Spring

Today is a gorgeous day in lynchburg.  The sun it out in power, the sky is a beautiful blue, and the trees are beginning to blossom.  God has truly created the world and His creation is so pleasing to the senses.  The smells of spring are invigorating, intoxicating, overwhelming.  Gorgeous.

I spent most of this blessed day outside reading, I spent all of last week camping with students from Harvest Bible Chapel from York Region in the lovely Jacksonville sun digging into the Scriptures.  One verse we kept coming back to throughout the week was Romans 12:1-3, "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  We sat and dwelt on this idea of transformation, and not conformation.  The images invoke by the idea of transformation were truly thought provoking.  Not just provoking our thoughts but our hearts and our actions as well.

Transformation, not conformation.  Transformation.  Not conformation.  Imagine playdough.  When I was young I played with playdough, it was often homemade because my mother was very resourceful.

You could buy molds for the playdough where you put it in the mold, pressed hard and it would be pressed and changed in a way to form a different shape: a star, a rectangle, a square, a circle ... or something else.  It seemed to be new, it seemed to be different.  I mean it looked different and you could do a different thing with it, but when I was done playing, mashed the playdough back together and put it back in the container ...  it was still the same thing.  This is conformation, and we do it all the time.  Change your clothing style, change the music you listen to, change the Christian speaker you are listening to, change your style of worship, change your friends ...  these can all just be molds squeezing out the same person, character, and heart that you were before.  Just a different package.

Then there is spring.  Lynchburg in the winter is ... its kinda ugly.  We are surrounded by mountains and every time I look up all I see in the winter is a mountain of blah.  Its just dead, it has no life.  But when I walk around town on days like today and I see blossoms of every colour covering the creations of the world, I look and see: new life.  Transformation.  Life and beauty where there was not before.  Like a flower pushing up from the dirt, a chick hatching out of an egg, a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.  New life, transformation.

This is the picture of what is to happen when we offer ourselves fully, completely, and wholly to God as a living sacrifice.  We are not to fit the new mold, change for merely changes' sake pumping out the same playdough, the same character, the same heart and the same life.  But by the renewal of our minds we are to be transformed and made new!  new character, new heart, new life.  This transformation comes from grace alone. Grace alone.  We are to be born again, Christ declared, and we are born again to a new life which is dead to sin and alive to Jesus by grace through faith in Him.  Grace through faith in Him alone.  We are transformed! No longer enemies of God by friends.  He transforms us and we are to continually seek transformation by the renewal of our minds.

This renewal, this continual transformation is to be sought through the truth of Scripture and through submission to the work of the Holy Spirit.  What are we being transformed from? Simple: from sin toward maturity and Christlikeness.  God alone brings the growth.  We are not to look like the world continually conformed to the new wish and whim of the week.  But, be transformed by the Truth, Jesus the Christ.  Transformed to holiness as God is holy.

As the new life of spring transforms the face of the earth, will you seek the the transformation of the Spirit and the Scriptures through renewing your mind, turning from the sin of this world, and binding yourself to the grace of the Gospel? We have victory over sin to live free from sin. As spring has sprung, so Christ has sprung triumphantly from the grave and having defeated sin, He offers new, transformational life.  My prayer is that the Spirit would shine the light of Scripture into the dark and dead corners of our heart and that God would transform us that our lives would glorify His name.