A Better Person

Message / Question

When you talk about responsibility to live by a moral standard - what do you say to people who says that God is meant to change us to become a better person (and that it is not up to us) - isn't that the whole point of the Holy Spirit???

Response

“Anyone in Christ is a new creature, the old has gone and the new has come”(2Cor 5:17). There’s the reality, God has done the job we are made new. However, the Bible doesn’t leave it at that. Our spirit has been transformed, made alive. However, when someone becomes a Christian, they don’t lose their memory (i.e. they still remember how to sin) and they still have the same human mind and all of the emotional and mental processes that having such a a mind entails. This is why, in Romans 12, Paul tells us to take responsibility for our thought processes and actions and be transformed by the process of renewing the mind.

This is action that we must take – certainly we cannot do it in our own strength, we need the Holy Spirit to prompt and even empower us to allow this transformation to take place. I do not believe that a Christian, at the point of conversion, suddenly has a new morality, a new personality etc, the process of renewal of the mind is a lifelong project that we take with the help of The Holy Spirit. But the speed of that process and the number of times we “relapse” into our old ways in, to major degree, in our hands. God will help us but not force us to comply. This is why Christians still fail and fall. This is why Christians still sin (gossip is a sin that’s prevalent in the church and often overlooked – but it certainly doesn’t portray the character of God!); it’s where the Christian character is formed and demonstrated, it’s where the Christians’ greatest battles are fought.