Ephesians 2:1-3 (NKJV) 1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
In our last post, we looked at the fact that both worry and faith are a process. In Romans 4:1 Paul asks a question. “What has Abraham found?” What he found was a process whereby faith works. Faith is not a matter of God preferring one person over another. It is based upon principles that God placed in his Word so that anyone can walk in faith. We must understand is that worry is also a process. Worry does not come from nowhere and without reason. We cannot do both processes at the same time. We can either worry or apply faith.
Since the fall, worry has become a natural part of human existence. We mistake it for acting responsibly. They are not the same thing. Worry always flows from fear and fear is not from God. What we need to do is build the faith process into our minds and hearts until the response to bad news or troubling situations is no longer worry but faith. We must train ourselves to replace worry with faith.
I think it is important to understand something here. Worry is natural to the fallen human being. When Adam rebelled against God, he opened the door to fear as the controlling force in his life. That was not the case with Adam. He did not worry. It was foreign to him. He knew God and automatically believed that God would take care of him.
We cannot imagine Adam worried about the future. It is almost laughable to think of Adam worrying about his next meal. God had given him every tree in the garden except one as food. He did not need to worry about lodging or clothing for that matter. He was not afraid of the future. Fear and worry are a product of rebellion and the fall.
If we are “born again” the fall is not our state of existence. We have been redeemed from the curse of Adam’s rebellion. (Galatians 3:13) We are not heirs to fear and worry is not our natural state of being. We have been trained by everything from our culture to the media that worry is necessary and responsible. It is not.
If we have indeed accepted Jesus as the Lord of our lives Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5 that we are new creatures in Christ and that all things have become new. We are new in the sense that we were once dead and now we are alive again. One of the effects of the new creation is the change of our nature. We were by nature children of wrath. That means that certain things were natural to us before we were saved and other things are natural now.
It is natural for a Christian to walk by faith and not by fear. It is natural for a Christian to respond to trials by faith and not with worry. However, we must retrain our flesh to allow what is natural inwardly to become natural outwardly.
Let me illustrated it this way. If a wild predator is born in captivity, the natural predatory instincts are trained out of him. He may learn to be friendly with his captors. He may learn to get along with animals that should be his prey. He has been trained not to obey his nature. The non-predatory behavior looks like it has become his nature. Inwardly he is still a predator.
If this animal is released into the wild one of two things will happen to him. He will let his true nature come to the forefront or he will die. He cannot exist in his natural habitat without being a predator. Most animals naturally revert to their nature. It is how God made them. They have always been predators, they just did not know it and they did not know how to be what they were by nature.
Where a Christian is concerned this illustration changes a bit but the principle remains. At the fall of man, his nature changed. He became a child of wrath. One of the natural characteristics he inherited is the tendency to fear and worry. One of the things that became unnatural to him is was the process of faith and trust in God. It is similar to what happens to the predator in captivity but much deeper. Man did not learn to be something else he became something else.
When we are born again, we are changed at the deepest level or our being. We change from a child of wrath to a child of God. Our inner man is restored to its original nature. However, everything around us is geared to the fallen nature. We were trained as children according to the fallen nature. Even Christian parents cannot avoid letting the fallen culture influence their parenting. Beyond that, media, peers and school all train us according to the fallen nature.
We trained from birth in things such as worry and fear but we are also trained that faith is a nice thing but not really practical. We must take care of ourselves if we are going to survive. If we are going to trust in anything else to take care of us, it must be things we can see such as science or the government. We might learn to trust in friends, family, education or job but we are taught that faith in God is not a practical way to live.
Man was not created with a fallen nature. He was never supposed to be a child of wrath. God designed him with a nature that naturally trusts in God. It was natural for Adam to walk by faith and not by sight. It would have made no sense to him to trust in what he could see when he knew the invisible God created all he could see.
Once you and I are born again, we become the predator in captivity. It is in our nature to trust God. The process of faith is our natural response to trouble. However, that nature has been trained out of us. When we worry it feels right. When we trust in what we cannot see it feels wrong. We must learn to allow the inward nature, the new creation, to dominate our thinking and our acting. Paul calls it renewing the mind.
Romans 12:1-2 (NKJV) 1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Notice Paul uses the term “reasonable service.” It is reasonable for us to trust God and work the process of faith. It does not feel that way because our minds have been trained by fallen society to think that something else is reasonable. We must “renew” or retrain our minds so that they get back to thinking as the creator intended.
I think the choice of the word “renew” is significant. Sometimes we think this scripture is saying we must learn to think in a strange way. It is not. It is saying we need to learn to think the way we were created to think. We need to learn to think according to the nature God always meant for us to have.
Why is this important? I believe we need to realize that the process of faith is our natural response to trials. Worry is a product of the fall. It seems reasonable and for a fallen person it is reasonable. If you are a Christian it is not reasonable to worry. It is reasonable to apply faith in the God who created all we can see. We just need to put in the time and effort to train ourselves to allow our real nature to regain the dominance it was created to have.
Leave a Reply