Own It: Leaving Behind a Borrowed Faith by DiMarco Hayley & DiMarco Michael

Author:DiMarco, Hayley & DiMarco, Michael [DiMarco, Hayley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Life, Spiritual Growth
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

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Owning Your Faith Will Change You

People think that God is about forgiving and getting as many people into heaven as He can. Wrong! He is about transforming people.

—James MacDonald

The transformation of a human embryo is nothing short of miraculous. As soon as a baby is conceived, he is growing, forever changing, becoming different than he was yesterday. It’s part of being alive. When you live, you grow. At the point that you stop growing, you start dying. It is impossible for a living thing to not grow. And all growth involves change. Change is the evidence of growth. A tree that is growing changes from season to season, growing leaves, shedding them, and growing them back again. Your body does the same thing. Your very cells are constantly growing and changing, regenerating and dying. The cells in your stomach change about every five days. The cells in your skin change every week. Living means changing, growing. The only person who isn’t growing is decaying, dying.

But that’s your physical life; what about the rest of you? Does your personality change like your cells? If you were born an introvert, do you stay one forever? Or is that something you can grow out of, like your baby teeth or your curly hair? The idea that you are who you are and you just have to learn to love it and others just have to learn to live with it is a popular one. A lot of people believe that whatever nature or nurture has instilled in them is what they are stuck with. So a person might be called dumb as a kid and think that’s a life sentence. Or they might be prone to anger or shyness and believe that to be as natural to them as their physical traits of height and build and just as unchangeable. But in the life of faith, that’s not the reality of the situation.

Faith signals a change, not only in your eternal destination but in your heart, your mind, and yes, even in your personality. When you own your faith, those things that used to control you lose their power. The stuff that used to scare you is uneventful. Faith—true faith—changes you from the inside out. As we read in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come.” A new creation is a changed creation. In other words, just as your cells die off and are replaced by new ones, so the old self dies off and is replaced, only not by an exact replica but by a better, more improved version of you.

This new life is one that stands in stark contrast to your old life. In your old life you were controlled by sin, addicted, losing the battle, wandering and hopeless. Any gains you made, any ground you gained, came at the expense of other ground and with other losses. And the fight never seemed to stop.

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