Healing our character

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. (2 Peter 1:5-7)

Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus displaying the power of God by instantaneously healing various people: a paralyzed man in Mark 2, the ten lepers in Luke 17, and a blind man in John 9 are just three examples. But you never see Jesus heal someone’s character defects in an instant. There are no records of Jesus healing someone of their impatience, or casting out their ungodly anger, or replacing their gluttony with self-control. For whatever reason, God has designed our sanctification to be a much more deliberate process as, over time, the Holy Spirit partners with our faith and obedience to decrease our propensity to sin and to form us into the image of His Son.

The truth is that as much as we seek God for physical healing – which is right to do – we often seek Him with less fervency when it comes to our sinful tendencies. Our prayer wall in the weekly Pulse of NewLife is more likely to have pleas for physical healing, relational reconciliation, or provision of work than it is to have a request for God’s help overcoming laziness, or an unforgiving heart, or a lack of love for one’s neighbor. But even if God doesn’t answer those kind of prayers in an instant, we are still utterly dependent upon His spiritual help to transform our character.

As we prepared for the 21 days of prayer and fasting that began on January 5th, I spent time seeking the Lord for what it was He wanted to do in my life. I tried to reflect upon what are the foundational character issues that get in the way of trusting and obeying God. The more I prayed, the more I became convinced that I needed to ask God to help me address what the Bible calls “the fear of man.” Nowadays, you might hear that concept called people-pleasing, or peer pressure, or even codependency. But whatever you might call it, the impact on my life is clear: it causes me to want to hide from what scares me, to avoid difficult people or conversations, or to instinctively give in to what others want out of a fear of ridicule or rejection. I am praying that God would help me to see this tendency when it manifests, and to choose to trust Him instead and to walk in a healthy fear of the Lord. To paraphrase John the Baptist in John 3:30, “He must increase and I - AND OTHERS - must decrease.”

What character defect would you like to see Him change in 2025? What are those foundational struggles that extend like tendrils into multiple areas of your life, making it hard to trust God and obey Him? And to whom can you confess this issue to, asking for prayer and accountability as you seek the Lord this year?