Joe was born with a debilitating disease, common to many, that he inherited from his parents. This disease was terminal in time and for many years, without a cure. One day, the cure was found and Joe was totally healed. His excitement and elation was off the scale but to his surprise, short lived. After he was cured, Joe thought that he would no longer experience any of the symptoms of the disease but soon discovered he was wrong. He continued to exhibit many of the feelings and behaviors associated with his original condition. Joe asked his friends about the situation, read articles on the internet and wracked his brain for an answer. Finally, he went back to the doctor who had given him the cure to find the answer to his riddle. The doctor said, Joe, you were born with this condition, you lived many years with it and with the problems that it caused. Your mind and body adapted to it from the beginning and formed methods of compensating for it. Your mind and body are so used to living with the disease that they are still functioning as if it were still there. What do I do about it Joe asked. How do I retrain myself to live like a man who is cured? You learn everything you can about it Joe, the doctor said. You learn about what it is like to live a healthy life, you learn all about the problems and patterns your disease caused and you learn the methods of renewing you mind and body. As you learn about all of these things, you put them into practice, slowly, daily, changing the way you think and act. As you catch your mind and body acting like a sick man, you confront the problem, stop doing it and practice acting like a cured man. It will take time but if you will commit to the process and stick with it, you will be able to totally renew your mind and body to live like a healthy man, cured of your disease. Joe’s mind was now more at ease. He understood why he continued to have the same problems and now knew what to do about it. He left the doctor’s office with new excitement and a desire to help others experiencing the same problem by teaching them the solution to the hangover behaviors.
The Analogy
Knowing that I am a Christian Pastor-Teacher and counselor, you no doubt have surmised that Joe’s story is an analogy that I created. It is an earthly story with a spiritual meaning. I wonder how many of the parallels you have put together. Let me give the interpretation of the story.
Interpreting the Story
The Meaning of Joe’s Story: Joe is any and every born member of the human race. The disease is sin that we inherited genetically from Adam and Eve passed down through our own parents. The cure is the death burial and resurrection of Jesus that paid for all of our sins. We are given the cure when we believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins and was resurrected to defeat death for us. Once we take the cure, we are saved from the judicial penalty of sin and we are secure in Christ forever. The surprising ongoing symptoms are the sins and the destructive patterns we continue to think, feel and practice after we are saved. These patterns are surprising because we are saved, indwelt by the Spirit and have the power to reject sin as a way of life, yet we don’t. The search for answers corresponds to the difficulty we all have trying to understand our own souls and why we continue to struggle with negative feelings and actions. The doctor’s answers are analogous to the teachings of the bible that explain this mystery.
The rest of this article will expand the explanation so that we can understand our struggle and have solutions to resolve it. We will discuss that all mankind is born separated from God with a sin nature, that we all develop habitual thoughts and behaviors that are brought into our new life and finally we will examine the concept of transformation where we take off our old ways and put on the new ways in Christ.
A Choice – A Disease
Joe’s disease is called sin. Originally sin was a decision to disobey God. When sin was chosen, it infested the human body and soul and became like a disease. Sin resulted in all mankind being born spiritually dead, separated from God and we also inherited a sin nature. Joe, like the rest of us was born separated from God because of Adam’s sin. When Adam sinned, he caused the whole human race to become spiritually dead. Spiritual death means that we are unworthy to be accepted by God and that we are unable to function in the spiritual realm. Let’s examine the impact of spiritual death.
Human Needs Unmet by God – Frustrated
God created the human soul with inner needs. Adam experienced these needs even in perfection. Man was designed to need God and to a lesser degree, to need one another. All of us are born with divinely designed needs that only God can meet. In the garden, God was there to meet their needs but after the fall we are born permanently separated from Him. Our spiritual death and separation from God causes us to be unable to have a relationship with Him to meet our needs. In addition, spiritual death renders us unable to understand anything spiritual that He might say to us. The result is that our deepest needs go unmet as we develop our own ideas about life. We grow up without God. As we go through the stages of human development and build our own views about life, we experience continuous frustration from our unfulfilled longings and don’t know why. Only God can fill the emptiness within the heart of man but the heart of man is cut off from Him. Driven by these needs, we are left to our own feeble devices to find a source to fulfill them. Human ability is unable to create a solution so that the human soul is left hopeless and helpless to change our situation. Therefore, spiritual death separates us from God, frustrates us as we try to meet our needs and leaves us confused about why we cannot find happiness through relating with other members of the human race.
The Sin Nature
The second result of Adam’s sin is the corruption of our human nature. God created us with a nature to love and worship Him. The corruption of sin causes us to redirect all of our loyalties away from God onto our self. This corrupted nature is called a sin nature and it causes us to view our self as the most important person in life. In contrast, the bible explains that God is the most important person and His plan is the primary goal of the universe. Our corrupted nature driven by needs, causes us to build an idea system that is contrary to God’s truth. The inner hunger we feel so dominates us that we view our self and our needs as the primary issue in life. We are loyal first to self and then to others only after we have what we need. Our sin nature corrupts the development of our ideas so that our belief system is built around self first. We believe that meeting our own needs is the most important task of our life. All of our thoughts, ideas, feelings and actions are built around meeting our needs. Our hunger for love, belonging and significance becomes our dominant goal and all of our thoughts are arranged with this priority in mind. The sin nature causes even the best of us to be selfish and build our ideas around the belief that selfishness is justified and right. From birth and beyond, we begin and live totally disoriented to God.
The Cure of God’s Grace
The disease is sin. Its results alienate us from God both judicially and experientially, both in our thoughts and our behaviors. We are born condemned to die physically and then to die a second time by being placed into the Lake of Fire forever. The disease is terminal and without a cure, all of us will die and then die again. But God, whose great love motivates Him to show mercy devised a plan to cure us from sin and save us forever. God’s plan to save man is called grace. Grace is God’s genius plan to personally resolve the judicial penalty for sin on our behalf and then offer this resolution as a free gift to the undeserving. He sent His Son Jesus to defeat spiritual death by paying for our judicial debt and then to defeat physical death by returning from the dead. Having accomplished this great mission of mercy, God offers what Christ earned as a free gift to be accepted by believing that He did it for us. When we hear the gospel (the cure), understand it and choose to believe it, God credits the work of Christ to our individual accounts. This is the cure, the only cure that God has provided. Once we accept Christ and His work as our means of salvation, God settles the issue of our sins in the courtroom of heaven and pronounces us pardoned forever. We are cured from the terminal disease of sin, never to be condemned again. Yet, our problems are not over. At first, we think we have it made and in the judicial realm we do. But in the experiential realm of beliefs and behaviors we still have a long way to go.
The Old Man
Habitual Beliefs and Behaviors: God made both the human mind and body to operate on habits. We form ideas and behaviors that become habits that we use instinctively and unconsciously when the occasion arises. The beliefs we formed when we were separated from God and on our own have become deeply seated habits of thought that fire off almost without conscious choice. From these habitual thought patterns come emotional, verbal and overt behaviors that we use to interact with our world. Before we were saved, we all formed a habitual way of life that we unknowingly carry into the Christian life. Our beliefs chosen over the course of our lives with their corresponding behaviors are deeply ingrained and operate habitually under the level of awareness. These old beliefs are called the Old Man in the bible. After salvation, we still have the same needs to be met and we are just as driven to meet them. A great difference is that after salvation we now have God to meet our deepest needs. The problem is that initially we don’t really know what is going on inside of us and don’t realize that we are still using habitual ideas that promote selfishness and sinful behaviors. Even though the Spirit indwells us, we are still unconsciously thinking the old ways and therefore acting in old ways. Some of these old ways can even look like the spiritual life but are motivated to serve self rather than God. We are saved, secure in Christ, the Spirit indwells us giving us power but we still find ourselves sinning in the same old ways. We have to find an explanation to this disturbing hypocrisy.
The New Man in Christ
After we are saved the old habitual ways of living that we developed continue to function within us. These old ideas producing sinful behaviors become apparent as we learn about Christ and see His perfection. As we know Him better, He shows us our inconsistent behaviors. As we grow in Him we also begin to feel new thoughts, feelings and practice new behaviors that are like His. This new belief and behavior system is called the new man (NM) and is created by the Spirit in the heart of the believer who learns and believes the truth. Individual pieces of truth are built together into a viewpoint of life that produces Christ like behavior when we operate from His view. We grow and build divine viewpoint into our souls so that these ideas can become our habitual, unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions. It is the new man that thinks, feels and acts like God. It is the new man that we now want to be and who we want others to see in us. It is the new man we thought we would just automatically become when we were saved. Some churches even teach that from the beginning you have the ability to say no the old and yes to the new, totally and completely. But, nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Old Way Endures
The old way has been our way for a long time and it operates under the surface, without us even knowing. It is the fruit of the old way with its sinful, destructive behaviors that blows the whistle and reveals that something is very wrong inside of us. We try to resist the temptations of the old way and fail miserably. We try harder to no avail. We study more, pray more, seek counsel from the wise and still the old way resists our attempts to put it aside. We keep our mask in place to hide our inner confusion and our habitual sins. We learn Christian words and emulate those we believe are enjoying success in the Christian life. Inside we are still driven, frustrated, fearful and we still struggle with sins that threaten to destroy us.
The Old Man Exposed
The old man is revealed through his sinful behavior. The old man is exposed through good bible teaching. None of us are able to see the truth from God’s eyes on our own. God made us so that we would need His Spirit within us and need each other to teach and encourage us. God gave each of us a spiritual gift that works in unison with the other gifts to edify the church, both individually and collectively. One of these gifts is Pastor-Teacher, which is the ability to look into the scriptures, see the truth and communicate it in an understandable way. As we listen in bible class and learn how/why the old man was built, how/why he operates and how we can put his ideas aside, we grow in our capacity to say no to his desires. To see the old man requires much knowledge and a measure of maturity. Baby Christians are not ready to take on the challenge of our deepest inner motives. When a Christian reaches the adult stages though, he/she must look beyond the surface and begin to seek change in the depths of the heart. It is at this stage of growth that we take on the challenges of transforming the inner man.
The Old Man Rejected
The old man (OM) is the belief and behavior system built into the heart by humans during the time period from their birth until they are saved and in a relationship with God. The OM is a belief and behavior system that views life without God, without God’s truth to see His perspective, without God’s power to contemplate victory and without God’s love to deal with the shame of being weak and selfish. The OM is the system we all built seeking to meet our needs in the devil’s world, using our own abilities, using our own understandings while looking to people for what we need. Before we were saved it was our only option and the only way we knew to protect our self and find happiness. After salvation though, now we have God. God’s Spirit is inside of us, His truth is in the bible that we can learn and use inside of us. After salvation we are able to learn God’s perspective, adopt it as our own and use it as the basis of our emotional attitudes and actions. Now we have the option to reject the ideas of the OM and replace them with the ideas used by Jesus in His humanity, the NM. Now we can say no to the OM because we can see that his ideas are disoriented to God’s plan and disobedient to God’s will. What was the only truth we knew has now been exposed as a lie and we have been given the power to lay it aside and replace it with what God has said in His word.
Transformation – Renewing the Mind
In the 1600’s Spinoza said “nature abhors a vacuum” meaning that nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces. This principle seems to hold true for the soul as well. When we reject the ideas of the OM it leaves a hole in the heart that we are compelled to fill. The opposite is also true as demonstrated by many sheltered college freshmen who went off to school, abandoned their parent’s morality leaving a void they filled with another type of morality. When we reject the OM, we must replace its ideas with NM ideas and allow them to become our way of life. In the bible this process is called in Greek metamorphoo, translated transformation. Transformation is the process God uses to cause believers to grow spiritually. In transformation, the believer lays aside specific ideas previously adopted by the OM and replaces these ideas with specific principles from the word of God. The transformed Christian stops believing the ideas of the OM and therefore rejects them as a basis of action and then replaces them by believing ideas from God’s word and uses them as the basis of action. The Greek metamorphoo is the root of the English word metamorphosis, a process of change that occurs in stages resulting in the emergence of a different way of life. After salvation, God enters all of His children into this process where they grow in stages, taking off the OM, putting on the NM, finally resulting in the believer being like the Lord Jesus Christ.
Summary
After salvation we retain the belief and behavior system we built before we were saved. We carry these ideas into the Christian life and operate on them unconsciously, below the level of awareness. As long as these ideas remain in the heart as an object of faith, we will continue to view life from their vantage point and use them as the logic for our actions. At the point of salvation God enters His children into a process of change called transformation, the mechanics of spiritual growth. We have to enter it willingly and endure in it and when we do, the Spirit will change our hearts to be like Christ. He frees us from slavery to the hunger, fear and self-destruction of the OM and enables us to willingly enslave ourselves to the Lord and live our life by means of the influence of the Spirit. We learn/believe the concepts taught in the bible, assemble them into a belief and behavior system called the NM. When we habitually use the NM as the logical basis for our actions, it becomes our new nature and our natural way of life. We live as imitators of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Him be the glory and honor forever.
