Worship Your Way Out

How do you get rid of a bad habit or sinful patter in your life? Certainly not by willing it away, or just fighting it directly, From much personal experience, I can assure you that does not work! Sin must be "expulsed" by a higher affection.

"The Puritan preacher Thomas Chalmers, in his sermon the Expulsive Power of a New Affection, said that desires for God and desire for sin cannot coexist in the human heart. They are two opposing 'affections' - one will push out the other. So, he said, "the only way to disposses [the heart] of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one. (See Gal. 5:16-17) You can't just 'stop it,' because the it is always more than behavior. It is always rooted in your affections, in what you love - what you worship. Chalmers points the way forward: we worshiped our way into this mess and, by God's grace, we'll worship our way out."

                     -Mike Wilkerson, Redemption, Page 38

We get in by false worship; we get out by true worship. I like it!

Already Part of New Order

"..when the Bible says you are a new creation, it means that you have already been made part of that whole new order of things. Jesus is the first of the new creation, and in him you too are a new creation (see 2 Cor. 5:17; cf. 1 Cor. 15:23). In Christ, we are transformed.  Idolators, thieves, liars, sexual perverts, addicts, abusers, and victims - all of us already get new names, new identities, and new hearts with new desires (see 1 Cor. 6:9-11). Already, he is healing our wounds, covering our shame, and freeing us from the bondage to sin and temptation."

Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry, page 36

Basic Human Wiring

"..to be human is to worship. We reflect God's glory by our worship of him, which means to hold him as the object of our deepest desires and as worth of our imitation. Worship is not just singing songs in church; it's how we live our lives every moment of every day - every thought, word, deed, feeling, and desire. You worship what you live for, whatever is most worthy of you attention and devotion. It is what drives you at the core, and it flows from the essence of who you are. You can't turn off worship. It's your basic human wiring. To not worship is to not live."

Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry, page 29

The Ground for Inherent Dignity

 "..you have great dignity as a human being, not primarily because of your own goodness but because you are made of the kind of stuff that is capable of making God's much greater goodness visible to others. This is the bedrock upon which the enduring dignity of every person is established - no matter how sinful, abused, impaired, or oppressed. Male and female from the womb, every race - we are all created in his image and likeness."

 Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry, page 29

Rewrite!

Truth!

"Rather than trying to write God into our stories, we would be wiser to sit patiently with our Father and let him tell us his. We would surely find ourselves in his story and learn that we are not defined by our hurts or our sins, as we may have believed.  As he tells us his story, we must be willing to let go of the stories we've told to make sense of our lives. We must let his story rewrite ours and sweep us up into something much greater than ourselves."

 Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry, page 27