What an intriguing perspective on how much God and Satan both use change as a means of furthering their work. In those moments of change, will we allow God to shape our lives or other forces?
In an article in Guidepost magazine, author Elizabeth Sherrill told of the difficulty of moving out of the home she had loved for 50 years. Sorting through and wanting to hang onto the accumulation of a lifetime, she contemplated the myriad changes she and her husband had experienced and the big one they were about to make. This sentence from her article is my theme today: “One prayer God never answers is for things to stay the same.”
Things change! And so often for the better. I like to remind myself that the scriptures always say, “It came to pass.” Never, “it came to stay.” And, for everything we wish would stay the same, there are probably ten things we want to change. The most common claim of self-help books is that they will change your life. Still, there are times we hang on to the status quo.
Repentance Requires Change
Maybe one reason God never answers the prayer for things to stay the same is that we can’t repent without changing. Repentance is a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of behavior, a change of motivation.
Change isn’t usually easy, but ruts are not paths of progress. We need to pull ourselves up and out of ruts and habits that aren’t moving us ahead—to seek the Lord’s help and pay our part of the price of change in order to keep moving in a positive direction.
How the Adversary Intrudes in Both Change and Sameness
When I think of my own life, the underlying theme is probably a yearning for change. I’ve always wanted to do better, to learn more, to live on a higher spiritual plain. While the adversary uses bad patterns and ruts as ways to keep us stuck in “sameness” he also uses our desires for improvement to move us past “divine discontent” to discontent in general.