Strong in the Spirit

Chapter 3
The Transformation: Trusting God

Transformation begins with the training routine. This day-after-day commitment to working hard—without seeing immediate results—starts with an assessment. The trainer takes you through a battery of conditioning exercises and evaluates your performance to discover your strengths and weaknesses. A training regimen is then developed and implemented to enhance all of your major muscle groups. Regardless of how effective the routine is or how motivational the trainer might be, the client only gets out of it what they put into it. Faithful dedication and passionate effort will result in a great transformation, but a half-hearted approach won’t see much change at all. “No pain, no gain” is not a cliché in this arena—it’s a way of life.
God desires us to become likewise spiritually transformed. He wants us to assess our current spiritual condition, trust him as our trainer, and endure the training he has developed and implemented for us. One of our problems is that we often have a wrong assessment of ourselves. Sometimes we assume that because we are good at praying for people, leading Bible studies, have great insight into the Word of God, or are gifted at winning souls to the kingdom, that we are strong believers. But at the same time we are easily beset by habitual sin, angry with God, or offended by others. We don’t see our weakness because we think we are strong.
It’s not what we do outwardly that makes us spiritually strong; it’s who we are inwardly. We are as strong as we are like Jesus. Christ forming in us is what God’s training was designed to accomplish. Spiritual strength can be summed up in one word: Jesus! He is the firstfruits, the first of many sons to come in the same image.
“To them that love God, to them that are called according to his purpose . . . to become conformed to the image of his son, that they may be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:28–29). Jesus walked in the flesh as a man and showed us how to live the Christian life. He walked in love and mercy and showed strength and character. He acted in faith before God in every situation that came his way. Our main pursuit in life should be to act godly in whatever situation or trial we find ourselves in. Our failure to do so should be a sign to us of our weakness and our need for God to strengthen us.
Jesus is not dead, but he is alive in the form of the Holy Spirit living inside us. The Bible speaks of the Trinity as three-in-one, which means that God became man and dwelt among us. Jesus is God incarnate. The Holy Spirit is the creative power of God living inside each of us who profess Christ as Lord. The indwelling Spirit of God wants expression in our lives, and the godlier we act in life’s situations, the more Jesus lives through us. The apostles were fortunate enough to have seen Jesus in person, but unfortunately we must live by faith, believing that Jesus is the Son of God. To the extent that we believe and give our lives to living by his teachings is really the amount of faith we have. So the weight we give to doing godly things in our lives is the amount of faith we have in God. If we want more faith, we just have to believe more and act upon what the Lord teaches. Of course, the only way to believe more is to trust that God’s word is true. Trusting God through the training he has developed for us is the key. Think of it like a test we have to pass to get to our destiny, and if we fail we have to keep taking it until we pass. Look at Joseph’s life.
Nothing in the Scriptures should lead anyone to believe that Joseph did anything wrong. He had an amazing prophetic dream from God himself that absolutely came true, and all Joseph did was tell his closest loved ones about the dream. His siblings and father were the ones with the problems. Joseph loved his family, and when the dream came true and Joseph revealed himself to his brothers, he embraced them and wept. When they threw him in the pit and pulled him out only to sell him to a caravan, the thought of his brothers doing that to him must have broken his heart.
Can we even begin to imagine how Joseph must have felt as he watched his brothers growing smaller and smaller in the distance until they were out of sight, fully realizing he’d been sold as a slave by his own brothers? How devastating that must have been. Joseph’s life and dreams had been shattered, but unlike most, he continued to trust God. He acted godly in whatever situation God put him in. He became a blessing to Potiphar, and after being falsely accused, he became a blessing in jail. He then became a blessing to Pharaoh and all of Egypt.
Joseph endured heart-wrenching situations, but something was going on behind the scenes in the Spirit. God had taken an obscure little man from an obscure little family and had made him second to Pharaoh. God’s route was the only path to getting there. Joseph even verbalized this when he said to his brothers, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” Joseph kept passing the tests of trusting God, and his constant faith brought him right to his destiny. Likewise, trusting God where we are right now will lead us to our destiny.
It wasn’t until Joseph saw his brothers bow down before him that he remembered the dream. Obviously, this was not Joseph’s plan for making his dream come true, but it was God’s. Many of us have dreams of what we feel God has put upon our hearts...