Transformation?

Dave Johnson, pastor of Church of the Open Door in the Minneapolis area, has a good post at Out of Ur

So here’s my question: “What’s up with that?” In all his years in church and in “the Word”, Ray never became a different kind of person. He never changed. He never became more loving, gentle, peaceful, or patient. Indeed, he only seemed to become more angry and rigid as time went on. He became harder to be around. What’s more, no one seemed to be bothered by that, as though something were out of the ordinary. No one wondered if maybe Ray had somehow missed the point.

In other words, not only did Ray never change but no one seemed to expect him to. Ray was just being Ray. He prayed the prayer, he believed the right stuff about Jesus, he was irritated with people who didn’t, and he went to heaven when he died. So again the question: “What’s up with that?”

<idle musing>
Indeed! What is up with that? I'm more bothered by the fact that no one seemed to think it unusual that he didn't change. Have we become so used to intellectual assent christianity that we don't think there is any other kind? Have we changed our theology to expect this, instead of letting our theology be driven by scripture and our lives challenged and transformed by the abiding presence of the risen Christ?

When I read the New Testament, I see lives being transformed. Further, I find that such transformation was to be the norm. Anything less was deemed abnormal and earned a stiff rebuke from the writers of the various epistles.

Mind you, the transformation was always the result of the working of God in the form of the Holy Spirit in a person's life. It wasn't the works of the individual—that also would earn a stiff rebuke, see Galatians 3!—but it was a transformation of the individual; a miracle happening before the eyes of all who knew the person.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that no one can ever become better, they just become worse and more rigid. There is only one way of deliverance, and that is death. Not physical death, although I suppose that works too in a warped sort of way, but death to self. Romans 6, buried in baptism; Galatians 2, I am dead; the list goes on. Apprehend it by faith, the only way...otherwise be prepared to take another lap around the wilderness.
</idle musing>