Reversing
the Past
We
know it is not possible for us to fix all our character defects on our own, but
we can reverse the actions that reinforce our character defects. Letting
go of character defects is never passive. Change within a man is a divine
interaction between God’s grace and our choices. Like everything else we do in
recovery, character change requires action. Changing our actions helps
to interrupt habitual patterns of thinking, believing and feeling. Motion changes emotion!
When we realize that we are reacting
with a character defect, addicted feeling or thought, we can choose to do the
opposite of what our addicted instincts were inclined to do. If the old way of
thinking, feeling and acting didn’t work in the past, we know from experience
it won’t work now. So we try something different.
While we cannot change the past, we
are never doomed to do the same thing time after time in the future. We can
choose to do something different, avoiding the painful and destructive results
that came from our addicted life. It will take some practice, but with a little
commitment and a few failures along the way — which we shared with another
person — the changes to thinking, feeling and acting can actually come quite
quickly. Those of us who came from religious backgrounds will call this
repentance, and that is exactly what it is. Grassroots, down and dirty, rubber meets
the road, repentance. The simplest definition of repentance is to “change one’s
mind.” It is an about-face. It is turning and going in the other way. Whatever you
call it, it works.
And so I insist
– and God backs me up on this – that there be no going along with the crowd,
the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God
that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t
think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual
obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion. But that’s no life for you!
You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to
him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since
then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything – and I do mean
everything – connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through
and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life – a
God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your
conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.
Ephesians
4:19-23 MSG
This is an excerpt from WHEN LOST MEN COME HOME, not for men only ~ Copyright David Zailer, 2011
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