tomb and made it glow with light and hope.
Light looked down and beheld Darkness.
“Thither will I go,” said Light.
Peace looked down and beheld War.
“Thither will I go,” said Peace.
Love looked down and beheld Hatred.
“Thither will I go,” said Love.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
(Laurence Housman, Little Plays of St. Francis [London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1922], 202)
And as the Word was made flesh, so the flesh became Word and showed and spoke the Divine Word. Everything is different now, since he came. He transforms our dead souls, our dead hopes, even our dead; he makes everything live.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 29, Friday)
Life Makes Sense
Romans 8:39; 1 Corinthians 2:10
The central thing in the transformation of the mind is the ability to “make out what the will of God is” (Rom 12:2 Moffat). When your mind and God’s mind come together, then all things in heaven and earth fall into their place. Life makes sense.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 21, Sunday)
Isaiah 41:10
The four steps that constitute the life climb of the universe are these: (a) Faith in the higher life; (b) leading to a surrender to the higher life; (c) leading to cooperation with that higher life; (d) the lower life taking these steps is transformed into the image of the higher life and partakes of that higher life. You are no longer inferior; you are a part of a superior Life.
This is transformation: “For thou hast saved my life from death, my feet from stumbling, that I may live, ever mindful of God, in the sunshine of life” (Ps 56:13 Moffatt). “Life from death” (past); “free from stumbling” (present); “that I may live, ever mindful of God, in the sunshine of life” (future). Here is something that covers the past, the present, and the future; it is a total transformation. Accept it; it is yours for the acceptance.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 29, Friday)
World Transformation
Mark 1:14-15; Luke 9:2
We come now in our study of transformation to the question of world transformation. Many people are convinced that the Christian way is the way of transformation, but question whether it can transform the world except incidentally through transformed individuals. Its influence is indirect; it has no head-on proposal or plan for world transformation. Secular forces must control the collective life of humankind.
Well, the control of secular forces has led us to the collective mess we are in: two world wars in one generation, and now we tremble on the brink of a third. Does Christianity let us down in the area where direction and control is most needed, the collective?
Not the Christianity of Christ. For Christ presented something that is a head-on and all-inclusive proposal for the control of the individual and collective life. That proposal was the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God on earth is the most astonishing and radical proposal ever presented to humanity. It is nothing less than that the whole of life shall be organized around one center: the will of God.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 49, Sunday)
Ephesians 4:13-14
We now turn this week to look at continuous transformation. Our main stress has been upon the crisis in transformation, and I believe this emphasis has been sound, for the soul gets on by a series of crises. The crisis precipitates decision, the decision precipitates acceptance of grace, and acceptance of grace precipitates transformation.
But while transformation comes through crisis, it also comes through process—a continuing transformation. This passage gives that continuing process better perhaps than any in Scripture: “But we all mirror the glory of the Lord with face unveiled, and so we are being transformed into the same likeness as himself, passing from one glory to another—for this comes of the Lord the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18 Moffatt). The phrase “we are being transformed” depicts that continuous process of transformation, a process, I believe, that has no end. It will continue for eternity.
Here then is the figure the apostle uses: We stand with unveiled face continuously gazing at the face of Christ as the center of our attention and love, and we are gradually and continuously changed into the likeness of Christ, thus proceeding from one degree of glory to another, the Spirit within us being the silent Artist who makes us into the divine image. It is a breathtaking conception and so simple! And yet how profound!
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 50, Sunday)
A Perfected Individual in a Perfected Society
Colossians 1:11-14
The Christian faith . . . turns its redemptive energy into transforming the individual unto perfection and into transforming the present world order into the kingdom of God. The end of life is not negation, but affirmation. And affirmation where it counts, in the character of the individual and society.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 1, Saturday)
Jesus the Redeemer of Waste Material
Ephesians 5:3-10
Jesus took his greatest persecutor, Saul, transformed him into the man who could write the most beautiful thing on love that has ever been written—the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians—and thus made love the greatest thing in the world. The man of hate set love at the center of virtues and illustrated it in himself. Jesus was the redeemer of waste materials.
Mastery
(Week 40, Friday)
Round-the-Clock Tutelage of the Spirit
1 Thesssalonians 1:2-4
In the school of the Spirit there are four steps: (1) confession; (2) self-and sin-surrender to God, the Spirit; (3) acceptance by faith of forgiveness and reconciliation to God, the Spirit; (4) transformation. For in confession everything is brought up and out—complete honesty; in self-and sin-surrender there is a transfer of the central allegiance from self and sin to God—complete recentering; in acceptance by faith of forgiveness and reconciliation there is a wiping out of all barriers between the soul and God, and hence, there is transformation. God’s power, now free to operate, transforms the honest, the surrendered, and the receptive soul.
Christian Maturity
(Week 43, Thursday)
The Redeemed Become the Redeeming
Yesterday I met a completely transformed woman. She and her husband had kept a gambling house with all the accoutrements in Louisiana for two and a half years. She became an alcoholic to escape from herself—and her past. Now she is a radiant person, her home the center of youth, and her touch on life a creative touch. . . . Her touch on life was destructive, now it is constructive. She is not absorbed into the divine—she is absorbing the divine into the human and making that human creative. Yet she knows where she belongs—at his feet. Being at his feet she stands straight before everything. She is being created, and she is creative.
In Christ
(Week 15, Saturday)
Fundamental Tendencies: Forgiveness and a Second Chance
1 Corinthians 1:26-30
[One] fundamental tendency [is] toward a new birth, a new beginning. There is a fundamental tendency in the universe to give the second chance, a recovery, a new start. This comes to its supreme manifestation in Jesus; he took the nobodies and turned them into the somebodies, made a new world beginning out of cast-off material, threw open the gates of possibility to the impossible. Recovery and transformation are the twin words written across the whole of the life and purpose of Jesus.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 50, Friday)