Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Let Change Kill You

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Some people love change. Most people hate it. Why? Because change brings discomfort, difficulty, and uncertainty. Change is an unchanging part of life, so we all have to develop strategies for responding to it. Unfortunately, most people offer strategies that don't help you thrive in changing circumstances. They offer strategies that let change kill you. Jesus has the key to facing change in your life. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. If you told me my wife and I were going to have an argument this weekend, I would probably guess that it has something to do with change. I don't mean that change will be the exact thing we argue about. I'm just saying that probably somewhere related, somewhere down underneath the things that we're actually talking about, is that something is changing. and I'm excited about it. I'm pushing that forward, and she's not so sure that I'm making good decisions. Your marriage sounds a little bit like mine sometimes. You like change, right? I love change. I just wake up in the morning and think, what could we change today? You would be hard to be married to. I like change as well, quite a bit. In fact, I was thinking the other day since I've worked here at the crossing.

It's a funny thing to say when you've only worked at one place since you graduated, and if you're a millennial like me, that's a bit unusual to work in one place for that long. But I have changed my job about every three years or something where I just start getting itchy. I want to do the next thing. Well, in the middle of COVID, it feels like things are changing all the time, three years. I can't imagine even thinking about what we'll be doing in three years. Do you remember early on in COVID, you and I in the office? Let me be clear. We both think that COVID is a bad thing and a sad thing.

But we had to do all these crazy pivots and everything was changing. And we're sitting in the office and Keith looks at me and he goes, are you loving this? Well, I felt bad saying it because it is a serious thing for so many people. We were enjoying it. We were blessed with good health and we were kind of pumped. It wasn't that we liked COVID. It was that we loved the challenge of a pivot and change and all that happening and being forced upon us. Oh, yeah, it had nothing to do with COVID and we should go away.

Christine and I are going to have an argument this weekend. Here is what it's going to be about. What are we going to have for Thanksgiving? Because she thinks that we should have, wait for it, turkey and stuff. Why? Well, That's because what we always have. Me, I was sending our recipes for all these different ideas of things we could do, and they all got shot down.

I've been to laugh at myself because maybe I don't actually like change as much as I think. Whenever it's home stuff, I don't want to change things. Like if there's a room that's just dirty and cluttered, I don't want to change it. I'm just happy. I'm like, well, you're lazy. You don't want to clean it. That's what it's about. Yes, that is part of it.

But I'm also like, I don't need a change here. I'm perfectly happy. with this room the way the room is, why does this room need to change? Maybe you got to a bigger point there somehow. I'm not sure exactly how you got there, but we all respond to change differently because of our personalities, but we also respond differently because some change we embrace is good and some change where all of us are a little bit more resistant to it. We don't like it.

We don't want it. What's the difference there? Why is it that some changes we get pumped about and some not so much? I think that even quote unquote good changes. So you think about maybe getting a promotion at work. That would be for most people an enormous change. You might change bosses. You might change teams.

You might change where you work. And all of those changes ostensibly a good thing. You got a promotion. You moved up. Isn't that great news? But it can be a bad change in the sense that maybe it disrupts your life. You had a pattern of life that you were living in and now it feels different. Maybe it's a bad change because it feels awkward.

Like you're in this new job. You don't quite know how to do it. You feel like a gangly little middle school. and you're trying to make your way through it, trying to fake your way through it, not sure if you're actually accomplishing the things you're supposed to accomplish. And so, again, that positive change can start to feel like a negative change. And so I would even say that even in the world of changes, you've got changes that are good, bad, good and bad, all sorts of mixes.

Yeah, I was saying to a group of guys the other day, one of the things that I don't look forward to is growing older. Like, death doesn't bother me, but the process of how I get from here to there. Are you worried more about your body or your mind? I'm worried about both. Which one more? What are you trying to insinuate? I'm just curious.

I dread getting older. That's a change that I'm not looking forward to, but it's a change that's unstoppable. I mean, I am for sure going to get older than that or I'm going to be dead. I don't know which, but there's no option there to get out of it. So some change you kind of look forward to is exciting, and some changes you dread. Why do you think people long for permanence? If you stop and think about it, there's hardly, I mean, you just made the point, There's hardly anything in life that is permanent.

And we were talking before the podcast. I asked you the question, will there be change in heaven? We were both talking. We thought, well, yeah, of course there's going to be change in heaven. I mean, presumably our hair is going to grow. We might move around. We might change jobs. I mean, I would personally like to change jobs in eternity.

I don't think there's one job I want to do for the rest of time. So why is it that we want permanence when permanence probably is something that will never actually have? Yeah, and if you think about it on the other end, so we think about where we came from, not just the end of the Bible in Revelation, but the beginning of the Bible in Genesis. Did we ever have permanence? Were we going to live forever? Well, I think there's some discussion on that. I think Adam and Eve were created mortal. They would have been able to live forever after having eaten from the tree of life that got offered them. But I guess all that to say is I'm not really sure where this desire for permanence comes from because we weren't created with

permanence in mind, and we won't have a permanent set of circumstances in heaven. So where did we learned along for this sense of permanence? God's permanent. He's unchanging, right? He's immutable, but there's never been a moment in our life or in human history or human beings in general that are unchanging. So where's that come from? I really don't know. Even some of our most permanent relationships aren't going to be permanent. I mean, Jesus clearly intends that marriage would be a lifelong relationship. And then he gets questioned by the Sadducees about this. They posit this woman who has one husband, he dies, and a second, and a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and they say, hey, which of those seven husbands gets the wife in heaven? And what does Jesus say? He goes, well, in the resurrection,

people aren't going to be married, so none of the above. That's a crazy statement. If you think that you've married your forever partner, I hate to be the one who breaks it to you. You might be friends in the resurrection, but it's not going to be a forever marriage. Well, you don't even have to wait until heaven to find that marriage has changed. Christine and I've been married for 30 years and we've gone through a lot of changes in our marriage. We've changed as people. I'm sure she would say that she liked the old me in some ways better than the new me. I mean, you know, the younger you? Well, that's part of what taking vows are is I'm committing myself to you even through the changes that are going to come in our relationship. I'm committing myself to you and the seven people you become one day. Exactly right. I think

she liked the me that was less interested in eating healthy than she does that the new me that kind of is some days. I won't even get into it in the podcast, but Keith's diet is something that definitely needs to change. Okay. Now, obviously, there are some changes that are bad changes. There are changes that come out of awful tragedies. If you are a pastor or if you work in a lot of different areas, you are often surrounded by people who are going through terrible change. I think about people at our church. There's a young guy here who got diagnosed with cancer at the age of 18. Great guy has a great spirit, fights through it.

He seems to be in remission. And then it happens again right when COVID starts. And he has to go through it this time entirely alone. And I look at that, I think, I mean, the change that he's had to face in his life because of tragedy, because of hardship, because of hurt is absolutely tremendous. And that's bad change. That's changed that I don't think anybody wants. wants to experience. But let's just think about that guy who you said contracted cancer when he's 18,

has it now at about 22, been through a lot of changes that are really difficult. But as you said, he has a great spirit. He seems to be at peace. He seems to have held on to his sanity. He's poised. He's confident. He handles things with a great attitude. Now, why is that? I'd say maybe we're on to something here because everything around him is changing. His body's changing. His diagnosis is changing. The treatment plan is changing. What he can and cannot do is changing. But there are certain things in his life that aren't changing. He is still loved by God. God is still in control of his life. God is good. God is wise. God has a plan. God is up to something. So while all this crazy bad stuff is happening to him, and it's all changing every day is something new, usually probably not good, there's something about

his attitude that's built on this unchanging promise from God. I don't know how to process that exactly that while there's a lot of change like you say could go on in a job or in a marriage, there are certain things in our life that we have to build our life on that don't change. And I find it interesting that so many people who go through these kinds of tragic changes, whether it's an awful diagnosis or it's losing a child, losing a loved one, losing a job, going through a divorce. When you talk to people after the fact, they'll often say the exact same thing. They'll say, well, look, if I could go back, of course I wouldn't choose this.

Of course I wish that this thing hadn't happened. And yet, I'm thankful. I'm thankful for it because I'm thankful for the things that God did in my life, for the character that he formed, for the kind of person that he made me into, for the bad aspects of my character that he, in a sense, burned away through that change, through that hardship, through that trial. They sound like the Apostle Paul to me. I mean, Paul was a guy who was stoned, imprisoned, shipwrecked, shamed, disowned.

And yet, he said, as he's almost bragging about all these things in his letter to Corinth, 2 Corinthians, he says, for this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. He's looking at the change and the trial in his life, and he's saying, it's only, momentary. It's not going to last forever. It's kind of what you were getting at just a second ago. He looks at what's eternal, what does last forever, his relationship with God. And he says, these light things, they are transforming me and they are shaping me and they are preparing me for what lasts forever. Yeah, you're right. He says in that verse that you read, 2 Corinthians 4,

they are momentary. In other words, they will soon be gone. They are here today and gone tomorrow, much like our life. And so if we can embrace the things that don't change in our life, the truths about God and who we are and what his promises are, then that might help us deal with the changes that come on a day-to-day basis, whether they are good or bad, things we're looking forward to or not. But that's a lot different than our culture and the way it tells us to handle these changes that come. Because there seems to be a sense in which our culture says that anything that causes us to be uncomfortable or to be stressed is automatically bad. I can think of a lot of examples of people who experience some sort of mental disequilibrium

because of a change that's happened in their life. Rather than just saying, well, this is a change and it's going to be hard like a lot of changes are, they start blaming people. They say, well, this is my boss's fault. My boss is my enemy. My boss is trying to hurt me. They start dividing up the world into kind of good and evil, black and white. And this stuff is encouraged by a lot of pop psychologists, by a lot of academics, mental health experts who tell people you should trust your feelings. Whatever you feel on the inside, whatever you feel people are trying to do to you, you shouldn't question your feelings and ask, is this really a good take on reality? You should just trust them, buy in. And so if those people who are causing the change feel like your enemy,

go gossip about them, go say bad things about them, go complain about it. That's a good choice. That's going to help you process through your change and your grief and your hardship. And I'm just not so sure that's a really healthy way of dealing with things. I think when we do that, what we end up doing is we create fragile people. Some people call them snowflakes or I know you're fond of calling them jellyfish pantry. Help us understand. Why do you call people who are fragile jellyfish? I call them jellyfish people for two reasons. One, jellyfish are soft. They kind of just are moving around with the, I wish you could see me. I'm like doing a little ocean. I was like, hmm, I wish this was on YouTube.

They're just caught in the current of whatever's happening around them. But jellyfish see everything around them as an enemy. If you are swimming by a jellyfish or if you swim underneath a jellyfish, what's it do? It stings you, it attacks you. You are automatically an enemy. Jellyfish have to act that way. Why? Because they're incredibly fragile.

If they don't sting a shark or something that's coming to eat them right away, then their life ends. And that's a way that you can live in the world. You can live in a world where you're just always caught up in the current of your own emotions. You're always caught up in the current of your own frustrations and hardship over this change or that change. And whoever's causing that change will just be the latest enemy that you have to sting, that you have to attack, that you have to take on so that you can protect yourself. I don't want to be a jellyfish person. Well, maybe that explains this whole COVID thing. I mean, I know we're bouncing around from place to place, but just track with me for a second.

haven't we seen a lot of people who are angry, lashing out, frustrated, finding people to blame for COVID or the lack of response or why their kids aren't in school or politics or what have you. And maybe it's because we just hate all the change and uncertainty. That's why I really think the issue is in some ways. It's not just the change, it's the uncertainty. We don't know what's coming in COVID and all the restrictions that it's placed upon us because of health or health guidelines. or government laws or whatever has created a lot of uncertainty. We can't plan on anything. If you plan for something more than two weeks ahead, you're a fool because who knows what will be happening in two weeks. So maybe we're lashing out because we are fragile because we're the jellyfish that you

just talked about. I think this is only made worse by the fact that we are living in a moment in history where you think about most of human history, people lived in what you might want to call a two-story world. So think about a house being two-stories. In a two-story world, world, you've got Earth where the people and everyone live. And then on the second story, you've got God in this transcendent reality. And so there was always the promise that even if things weren't going right on earth, heaven would come down to make things right eventually. But now we live in a one-story world, a world where there is no God, there is no purpose, there is no meaning. And so all of these changes happening around us, rather than having a purpose in our life, maybe they will produce character and virtue,

rather than being something that might have meaning in the long term, that that suffering might produce for you an eternal weight of glory, all those changes just become absolutely random, meaningless events. And again, that puts me in a position of being a victim and in a position of being impassive. I just have to receive these things. They just come out me. They hit me. There's no purpose to it all. It's all just random chance. It's all entropy. But what if you saw the world as being controlled by a sovereign God, and you saw the change that came into your life is something that God was doing and something therefore to embrace and be excited about a new challenge, a new opportunity, a new place to represent Christ, a new area to grow in,

a new place to serve in God's kingdom, a new way to put others' interests above your own. What if you saw that God was the one who was orchestrating the change in your life and he was up to something good? Sometimes that change is good. You're excited about it. You're excited about it. you moved to a new place, you got a new house, you got a new job, you got married, you got divorced, no, just kidding, whatever. The positive changes that you... It took a second to get that, so sometimes it's good things you're looking for, and sometimes it's really hard things like we talked about with people with difficult diagnosis or whatever. But what if you saw this is all brought about by God, and therefore I'm not really the subject

of whims of people or circumstances, but God has a plan. this. He's up to something. Let me press that one step further. It's not just any God. It is precisely the God who came to earth and who suffered terrible change, not just in the form of being God and then becoming human, but then being a human who became a slave and suffered death. God went through the worst imaginable kinds of change for our sake. And yet through that suffering, Jesus produced a new creation, a new world, a new way of being human. I mean, right at the core of what it means to be a Christian is this belief that through suffering, through trial, through these tremendous and painful changes, God can produce amazing things. I think that's why the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 5,

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame. You see what he's saying there. The trials that he undergoes, those trials are all different forms of change in his life. they aren't purposeless, they aren't meaningless. Just like Jesus's suffering led to the beginning of a new reality, a new creation. Paul sees that even in his own way, he can participate in those sufferings and see that new reality come to life in his own life. So I think the key here, at least as I've just been processing this with you, Patrick, because I'm just trying to figure this out in my own head as we talk with people, is that there have to be certain things in my life that don't change

in order for me to be able to handle the things that do change. So what doesn't change in my life? Well, all these foundational, fundamental, theological, biblical, spiritual truths, who God is, who I am, my security in heaven, my security and my relationship with him, that I know that one day I will be forever with God. These are the things that don't change, that God is always for me, that he is always working for my good, that he loves me, that my sins are forgiven. Those are the things that don't change in my life. And the more I focus on those, and the more I'm solid and secure in those, the more it

frees me up to embrace whatever changes come my way because of the things that don't change, I can handle change. You're making me think of, and I've told you this illustration before, but what you do when you plant a new tree, you dig a big hole, you put the tree in the ground, the dirt on top, but if you stop there, if there's a single gust of wind, that tree is going to go flying over. It's just going to fall over. So what most people will do is put a bunch of stakes in the ground and attach them using rope or twine or wire or something to the tree to hold the tree up. And it's kind of the point you're making. The stakes are unchanging. They don't move. The tree's going to move. The tree will blow around in the wind. The tree will continue to grow, but the reason it's

able to grow safely, the reason it's able to stay upright in the middle of the wind and all the change around it is because there's something stable that it's attached to. And I think the cross really is that stake in the ground for us, this stable reality that we worship a God who loved us enough to die for us and that his love for us is absolutely unchanging. That relationship is a grounding reality that allows us to endure whatever change comes our way. I came across an article today in which people are talking about the chaos of COVID, the chaos of uncertainty of what to do on Thanksgiving because of COVID, the chaos of the election and the cultural upheaval we're all in. And they had a woman. It was a

mother, which I think is significant. We're not talking a college student. We're talking about a mother who found herself eating edibles, pot-laced brownies and things like that. She said it was helping her cope with all the uncertainty, that she was kind of felt bad about it, but then she thought this world is too much. If this can taste great and calm me down, then it's kind of a double win. And there is a way of trying to deal with change by looking to get away. I'm going to go on vacation. I'm going to get out of here or a way of escape through something like pot or alcohol or whatever. But I'm not sure those are going to provide what you're looking for because when you come back into reality from your high or when you come back from vacation, all the turmoil is still there.

There has to be a better way, a different way, a more transcendent way to handle change. So it makes me think of a woman I met several years ago. Her name was Kiola, and I got a call from her family. I didn't know them, but they said, hey, we've been going to the church for a while. Kyola has cancer, and we're kind of getting near the end, not the end, but near the end, and we'd like for you to come over to our house. that might sound like an intimidating environment for you to walk into a house of people you don't know and they want you to talk to this older woman who is dying of cancer.

But for me, it's kind of par for the course. That's what you're used to doing as a pastor. And so I walk in and I meet the most joyful woman that I may have ever met. She left that kind of impression upon me. She has cancer. She's dying from it. She's in pain. She's on meds, all the normal things that go with cancer.

but she's got so much joy. And she explains to me that the reason she has joy is because she sees her cancer as being something that God has given her. I'm like, okay, tell me more about that. She goes, well, my family was all drifting away from Christ. I prayed to God. I said, God, would you bring something, anything into our lives to wake them up and bring them back toward Jesus?

Anything you want to do with me, anything at all. It's all fair game. God, please. And she prayed that over and over and over. And then soon thereafter, she is diagnosed with cancer. And she just goes, well, this is something that God's brought in. He's answering my prayers. And wouldn't you know it?

But her family really did come back toward Jesus. And they're still falling hard after Christ today years after she died. But Kyola was able to rejoice in change, rejoice in the hardship, because she saw that God was up to something bigger. She knew what was certain and unchanging. God, his love for her, is commitment to her. He answers prayers. Her eternity was secure in him. And therefore, she could handle the change that came. She could see it as a good thing that God was using. I wonder if there aren't some clues in that story about how we might be able to handle change by focusing on the things that are unchanging. What if we thought about change more like a

refining fire? It might be hard. It might be painful. one wants to live inside of a furnace. And yet, throughout the Bible, this is a picture that we see again and again of what God does to people that he loves. He puts them through a fire. And if you don't know anything about how metal works, I don't actually know that much about how metal works. What you do, if you want to get a really purified metal, is you put it into a furnace, you heat it really, really, really hot. And the impurities, what's called dross or alloy, that rises to the surface. And a metal is just, they'll take a little scoop and they'll scoop out that dross to purify. the metal. And this is the picture that God uses for trials, for suffering, for change in our life,

that he's putting us into a furnace. And again, it's not minimizing the grief, the pain. Like Keith was just saying about Kyola, he wasn't minimizing her pain. It doesn't minimize it at all. Living in a furnace is hard. And yet, the furnace is the means by which God removes the impurities in our life. The thing that I have to accept is that when I'm going through change and bad things are coming out of my heart, anger, frustration, gossip, those aren't. things that weren't there before. They were always there. But the furnace brought those things to the surface. And I'm left with the question, well, I allow, like Paul says, this suffering to produce endurance, for that endurance to produce character, and for that character really produce hope in my life.

Only Jesus can bring that about inside of us. And the reality that he is with us and that he doesn't give up on us is the thing that we can cling to in the middle of that furnace and know that, yes, in the end, God will bring something good even out of this change. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually.

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