WHAT WE MEAN BY SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
Spiritual Transformation means we are changed into a different being.
We grow to our potential, reach challenging goals, and experience real joy.
We get a transfusion of God’s character. Jesus enables that connection.
Spiritual transformation can feel like a tectonic plate shift or it may evolve and emerge from an unconscious process. It can come reading, or listening to music, in a friendship or in a relationship to nature. For some a worship service or a spiritual retreat opens space for God. God uses these experiences to connect.
The path to this transformation is faith in God whom we come to know in Jesus, God’s Anointed One. This faith is a relationship in which we accept our acceptance by God. It is God’s Love for us, just as we are, that liberates us to love God, others, and ourselves. Through the sacrificial love of Jesus, we see the depth of God’s love for humankind.
It is God’s grace in love that guides us to become new creations in which the controlling force is expressed through the transforming presence of God’s Spirit. When we become aware of a gap between what we wish for and what we are—we become open to something more.
This transformation does not eliminate pain and suffering. But the Apostle Paul, speaking from his personal experience, wrote that our present sufferings are nothing compared with what will be revealed in us. He affirmed liberation from bondage to decay in which we will be brought into a glorious freedom. J.B. Phillips’ captured Paul’s spirit in his translation of Paul’s words. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the “children” of God coming into their own.
