Change

He looked across a crowded room, met her eyes and knew that somehow things would never be the same again or the joy and wonder in the eyes of parents as they lovingly admire the new family member. There are times when new relationships define our direction. Those are wonderful moments but there is a greater life moving experience we all must know. I am talking radical here; more drastic than leaving your job, car and pension to trek across the Andes; more life renovating than the changes a baby can bring into lives, turning women into mothers and husbands into fathers who have learned to exist in a blurred sleepless state!

Change is the essence of God’s gospel of Good News. Jesus did not come to make over people (hiding the bad bits with religious make-up); rather he came to transform people from the inside out.

A man, called Paul had such an experience. He was a strict Jew who considered Christians a dangerous cult and on a journey of proposed destruction for Christians Jesus met him. Paul knew that Jesus had died but had treated the resurrection talk as foolishness. Here he met with the living Jesus who changed his life forever! He became a disciple, a slave of Jesus committing his life to spreading a message that has altered the lives of countless numbers throughout the generations since.

A moment can change your life forever. You can move from being his enemy, albeit an apathetic opposer of his truth to knowing sins forgiven and having a worldview that has Christ at the centre of everything. This is the heart of the Gospel. It is not about adopting a set of morals that tell us how we live before others; it is meeting the risen Christ who forgives all our sin, all of it! Paul wrote of it like this.

I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him