You can change.. but not if you leave Jesus out of the picture.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm currently reading through the book You can change by Tim Chester.

Only thing is, a couple of chapters in, I kinda realized I'm missing this promised change. The first few chapters are a reminder of the gospel: Who God is, and what He has done through His work as Father, Son, and Spirit, and being someone who's already pretty familiar with most of this already, I merely skim read and flicked through those bits.

Then it struck me - the reason why Tim had included those bits in is because the gospel is the only thing that's going to bring about real and lasting change in my life. And the reason I was skipping all those bits was because I'd foolishly forgotten to take my heart condition in for a tune-up, and instead was heading straight to the mechanics of change.

But like Tim writes:

"The root cause of my behaviour is always, always my heart. What we see is behaviour and emotions. But lasting change is achieved only by tackling their source - the heart" (71).

 And if we don't confront our hearts with Jesus, then any behaviour we undertake in the name of change, is certain to be of a superficial nature and of temporary duration.