I John
3:2
A young
man named Jeremy Britt won this year’s “Biggest Loser” competition. The ironically named reality show is about
people who want to lose weight, a lot of it.
Twenty-two-year-old Jeremy won the contest by losing 199 pounds. He began the competition weighing 389
pounds. The contestants on this show are
like many of us, they want to be better.
Doubtless many people watch the show because they’re curious; but some
watch because they are facing some challenge (their own weight, a habit, a lack
of education) that’s keeping them from being what they would like to be—better.
It’s a
tragedy to never be able to harbor the hope of a better you. When you and I have no hope of breaking free
from those behaviors that cause hurt to other or ourselves, no hope of escaping
those qualities that continually make us self-disappointed, we lose any sense
that life will ever be different. We may
even begin to wonder if we should march into some church; find the pastor, and
say, “I’m returning this gospel. It
didn’t perform the way you said it would.”
Is it
realistic to cling to the hope of a better you?
I hope so. As I look at the
Bible, I find some materials that speak to the question. Some of what I’m about to say won’t be new,
some might surprise you. I’m going to
cluster what I say around two headings.
Hope for a Better You Involves Doing
Some Things Only You Can Do.
Praying
“God change me” is fully appropriate if we wish to become better. Yet, there seems to be some matters God
leaves in our hands, to a degree, at least.
1. As you pursue a better you, guard your
attitudes.
So many
of us cherish negative attitudes, attitudes that tie us down, that keep us from
change. We may have faced tough times in
the past and those experiences shape us for the rest of our lives. My mother taught me that a person should
always expect the worst. That way, when
the worst happens you won’t be disappointed.
If things turn out better than you expected, you’ll be pleasantly
surprised. Needless to say, she had
little joy in life. I don’t deny she had
her share of grief. She had lived
through the Great Depression. She had
lost loved ones. How different her life
would have been if she had taken different attitudes toward her experiences.
Victor
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who was imprisoned in the Nazi death
camps. While he was in one camp, his
family was in another. His family
died. Somehow he survived. Frankl, who eventually became a Christian,
reflected on his experiences and wrote several influential books. Listen to one of his key observations.
We
who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through
the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may
have been few in number; but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be
taken from a man but one thing: the last of his freedoms—to choose one’s
attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
William
James, who died in 1910, spent years studying religious people. He said, “People can alter their lives by
altering their attitudes.”
Some of
us need to change attitudes of worry.
Jesus once asked, “Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to
your life?” No one can. In fact, chronic worry may even shorten our
lives. Jesus’ antidote was to order our
priorities toward strengthening our relationship with God.
Some of
us need to change attitudes of bitterness.
I’ve known many people who harbor some deep-seated anger. This bitterness shapes their attitude toward
others, toward change, toward every experience.
John Homer Miller, a writer in the eighteenth century, saw the danger in
this. He wrote, “Your living is
determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring
to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at
what happens. Circumstances and situations do color life, but you have been
given the mind to choose what the color shall be.”
We can’t
always be thankful for the experiences that come our way, but we can often find
some reason to be thankful that those experiences came as they did and not some
other way. As Tim Hansel says, “At any
moment in life we have the option to choose an attitude of gratitude, a posture
of grace, a commitment to joy.”
One step
toward a better you, is a changed attitude.
I’m not calling you to a warmed over plate of positive thinking, but I
am calling you to try to see things just a little differently.
2. As you pursue a better you, feed your mind.
Toward
the end of his life, perhaps only a short while before his execution, Paul
wrote a couple letters to Timothy. In
the second letter, he urged his friend to come to Rome to visit him. Anticipating that visit, Paul asked Timothy
to do him a favor. Maybe you’ve asked a
similar favor from a friend. Paul wrote,
“When I was in Troas, I left my coat there with Carpus. So when you come, bring
it to me, along with my books, particularly the ones written on parchment.”[1]
In the
midst of a tough time, Paul wanted to study.
We don’t know what books Paul had in mind. They might have included some of the Old
Testament, but not necessarily. Paul had
a curiosity beyond the narrow range of religion. He quoted non-Jewish writers at least twice
in his sermons and letters. And
evidently he kept that curiosity throughout his life.
Did you
know fewer than half of our fellow Americans read a book during the year? Now, I know that there are other ways to
learn besides reading books, but there are still too many of us who stop
learning at some point in our lives. For
some it may be when they graduate from college.
For some it may be when they retire.
Why is it
so important to nurture the mind, to keep it active? To begin with, learning makes life more
interesting. Some of the dullest people
you’ll ever meet are those who have just stopped learning.
Then,
too, learning enhances our usefulness to the Kingdom. We have greater resources available to us to
advance the gospel. Harry Blamires has
been a lifelong advocate of Christians learning to love God with the mind. He reminds us that, “The Christian thinker
challenges current prejudices . . . disturbs the complacent . . . obstructs the
busy pragmatists . . . questions the very foundations of all about him and . .
. is a nuisance.”
So, if
you want to become a better you, put your mind to work.
Feeding
our minds may help us discover what is essential to our faith and what is
really incidental.
3. As you pursue a better you, hang out with
the right kind of people.
Proverbs
27:17sets this principle in imaginative language. Using he imagery of a file shaping a piece of
metal, the proverb says, “As iron sharpens iron, so people can improve each
other.”[2]
Puritan preacher Jeremy Taylor wrote,
“The wise man chooses friends with the qualities he lacks.”
Being
around the right people can challenge us to be better, can renew our
enthusiasm, and can enrich our understanding.
Of course, hanging out with the wrong people can leave us deflated and
discouraged.
The
writer of Hebrews understood the importance of Christian fellowship in making
us better. He told those who would
neglect that fellowship, “And let
us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not
neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one
another….”[3]
The right kind of Christian fellowship can
make you a better person. That probably
only happens when you participate in some kind of small group activity and not
just the “big church.” Whenever you get
together with your Christian friends, there is the potential of going away a
better person.
4. As you pursue becoming a better you, make
yourself available to others.
I once
heard someone described in words something like this, “Sally lived in a world
bounded on the north, south, east, and west by Sally.” My generation is notorious for being
self-centered. Many of us desperately
need to get outside of our narrow worlds.
Jesus
said to his followers, “You are light, you are salt. Keep your light under a bucket and it does
nothing. Keep your salt in the shaker
and it makes no difference.”
Making
yourself available to others to help them, encourage them, get them through a
tough time, does them good—and does you good.
I saw it
happen in the life of a man named Ray.
Ray was a good man but he had spent his life in one tiny community and
one small church. His only time out of
that community was a trip to Europe in the early 1940s. He came back from that with a bullet wound so
his perspective on the outside world was a little jaundiced. He thought the way to do church was the way
the church he had grown up in did it.
Then, Ray was inspired to spend a couple weeks on a partnership
mission.
During
those weeks he worked for the first time with a Christian who wasn’t a
Baptist. He discovered that three songs
and a sermon wasn’t the only way worship could be done. He found that God’s Kingdom was like a
diamond with many facets. He came back
changed.
If you
hope for a better you, don’t plan on it happening by staying alone.
Now I
want to remind you that
Hope for a Better You Involves Letting
God Do Some Things That God is Best At Doing.
1. As you pursue a better you, listen
especially to God’s correctives.
As you
move through this life, you’ll meet a lot of people who would like to tweak you
just a bit. Not all of them speak for
God or even have your best interest in mind.
Now, this doesn’t mean if someone suggests you should quit smoking or
lose weight and their counsel isn’t accompanied by rumbling thunder, you can
afford to ignore it. It means you should
carefully consider what people are saying to you.
One place
to hear God’s voice is the Bible. Of
course, even there you need to be on guard against approaching the Bible with
preconceived notions. That can interfere
with what God is saying. At the same
time, you have to bring some interpretive principles to the Bible. You don’t have to go to seminary to learn
these. Most of them are rules you would
apply to any kind of material.
When you
turn to the Bible, you’ll discover the Bible has plenty to say about us
becoming a better people. You’ll
discover, as Paul says, that “Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and
useful one way or another—showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting
our mistakes, training us to live God’s way.”
Let me go
on to say that you may hear God’s corrective voice through other
believers. Usually, this will be a
believer who knows you and cares for you, a believer whose own life is
balanced. He or she won’t be
perfect—none of us are—but will have an attitude which says, “You and I are on
this pilgrim road together; here’s
something I’ve learned.”
Your hope
for a better you, stands on the fact that God will give you directions along
that road.
2. As you pursue a better you, open yourself
to God’s transforming grace.
None of
the members of the Corinthian church had been raised in Sunday school. They had come from the worst
backgrounds. Then they were encountered
by God’s transforming grace. Paul helps
them recall their past and their debt to that grace.
9 Do you not
know that the unrighteouswill not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be
deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men
who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor
drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11
And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were
justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.[4]
They had
touched the moral bottom but God had changed them. Though they were by no means all they should
have been, Paul could call them “saints.”
As one translation puts it, they were “Christians cleaned up by Jesus
and set apart for a God-filled life.”
Paul would rejoice that “There’s no end to what has happened in you—it’s
beyond speech, beyond knowledge. 6The evidence of Christ has
been clearly verified in your lives.”
All that change
took place was because of God’s transforming power that had worked in their
lives and would continue to work in their lives. He could promise them, “God himself is right
alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by
Jesus. 9God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure,
shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up
on you. Never forget that.”
Your hope
for a better you, stands on the fact that the God of grace “will never give up
on you.”
3. As you pursue a better you, keep in mind
God’s goal for you.
Listen
again to John’s words, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be
has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him,
because we shall see him as he is.” [5]
What John is describing is the believer’s
“glorification.” It means the time will
come when every believer will be like Christ.
As you and I well know, this doesn’t happen the moment you step out of
those waters of baptism.
Paul
might call the Corinthians saints, but he knew it would be a long time before
they were truly saintly. God works through
various means to bring us to that place where there’s no doubt we are Christ’s
people.
Your hope
for a new you, stands on the fact that God has a glorious goal for you.
Conclusion
A
Christian once testified: “I am not what
I should be, I am not what I am going to be, but thank God, I am not what I
was.”
If we
understand our own hearts, this testimony will resonate with us. You know you’re not what you should be. You may even accept the promise that you are not
what you are going to be.
But
finally, you can take comfort if you can truly say; you are not what you
were. If you are better now than you
were, that reality continues to inspire the hope of a better you.
[1] The
Holy Bible : New Century Version , Containing the Old and New Testaments.
Dallas, TX : Word Bibles, 1991, S. 2 Ti 4:13
[2] The
Holy Bible : New Century Version , Containing the Old and New Testaments.
Dallas, TX : Word Bibles, 1991, S. Pr 27:17
[3] The
Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1996,
c1989, S. Heb 10:24
[4] The
Holy Bible : English Standard Version. Wheaton : Standard Bible Society,
2001, S. 1 Co 6:9-11
[5] The
Holy Bible : New Century Version , Containing the Old and New Testaments.
Dallas, TX : Word Bibles, 1991, S. 1 Jn 3:2
