This post is Part 5 of 12 of Awakening to Authentic Community
We are either re-forming or de-forming. We are either conforming to the world or being transformed into Christ’s likeness. There is no neutral status. We are either blindly conforming to the kingdom of darkness or we are growing in clarity of the kingdom of God. Now, I know that these statements are offensive to many and even many within the church today. One of the key values of our individualistic American culture is the idea of the self-made, self-directed man or woman. But Jesus is clear in His Word that we are either for Him or against Him. There is no neutral stance. Many people are just not in tune with the spiritual re-formation or spiritual de-formation of their souls. They just are “going through life – on a ride.” The devil and the world purpose to fragment God’s creation and fragment the soul and heart of people. But God’s purpose through Jesus Christ is to rescue and re-form our soul and heart. His desire and purpose is to make us a new creation by re-forming our whole “being” by the power of the Holy Spirit. We were all created in the “image of God.” But after Adam and Eve rebelled against God that “image” was de-formed and captivated by our selfish soul the flesh and helpless to truly re-form without God intervening. The Gospel is God’s amazing intervening grace to re-form us into His image. But let me add, Jesus did not come to just re-form us back into the state of Adam and Eve before the “Fall”, but He came to make us a whole new creation with eternal life. This is critical to understand. Because of Christ’s sacrifice for us we can have security in Christ never fearing to “Fall” again unlike Adam and Eve. We have the hope that Jesus is re-forming us from glory to glory for all eternity. We are most alive when we are in the process of allowing the Spirit to re-form us. We need to constantly heed Romans 12:1-2 and make sure that it is the Word of God which is reforming us and not culture. That said we need to be always thinking about the Word in light of our cultural context. For all the great reformers it was biblical truth which re-formed them out of a cultural Christianity that had drifted from historic Christianity. It was not some new insight into the Word that had not been held to by historic Christians. If we are not engaged in this kind of re-forming we will fall into traditionalism and dead faith. However, if we are led more by cultural situations and start to be conformed to them than we run the risk of being conformed to culture rather than transformed by the Word through the Holy Spirit. So, re-forming is when the Word through the Holy Spirit transforms us so as to bring new life to our soul and to our unique cultural situation.
Now, this re-forming work that Jesus is doing within us through the Holy Spirit cannot happen in isolation from the community of believers – the Church. Many believers today come to Jesus for salvation but they remain with an individualized and Americanized view of re-formation. They feel they can re-form without being re-formed into the Body of Christ. Jesus re-forms us individually as we are re-formed into the community of believers – His Church. How aware are you of your soul’s re-formation or de-formation? Are you in the process of re-forming into the Body of Christ or trying to do it alone?
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