Are you who you want to be? When no one else is around, and you give an honest assessment of yourself, are you proud to have your last name?

When we ask ourselves these questions, and answer them with a no, or even a maybe, we begin to think of all the things in our lives that we need to fix. We think of all the times we have royally messed up. As we think of all the issues we have with who we are as people, it seems as if a widening gap is created between the people we are today and the individuals that we desire to become. This disparity between what seems to be an over-promised Christian life and an under-delivered execution of it on our part can leave us feeling hopeless. It’s okay to feel this way, because there is a way to change, there is a way to the other side.

So often, when we begin to feel this way, we immediately want to change everything, everything over night. We live in a society today that is so much different than what any community throughout the course of history experienced. With the use of the internet, access of cell phones, and e-mail, our relationships with others are able to move so much faster. Relationships in business, school, and family are forced to move quickly. We can be in communication with anyone at anytime with the help of today’s technology. We rarely have the time to think things through anymore, or to calm our emotions down before speaking to someone regarding a problem that has arisen. Everything has to be dealt with immediately. As a society, we have grown accustomed to being able to fix so many things with the click of a button or with a surgery in order to lose weight, that when it comes to our relationships with both ourselves and other people, we assume that these issues must be and should be dealt with in the same sort of timeframe.

When we begin to deal with the problems in our own lives, we think that everything should be fixed immediately and all at once. The problem is that relationships with people cannot be dealt with by using computer software. We are not programmable robots with glitches in our system that can be fixed in one hour. We are still human beings, unable to de-fragment our hearts to speed things up. It takes time in order to create new habits in our lives. Until this is understood, we’ll be trapped in a net of failure. We’ll try to change everything about us overnight, and then feel like quitting when we fail once or twice.

We need to remember that we live in a world that was created by a God who, throughout thousands of years, has honored hard work. He is a God that honors proven faithfulness and patience. Biblical characters such as Abraham and Joseph, to name a couple, are prime examples of the Lord honoring faithfulness over long periods of time. Our timeframe in an internet savvy world seems to be much different than from a God not bound by time. By realizing this, it gives us more encouragement to keep working hard, regardless of how many times we don’t succeed. It gives us faith in knowing that we can deal with one thing at a time. It allows us to shake the old habits that we are accustomed to, and move above and beyond the sin in our lives. It gives us a sense that as new people in the Lord, we’re okay, that we’re going to be just fine, that we’re going to make it.

If we try to fix our lives as if we were machines, more often than not, it will only lead to yet another failure and another emotional letdown. Repetition of this teaches us that we are inherently bad. Upon becoming a Christian, nothing can be further from the truth. When we make the decision to allow Christ to dwell in us or when we rededicate our lives to Him, and ask Him to forgive us from our sins of the past, present, and future, we are made clean and our hearts are made pure. We are made perfect in God and our eternal life begins right then and there. Our hearts become good. We become inherently good people, inclined to do good.

The difficulty in grasping this enters into us when we still make many of the same mistakes we did in the past after we have made the decision to change. We’ll begin to ask ourselves, “if we have been made good, why are we still inclined to many of these same mistakes? If our old self has been rendered dead, then why does it still show itself?” It’s like any other habit that you might have. Just because you have been made clean, your old habits will more than likely still take some time to break. The comfort comes in knowing that if you truly have asked for forgiveness, love Jesus, and are trying to follow Him, even these future mistakes have been wiped clean.

In saying this, I don’t want to make it sound as if once you are a Christian, or once you re-dedicate your life to following Jesus, sin is no longer a big deal. The difference is that by being saved, you can face it, deal with it, accept the grace of God, and move on as you leave the sin behind you forever. It is not tied to you with a leash. It doesn’t follow you wherever you go. It’s no longer your shadow.

As you move forward with instituting changes into your life as a forgiven person, you are given the freedom to move forward each day as you do your best to make adjustments to the small areas of your life. The old habits of yourself will be broken in the small areas, and reflected in the larger arenas. In moving forward, it’s so critical to focus on fine-tuning the areas of life that are under your control, and not worrying about the larger issues in life that are out of your control. These larger issues can only be brought to God, but will be dealt with much more easily on our part if we have the smaller elements of our individual lives together.

For example, when you are faced with the situation of having to deal with losing a loved one to cancer, or a friend in a car accident, these tragedies that are beyond our control as humans, will be coped with so much better if we have the smaller aspects of our life in place. If we are currently in a personal relationship with our Maker, we are then able to go through life’s heartbreaks with Him, and not on our own. Over time, by sweating the small stuff, and leaving the rest up to God, the larger manifestations of sin in this world will lose its sting.

As mentioned earlier, this is the critical part of goal-setting. To pick out achievable, specific, and layered goals is the best way to move from hopelessness to a point where you are daily breaking the habits reflected by the old self that no longer lives in you.

I once heard someone say that “each and every day, we know that our small decisions are headed for a cliff, but collectively, we don’t know how to change the course of our actions.” All too often, we know we are not living right, and that we want to make adjustments to our lifestyle, but fail to ever begin to work on ourselves because we feel the task at hand and the life we desire is simply unattainable. We put all of the changes we need to make into one basket and try to deal with them simultaneously. The idea of becoming enlightened in some miraculous fashion, and everything about you changing concurrently is an extreme rarity. The course of our actions is so much easier to change when we commit to Jesus, ask Him for His help, especially on the larger issues, and set short-term goals in order to change the daily actions that need to be mended, one at a time. Jesus wants us to seek Him daily, to go on a journey with Him. He wants all of us, everyday.

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