Bookstores and web sites are full of self-help advice. Much of that advice can be quite helpful—if you want improvement. But it’s vital to make a distinction: improvement and transformation are not the same thing. Self-help can make you a better person. It cannot make you a new one. And there’s a world of difference.
Take a well-known model of transformation, for example. For a caterpillar to improve, it needs to get faster or be better at hiding from predators. But for it to transform, it needs to grow wings and become a butterfly. Improvement would leave the caterpillar as a caterpillar—albeit a good one, however caterpillars define that sort of thing. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of its existence. Transformation does.
God is into the kind of transformation that changes our nature. You may not have seen that in many Christians, particularly those who clothe their new nature in old ways because they don’t know the power available to them. But it exists. And it’s a shame to settle for improvement when real change, a new heart, a new quality of and approach to life are available.
Seek such things. The capacity for transformation was embedded in you when you believed just as surely as the capacity for transformation is embedded in the caterpillar’s DNA. Your spiritual DNA comes from God. Even if it takes a massive struggle to emerge from your cocoon, do it. This life is already within you. Step into the new, leave the old behind, and live in the transformed nature you’ve been given.
