Focus: Change Is Possible

Text: Jer.13:23.

"Can the Ethiopian CHANGE his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are ACCUSTOMED to do evil."

We live in a changing world. A world in which nothing remains the same. Indeed change is the stuff of life.

But Jeremiah, from our text, is posing a question which suggests that change, morally speaking, is hard to come by. We find it morally hard or even impossible to change from bad to good. And Jeremiah tells us why it is so. He says that we are "accustomed to do evil." The Hebrew word for 'accustomed' means 'tutored, learned, discipled, instructed, used to.' Doing good is like attempting the impossible for those of us accustomed, tutored or learned in evil. By nature we have all been schooled, discipled, and instructed in evil. We are so used to living in a particular way that changing to another is like upsetting and disrupting our system, and we don't like it. We are creatures of habit. We are naturally patterned to living in a certain way.

How then do we begin to move away from what we are used to? How do we change from doing evil to doing good?

Psychology says it takes 21 days to break a habit. But that's just to break it; then next is to begin forming a new one. And what a process!

Hear me: you can change, and you will change. Isaiah tells us that "the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing" (Isa.10:27). Yes, even the yoke of habit patterns! The yoke of bad behavior. The Spirit of God in us makes change possible, but we must yield ourselves. We must show willingness to doing better and rising above the gravitational pulls of the flesh. You can break free. The Holy Spirit makes change possible. Christ is both a yoke breaker and a yoke maker. 

Welcome change; don't resist it! Amen.

by Bishop Moses E. Peter