Willing to Change: Embracing God's Transformative Journey

"Now, as was pointed out with a lot of other Beatitudes, notice that it doesn't say, blessed are the righteous. It says, blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteousness. Those that are hungering and thirsting are people that are in want. They are in need. They have a desire. So if you find yourself here today in want, if you find yourself here today in need or in desire, you may be blessed." [00:43:02]

"The fact of the matter is, we all have stuff in our lives that keeps us from being as righteous as God would want us to be. Now, whether we call those things defects or flaws or hang-ups or habits or whatever we want to call it, the fact of the matter is, we all have them." [00:44:56]

"Remember, the principle for today is to voluntarily submit to any change that God wants to make in your life. It says here in Romans 12, 1, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. And you all know the joke. If you don't know about a living sacrifice, the problem with it is they keep crawling off the altar. I understand that." [00:46:17]

"Jesus Christ loves you the way you are right now. All your flaws and works and everything. God loves you just the way you are. You don't have to clean up to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. He loves you. He loves you like you are. But he loves you too much to allow you to stay there." [00:47:34]

"He calls us not to be conformed to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed. Now, maybe some of your kids or grandkids or somebody plays with these transformers where they change from human to machine and all that. But it's change. That's what transform is. So we're called to change." [00:47:59]

"The changes that he wants to make in your life are for your benefit. They're to help you. It's something that is there to help you with those flaws, those defects, those habits. And how do we get those flaws and defects and habits? Well, there's a variety of things that I think contribute to it." [00:50:47]

"You know, there was a person much smarter than I was talking one time and said about like that decisions come from thoughts. Thoughts come from voices. Voices create choices. And choices have consequences. And when you make those choices, it can help you or it can hurt you. There's consequences." [00:52:28]

"We're called to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We might have to change the way we think, the way we look at things. And that's not easy for us. And to be honest with you, I can't do it by myself. I need God to help me with that." [00:53:20]

"And when we become a Christian, sometimes what happens is this. We look and we say, okay, Lord, I accept you as my Savior, and I want to change. I need you to help me change. But I look at my life, and it's just too much of a mess. I have too much baggage. I don't know where to start." [00:55:32]

"Because if you try to tackle the whole thing at once, you won't be able to do it. Pick one thing. One thing to focus on. When you sit with God and you say, Lord, what is it you want me to work on? What is it that you want me to change? Pick the one thing and focus on that." [00:56:21]

"It's because you take one thing at a time and you focus on it, but you also focus on progress, not perfection. Because in the first sermon of this series, Pastor Jacob talked about flipping, flipping a switch. He said, some of you don't understand how addiction works. You know, you think that you can just flip the switch." [00:56:58]

"The next steps are pray about it, write about it, share about it. Gotcha. Pray about it. The first thing I ask you to do is this week, when you have your prayer time, and I don't know whether you start or end or both your prayer time, you know, with your devotions and so on and so forth." [00:59:38]