Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Romans 5:2-5

“We believe an encounter with Jesus Christ transforms lives.” After five years of greeting this congregation each worship service with this line, today we are changing it. When properly understood it has been a great rallying call. However, sometimes people mistakenly think we are referring only to conversion. Transformation is not the same thing as conversion. Our church focuses on transformation. What is the difference? .

I must have converted to Christ a dozen times during my freshman year of college. I attended one church where an evangelist invited me to come forward and kneel at the altar. In another church I was instructed to raise my hand at my seat in order to receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior. In yet another setting the evangelist took me into a side room to teach me a “sinner’s prayer.” Roving from church services to revival meetings, I did whatever each evangelist asked me to do. I was desperate to encounter Jesus. .

The problem was that each time I prayed to convert and become a follower of Jesus I expected to wake the next morning with pure thoughts, no more sinful habits, and an entirely new life. After all, more than one evangelist had explained to me that my conversion to Christianity meant I was a new person, “the old is passed away, everything becomes new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). So why was I still struggling with the same problems?.

I wanted to believe I was new. But each time I asked Jesus to be my Lord and Savior, I soon discovered that I was still stuck in the old attitudes and sinful habits. I tried again and again to find the promised miracle of conversion. It was several months before I learned that Jesus is more interested in my transformation than my conversion. While Jesus could have included in my conversion the instant miraculous changing of my character, I learned he prefers to invite me into a lengthy process to bring about transformation of character. Transformation involves a series of steps..

More than thirty years since my prayers of conversion, I understand that Jesus wants us to participate in the process of transformation. He invites us to take an active role in transformation rather than simply being passive observers. In other words, transformation takes work on our part. To quote a popular phrase used in Twelve Step recovery groups, “It works if you work it.”

This is why we are altering the opening greeting used to begin our worship services. Listen for the change: “We believe encounters with Jesus Christ transform lives.” Did you get it? Let’s think about the ongoing miracle of transformation that requires our participation in a series of encounters with Jesus..

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Romans 5:1-5.

I thought it happened over one two-week vacation. My body was suddenly changed. I mean really changed! My center of gravity had shifted dramatically south. As a former gymnast, I had been proud of my physique through my twenties and well into my thirties. I had broad shoulders and narrow hips. Suddenly, overnight practically, my waist grew and I found I was patting this new enlarged belly like it was a long lost friend. I got home from the vacation and decided I needed to go on a crash diet. I reasoned that since I had put on the extra twenty pounds in a couple of weeks, I could take the weight off just as quickly. Not so..

I tried the fad diets. I took off seven pounds and then put five back on. I starved myself to no avail. My belly simply mocked me. “Get used to your new friend” it seemed to say. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my favorite diet counselor, my wife. Kathy smiled and explained the facts of life to me. “Bruce, you didn’t put on twenty pounds on one vacation, you’ve been gaining weight slowly over the last five years. Those late night bowls of ice cream and multiple desserts at church functions are catching up with you. What you need is a new lifestyle based on new habits appropriate for a man in midlife, not a fad diet.” The truth hurts!

Many people treat prayer and asking for miracles like a fad diet. They don’t want to change their entire lifestyle. They just want God to give them a miraculous quick fix solution. Unfortunately, quick fix answers usually don’t bring genuine transformation. God is more interested in our transformation into the people we were meant to be. So the Lord invites us to participate in the slow, systematic miracle of transformation..

Ezekiel had a vision of dry bones. God asked whether there was any hope for them. God could have simply done a miracle while Ezekiel passively watched. “Watch this Ezekiel.” Presto, the bones come back to life. But instead, God invited Ezekiel to participate in the process. “Speak to the bones.” Not until Ezekiel spoke did the transformation take place. God wanted Ezekiel to participate in the process of renewal. What Ezekiel experienced was God’s standard pattern for transformation..

Transformation involves our participation with God. Moses had to hold the staff over the waters before God separated them so the Israelites could escape Egypt on dry ground. The Israelites had to march around Jericho for six days before the walls came tumbling down. Naaman had to heed the prophet’s instructions and dip seven times in the river before his leprosy was healed. Consistently in the Bible, miracles of transformation involved participation, obedience, and persistence..

The Apostle Paul saw the pattern. He realized that the reason God wants our participation is so we can develop new attitudes and new patterns of behavior. He realized that even life’s difficulties and struggles are opportunities for transformation. A follower of Jesus learns to see troubles as a chance to develop endurance. Endurance helps develop our character. When we become people of strong character, we learn to look at everything life hands us from the perspective of hope. This is transformation!.

Here is the truth. A combination of multiple little forces can overcome any huge force. Galileo clarified this scientific truth as a law of physics. It is true not only in the realm of physics, but in our social and personal lives as well. .

Victor Hugo has a masterful description of this truth in his classic novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The priest of the huge beautiful cathedral is fearful of the growing small forces that threaten to overturn the power of the Catholic Church that had dominated France for more than a thousand years. The priest reflects on how life works. A small tooth can overcome a huge carcass one bite at a time. The small rats have greater destructive potential to humans than the powerful jaws of a crocodile. Many ants can overwhelm a grasshopper.

So what little thing is the priest most afraid of? He fears that the little pieces of paper coming from the printing presses have the potential to topple the powerful faith represented by the cathedral. Thus, the priest worries, “Alas! The small things shall bring down the great things … the book will kill the edifice (the cathedral).” .

With the Twelve Steps God has given us a series of small steps that can guide our lives in a new direction. If we want God to transform us into the person we were created to be, we must pay attention to our small daily habits. The big direction of our lives is mostly the cumulative direction of our daily habits. .

In the popular movie “Bruce Almighty” there is a powerful moment when the lead character, Bruce, asks why God doesn’t simply do miracles to solve everybody’s problems. This is one of the great dilemmas of our faith. If God is almighty and cares for us, why not use that power to make everything better?.

Bruce has been granted God’s almighty power for a few days and all he has used it for was to part the soup in his lunch bowl or manipulate a romantic evening with his girlfriend. God finally explains to Bruce the way miracles work. “Parting your soup is not a miracle, Bruce. It’s a magic trick. A single mom who’s working two jobs and still finds time to take her kid to soccer practice, that’s a miracle. A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to an education, that’s a miracle. People want me to do everything for them. But what they don’t know is they have the power. You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle.”.

I guess I first learned the miracle of transformation when I saw what God did in Merle’s life. Merle was a high school student who liked to hang out with me in the Alaskan village where I first became a minister. He was a really quiet kid. He only spoke in single syllables answering direct questions with a simple, “Yeah” or “No.” The more I got to know him the less I understood him.

Merle’s parents were both alcoholics. When Merle got a job at the school, they met him every Friday after he got paid and took his check so they could go drinking. I used to wonder why a boy would work at a job when his parents took all the money. Then I realized it was better than going home. He often hung around our house after work, playing video games. When Kathy or I tried to talk with him all he gave were his one-syllable responses to our attempts at conversion. “No.” “Yeah.” “Okay.”.

Our second year in that village Merle helped me around the church in exchange for a scholarship to summer camp. He talked no more at the camp with other high school students than he did around our house. He watched activities as a passive observer. I think he had learned at home that if you stay out of sight you avoid getting hurt. No emotions. No risks. Just survival. That was Merle’s sophomore strategy for life..

The next year Merle decided to go out for the high school wrestling team. He did well in the sport. His body filled out with youthful muscles. Then one day our neighbor, the Superintendent of Schools in that village, told me that Merle had earned his varsity letter in the sport. We both knew Merle’s parents had no intention of getting him a letter jacket. So the church took up an offering and bought the jacket. I was away the night that Merle was called forward by the superintendent to receive the gift. The superintendent explained that some friends of Merle were giving him the jacket as a gift. A few days later, when I got back, Merle came to the front door. He didn’t want to come inside. He was wearing the jacket. He just wanted to say something to me and Kathy. His words were accompanied by a smile. “Thank you.”.

Kathy and I celebrated that night. We replayed the moment over and over. Merle said two words! You could put a period at the end and call it a complete sentence!

We moved the next fall from that village to Sitka. I only saw Merle one more time. A couple years later he was walking with some friends through downtown Sitka. He was wearing his letter jacket from his high school days. He walked up to me before I recognized him. He started the conversation. He told me how he was doing. He was talking with me in complete sentences! Subjects and predicates and everything. We talked on the street for a few minutes then he returned to his friends who were waiting for him..

As Kathy and I walked away that day I realized what had happened to Merle. He was transformed—a new person. It hadn’t happened overnight. It took several years. But our friendship with Merle planted the seeds of a relationship with the Lord.

I believe encounters with Jesus Christ transform lives. I’ve seen it in Merle.