Commandments for Abundant Life: Part 6: Personal, Internal Change is the Key

If the kingdom of God is within us, then whatever is blocking our access to that kingdom is also within us; therefore removing the blocks must require internal personal changes.  Perhaps you may doubt that this is really the truth.  If you do, you should resolve that doubt right now.

  Put this book down, pick up your Bible and turn to any page in Matthew, Chapters 5-7.  Scan through any amount of verses you have time for and ask yourself, “Is this just information, or is Jesus commanding us to change, and if we’re being asked to change, what kind of changes are they?  Are they changes in being, thinking, and believing, or changes in outer actions?” If you do this exercise you will find that ALL of Jesus’ commandments are about personal change: becoming as children, becoming meek, becoming humble, removing the plank from our eye. 

When I was raising my children, I frequently used the metaphor of a spiral staircase in trying to explain life to them.  I told them we are all on a spiral staircase and we can choose to go up or we can choose to go down, but we can’t stay in one place, and even if you made no choice at all, you automatically go down.  The bottom line of my story was that if you are not choosing to go up, you will go down.

Now many years later, I still think about the spiral staircase metaphor, and it still correlates with my observations of how life works.  It seems that God in his mercy ensures that we grow, sometimes in spite of ourselves.  Reflect on how much you have grown personally, even if so far, you haven’t been following a systematic plan for spiritual growth.  Think back five, ten, or twenty years ago.  You are a different person now than you were then.  You are more of a person than you were then.  You have grown. 

There seems to be only two ways for us to grow.  We could call them the unconscious way and the conscious way.  The unconscious way is man’s way.  The conscious way is the way defined in the commands of Christ.  The unconscious way is the way most of us have grown so far.  This is what is commonly referred to as the “School of Hard Knocks”.  This is the way of growing where we make decisions in life on our own, based on what we think is “good” for us, without regard to that still, small inner voice within us; our “higher selves” – the spirit of God within each of us.  In the “School of Hard Knocks” we learn the hard way by learning from the consequences of our decisions. 

When our thoughts and actions are not aligned with the will of God, the spirit of God within each of us, we experience suffering in some way and eventually figure out a better way of making decisions.  At times it may seem like God is being cruel when our poor decisions result in suffering, but nothing could be further from the truth.  God in his mercy will not allow us to continue to descend down the spiral staircase without helping us to see that there is a better way – that at any point in our descent we can exercise our conscious free will and decide, “I have had enough of this.  This isn’t working, so I’m going to change my direction”. 

At this point we are consciously using our will to ascend the spiral staircase.  We realize that if our life is to change, we are responsible for changing it.  We stop indulging in self-pity and self destructive habits.  We start having faith and investing our energy in life; then we start seeing the rewards, and life begins to get much more peaceful and much more comfortable.

There is always the possibility, however, that anywhere on the spiral staircase, the comfort can become a trap.  God will always respect our free will.  If we decide to stay at a particular level of the spiral staircase and stagnate, we have the privilege through our free will to do so, but again God in his mercy will not allow us to stagnate on the same step forever.  We will start to slip down and in some way our lives will again become uncomfortable, until we once again decide to reach higher.  The “School of Hard Knocks” is obviously a very slow, difficult, and painful way to grow.