Last night I sat in a coffee shop and asked the question, “how do people change?” I only asked a few people how they thought people would change, and they all had different responses. I’m sure that if I continued to ask this question, I would continue to get an array of answers. And to be honest, I think I have adjusted and will continue to adjust my response to that question as I grow into a counselor. I used to think that it was easy for people to change. I always treated change as something that was simply a choice. If a person really wanted to change he could just stop abusing drugs, withhold his violent anger from his four-year-old daughter, or quit watching porn online till five in the morning. One thing I have learned is that change is a lot deeper than how someone stops doing one thing and then begins acting differently. I think before we change, we must also uncover the layer beneath the surface of how people get into trouble in the first place. With that said, I will try to explain where I stand currently on the questions of “how do people get into trouble?” and follow it with “how do people change?”.

How do people get into trouble?

When it comes to trying to understand how people get into trouble, the answer is complex. However, instead of trying to cover all of the different facets of what causes problems, I want to suggest an over arching theme of the problems: broken relationships in broken community. RTS’s counseling program has the motto “its relationships that get us into trouble, and it is in relationships that we are healed”. Not to steal from RTS, even though I am sold on their vision, but relationships really do cause problems. However, it is not just relationships that cause problems, its brokenness within those relationships that are expressed in a broken community.

I used to think that I wasn’t sinful. I also used to think that I could keep myself from sinning, or if for some reason I did fall into sin, I could pay for it myself. Looking back at the point in my life where I actually believed that I wasn’t sinful, I see now that my belief that I wasn’t sinful was actually sin in itself. I think that the reason why we say “relationships are what get you into trouble” is because very sinful people develop relationships. The honest truth is that we have broken every commandment that God gave us. Even if we haven’t sinned externally, we have sinned in our hearts. Not only have we all sinned, but we have also all been sinned against. If you have ever been prideful (which you have), if you have ever lusted (which you have), if you have ever hated someone (which you have), if you have ever judged someone (which you have), you have sinned against someone else. If you have sinned against someone else, you have also been sinned against. We have abused other people and other people have abused us.

We live in broken communities, because we live with broken people (including ourselves). The reason why we can’t stop abusing drugs, abusing our children, or abusing ourselves with pornography is because we live in a fallen world and are depraved. Like Adam and Eve, we long for the apple and do not long for God. While we desire to do change, we more so desire to not change. Paul feels the weight of this battle between flesh and the spirit when he cries out in Romans “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep doing (Romans 7:18-20).” We “get into trouble” because sin is all that we know. The reason why sin is what gets us into trouble in the context of communities, such as friends or family, is the way that we deal with our sin within those communities.

I think that a broken community has a few key faults: an absence of freedom, grace, and unconditional love. Broken community is restrictive and closed off. I say “absence of freedom” because problems arise within communities when there is no freedom to talk openly about sin, when there is no one in your life that you can be real with. A closed community is one that doesn’t speak to feelings and essentially does not deal with sin. I think that the saddest problems the majority of families face (even Christian families) is that we do not speak to the struggles of the individuals within community. We are afraid of knowing and speaking to other’s sins, and we are terrified of having our own sin exposed and spoken to. We are ambivalent in that we long and desire to be known, but we also long and desire to not be known.

A broken community also has an absence of grace. When sin does come to the surface of the table, it is handled without grace and is seen as a bloodstain on a community t-shirt. A classic example of this is the teenage daughter who “stains” the family by having premarital sex and getting pregnant. Instead of approaching their pregnant daughter with grace, mom and dad approach her sin with condemnation and bring guilt upon the sinner. This absence of grace has flooded our broken communities of friends, our broken families, and unfortunately, even our more than broken churches. Does a sinner need to repent? Yes. But behind the sin is a deeper longing, and this deeper longing (such as intimacy, or relationship) should be handled with grace.
Lastly, a broken community does not love unconditionally. Unconditional or selfless love is done in action along side of freedom and grace. If we are open about sin with each other and are given grace despite our sinfulness, love will become the centerpiece of the community. The problem in broken communities is that everyone is approaching community to receive love, not to give it. If everyone is only at the table to receive love, who is there to provide it? To sum up, a broken community is depravity without redemption.

How do people change?

If problems arise because of faulty community, then change should take place in good community. If bad community is the absence of freedom, grace, and selfless love, then good community encompasses three counter points: a community that exposes sin, shows undeserving grace, and loves selflessly. This morning, I had coffee with Michael, a friend I have come to know and love since I moved to Orlando. Michael and I spent two hours talking about our sin and struggles that we have faced over the past couple of months. By the end of the conversation I felt like our community with each other had moved forward. Good community is about having someone to be real and honest with. Good community is one where people truly know the heart of the other person, even if it is full of sin. While we shouldn’t always talk about negative things in community, I would rather a friend struggling with depression come to me and talk about his depression, rather than smile through the pain. One of my favorite quotes from class this semester has been “Jesus Christ did not die on the cross so that we could pretend to be ‘happy’.” We have the freedom to talk about sin openly and we were created to do this. Good community receives that sin with grace.

My roommate, Josh, told me that grace is “undeserved favor”. When an exposed sinner is received with favor, instead of condemnation, something deep in their hearts should take place. I think of the ex-convict, Jean Valjean, in Les Misérables, who changed his ways after stealing from the Bishop Myriel, after Myriel showed him undeserving favor by not turning him in to the police: “It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!” Instead of condemning Jean Valjean and seeing his “stains”, Myriel looks at him with compassions, which in time would expose the deeper longings of his heart.

Lastly, good community is about people caring for each other more than themselves. Selfless love clothes freedom and grace. Unless there is love, there is no grace and there is freedom, for they cannot act apart from love. In counseling, I would refer to this as rapport, or a built relationship. Apart from a relationship full of selfless love, another person will not have the freedom to remove the layers of fog covering his sin. Finally, the “favor” in “undeserved favor” is love, and love is what enables someone to show grace.

How does this integrate with Scripture?

I have learned a lot about myself in the counseling program. One thing that I have learned is that I experience God the most in community. I think this is the way He has made me, as well as the way that He is. What I have tried to do in paragraphs above is give you an outside view of what a good community looks like. While I believe that good community is possible and that change should (but doesn’t always) take place in those communities, I think that the only perfect example of community is found in the Godhead, or the Trinity. The Trinity is God Himself pouring into Himself. The trinity is perfect and the only community that fully exposes the sins of the world, shows undeserving grace, and loves selflessly through the perfect and powerful death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The cross was not a quick fix to sin. If anything the cross is the perfect example of change happening after intense suffering, not only physically, but also spiritually. On the cross, God revealed his selfless love by graciously transferring all of our sin on to His righteous Son, while transferring all of His righteousness to us, undeserving sinners. Christ bore the complete weight of our sins, and thus was completely exposed and completely died. As we all know, the story doesn’t end there and three days later Christ rose from the dead changing the way God deals with sin. The point I am trying to make is that suffering (on the cross) and redemption (His resurrection), through this perfect community, brought about change. I think that change happens in the context of redeemed communities and redeemed relationships, particularly with God and His children. These relationships (or communities) are marked with freedom, with grace, and with love.

Advertisement