Do People Change?

Do People Change?
Genesis 35:1-29

We used to meet each week for dinner with a group of friends, including a pastor or two, a therapist or two, and a missiologist or two, and one of the topics we used to come back to was transformation. Mission is concerned with it; ministry is concerned with it; therapy is concerned with it. I used to get into trouble for saying I wasn’t sure I believed in it. Admittedly, I eventually realized, part of the problem was that for me (and I think in Britspeak) “transformation” implies something much more radical than “change,” whereas the words were more similar in meaning for the others. Maybe I could believe in change. That still raises the question, In what sense do we believe people change? Coming to know Christ allegedly means a radical change in the orientation of a person’s life, but it does not in practice make people oriented to being more concerned for others than for themselves. Certainly it should surely not be expected that conversion, healing, growth toward maturity, or growth in holiness turns introverts into extraverts. What about anxious people into laid-back people? Or people attracted to the same sex into people attracted to the opposite sex? I know I am more of a people-person than I used to be, and I suspect it is at least in part somehow a result of having to live with my wife’s illness. I also know I am more mellow than I used to be, but is that just the result of growing older?...