CHANGING ONESELF
Trusting God’s Transformative Power
I recently read a fascinating account of who “we are” and how the traits passed down through our families can influence our personalities and behaviours.
Gilkey makes an interesting observation about the different traits we may inherit from those who came before us.
Behind each of us stand six immediate ancestors—two parents and four grandparents—all with different personalities and traits. From them, we may inherit a curious mixture of traits, some of which may even contradict each other.
For example, a father's sense of responsibility and a mother's tendency to avoid responsibility might both be present in us. We may inherit one grandfather's hot temper and another's tendency to be easily hurt. One grandmother may have been kind and good, while the other was quite the opposite. These very different traits can all find their way into the same person.
What we inherit may influence not only who we become but also what we are naturally inclined towards—anger, fear, irritability, anxiety, or any number of other tendencies.
This is part of the background of all of us: traits and tendencies passed down from those who came before us, which we did not choose.
And so we sometimes explain our behaviour by saying, “This is who I am.”
We are often encouraged to be our “authentic selves” or to “be true to yourself.” Yet many still struggle with the version of themselves they know. What if there are parts of ourselves we don't particularly want to remain true to?
Self-help books attempt to break these patterns of behaviour. Countless step-by-step plans promise to help us become our best selves and break free from attitudes and behaviours that may have followed us for years.
And certainly, we can make choices about how we behave. We can learn better habits and intentionally work on ourselves. But the changes we make are not always permanent. Old behaviours can return. The same temper, fear, reaction, or habit we thought we had overcome may surface again.
But God's plan goes deeper.
In the Bible, we encounter God's ability to change a person.
Scripture says that Jesus is able to “save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him” (Hebrews 7:25 KJV).
To the uttermost.
The Greek word translated here carries the sense of completely, fully, and to the end. Jesus saves completely—from the forgiveness of sin, to the transformation of our lives,
to the promise of eternal life.
Throughout Scripture, we also encounter God's extraordinary ability to transform people—changing what they are and even what they are capable of doing.
Consider Saul.
After Samuel anointed Saul, he told him, “the Spirit of the LORD will come upon thee,” and “thou shalt be turned into another man” (1 Samuel 10:6 KJV).
And this happened exactly as Samuel said it would. As Saul turned to leave Samuel, “God gave him another heart” (1 Samuel 10:9 KJV), and when he later met the company of prophets, “the Spirit of God came upon him, and he prophesied among them” (1 Samuel 10:10 KJV).
The transformation was so remarkable that the people who knew Saul asked, “What is this that is come unto the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?” (1 Samuel 10:11 KJV). The change was so unexpected that “Is Saul also among the prophets?” became a proverb among the people.
How did this happen? Scripture tells us: “God gave him another heart” (1 Samuel 10:9 KJV), and “the Spirit of God came upon him” (1 Samuel 10:10 KJV).
That is God's transformative power at work—the power to change an ordinary person into someone markedly different.
Saul's later choices would take his life in another direction, but that does not change what God demonstrated at the beginning of his story: God could change a man.
And Saul's experience is not the only example.
Think of Jacob. His story gives us an interesting picture of how behaviours can appear and reappear within a family.
Jacob was a schemer, but when you meet his mother, you begin to understand why. His mother, Rebekah, devised the elaborate plan by which he deceived his father Isaac and obtained the blessing intended for Esau. After overhearing Isaac's conversation with Esau, she prepared the food, dressed Jacob in Esau's clothes, and put goatskins on his hands and neck to imitate Esau's hairy skin.
Then you meet Laban, Rebekah's brother, and you see generational patterns of deception in action. After Jacob worked seven years to marry Rachel, Laban substituted Leah in her place. He later changed Jacob's wages repeatedly.
And the pattern continued into another generation. Rachel, Laban's daughter, stole her father's household gods and hid them from him (Genesis 31:19, 34–35).
And what about Jacob himself? Did he stop manoeuvring? No. After deceiving Isaac and obtaining Esau's blessing, Jacob fled from home. Years later, when he finally decided to leave Laban, he again did so secretly, without telling him. Scripture says, “Jacob stole away unawares to Laban the Syrian, in that he told him not that he fled” (Genesis 31:20 KJV).
Look at this family: Rebekah and Laban were brother and sister. Jacob was Rebekah's son. Rachel was Laban's daughter. Across generations, we see a recurring pattern of scheming, withholding information, manoeuvring situations, and getting their way.
But the man we meet at the beginning of Jacob's story is not quite the man we see at the end. He desperately needed change—a change from the man he had been.
Then came his encounter with the angel. Jacob wrestled through the night and held on, saying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Genesis 32:26 KJV).
God worked on Jacob over time, even marking that change with a new name: “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel” (Genesis 32:28 KJV).
Here was a man surrounded by—and participating in—a family pattern that had repeated itself across generations. Yet that pattern did not have to determine who he would ultimately become.
What can't God do? God could change a man.
God's transformative power can even change what we are ordinarily capable of doing. When “the hand of the LORD was on Elijah,” he ran ahead of Ahab's chariot all the way to Jezreel (1 Kings 18:46 KJV). God's power upon him made something ordinarily impossible possible.
And when Samson prayed, “O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me” (Judges 16:28 KJV), God gave him extraordinary strength to bring down the pillars of the Philistine temple.
The transformative power of God is not restricted to the Old Testament. Consider Paul in the New Testament. He persecuted Christians and tried to destroy the early Church.
Then he encountered Jesus. The transformation was so remarkable that people said, “He which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed” (Galatians 1:23 KJV). This story demonstrates that God's transformative power upon a person can mute their history, overcome their predispositions, and redirect the course of their life—if they welcome it.
What can't God do?
What does this mean for us?
We might think these stories are only in the Bible, but God's transformative power is still true today. We can bring Him all the attitudes and behaviours we are not proud of—or those we naturally default to because of our heritage. Nothing is too small or too big for God to change.
The Bible comforts us when we have doubts about whether our behaviour can truly change: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV).
With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can truly become the people we long to be, leaving behind those things we are not happy about in ourselves.
We may wish to be gentler, kinder, more patient, less irritable, less anxious, less easily offended, slower to anger, more forgiving, more disciplined, less controlling, or more courageous.
Whatever the change we desire, we do not have to attempt it on our own; we can trust God's transformative power to work in us.
What excites me about this truth is that God can also transform our family members who struggle with behaviours or patterns that are not godly.
We can claim God's transformative power for them, praying for the Holy Spirit to work change in their lives.
As we saw with Saul, God can give our loved ones a new heart—one that loves God. Ezekiel confirms this. God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26 NIV).
This is one of God's promises of transformation: He can change those undesirable behaviours and attitudes—even those that may have been passed down through generations.
We may not see changes immediately in our loved ones, but we can continue to act in faith, treating them with God's kind of love and seeing beyond who they are today to the person we are trusting God to help them become. We can keep believing that He who promised is faithful and that God is able to transform anyone.
For ourselves, we must not neglect meditating on God's Word, which allows our minds to be continually renewed. Scripture tells us, “be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2 KJV).
As God's Word works in us from the inside out, it helps us recognize old patterns, change the way we think, and confront even those predispositions from our family history that we may not yet be aware of.
As You Go About Your Day
Reflect on all we have considered today.
Is there a part of yourself—or someone you love—that you have begun to accept as “just the way I am” or “just the way they are”?
This could be something inherited, a long-standing behaviour, or simply something that has seemed impossible to change.
Can you bring it to God today and trust Him to transform it?
May the Lord who started a transformative work in us bring it to completion in Jesus' name.
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