Good afternoon Church! I hope you are doing well. Here is a devotional based on the message on Sunday.
 
We are all drawn to transformation. We love old ugly things being restored and made new. I think of the numerous reality T.V. shows in which we see someone take an old car or maybe an old house and they restore it and make it into something new, useful, and beautiful. As humans, we all feel this deep need of transformation. We look at our own lives and we see things we do not like and know are not right. We feel completely powerless to change. Sometimes we try to cover it up with distractions or by surface level changes, but nothing really works. 
 
This last Sunday, we talked about the nature of true transformation. Paul was reminding the Galatians of what they had experienced through the “hearing of faith” (Gal. 3:2). As they looked on Christ and heard the gospel, God moved in power by His Holy Spirit, and they experienced the power of God to truly transform their lives.
 
When we think of the Holy Spirit, we sometimes think of a powerful force that is out there. However, His work is primarily inside us. He does deep heart transformation inside us. This is what Ezekiel was talking about when he prophesied, “God will give us a new spirit who will give us a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone” (Ez. 36:27). Our heart of stone, which is naturally dead to God, comes alive when the Holy Spirit breaks into our lives and gives us a heart of flesh. We no longer resist God; instead, we say with the Psalmist, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” (Ps. 40:8). This new heart leads us to want to obey God and please him in all we do. We are set free from sins which had dominion over us and which we used to love (Rom. 8:2). We are filled with a deep love of our Lord Jesus (Rom. 5:5). We are filled a confidence that we can come to God as our Father (Gal. 4:6). We receive the gifts of the Spirit and see His fruit in our lives. These are all amazing results of this amazing work God does inside us by his Spirit.
 
I found this story of Corrie Ten Boom a good illustration of the power of this heart change which God does in us by his Spirit. Corrie was holding a talk in Germany after World War II when one of the guards who had brutally mistreated her sister Betsy in the Ravensbruck concentration camp walked in. He came up to her after the talk and told Corrie that he had become a Christian and he asked her to forgive him. She felt everything inside her revolt against this. She, in her flesh, could not forgive him. But then she remembered Romans 5:5 which said, ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit’, and she remembered all the sins she had been forgiven of through God’s love. How could she now withhold forgiveness from this man? She then forgave him and experienced afresh the transforming love of Christ in her own heart.
 
When our hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit everything changes. What we in our sinful flesh cannot do, God through his Spirit can do in us. How does this happen? How can our hearts be transformed in this way by the Spirit, so that we experience the power of the Spirit? It happened to the Galatians and happened to Corrie as they looked to Christ and heard God’s word in faith. This is the only way we will experience the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. You cannot produce it through your own emotions or actions. It is when we look to Christ and hear God’s word and believe it that the Holy Spirit transforms our hearts, and we see Him move in power in our lives. This is what happened definitively when we were first saved, and it continues to happen as we live out our salvation by faith. Would that we be a people of faith this week filled with the Holy Spirit, who live lives that are daily transformed by the Spirit.
 
May God Bless you this week.
 
In Christ,
Taylor Ewert