Why would you like to change

Think about it for a moment.
Why do you want to be more like Jesus? Why do you want to keep a lid on your temper or overcome lust or stop living in a fantasy world? Why do you want to feel less depressed or bitter or frustrated? Why do you want to be a better parent, a better husband, a better wife, a better employee?

1. I would like to change to prove myself to God.‏
You may want to change so God will be impressed with you or bless you in some way or save you.

Many people think that good people go to heaven—so if you want to go to heaven, then you need to be good. We might think of heaven as a fancy nightclub with a bouncer at the door. The bouncer
lets in only smartly dressed people. Anyone in jeans is turned away. So we have to smarten ourselves up to get into heaven. Or you may think you’ll be accepted on the last day because of
God’s grace. But you still want to impress God so he’ll bless you in the meantime. “I’ve tried living God’s way,” one woman told me, "but He's still hasn't given me a husband" She wanted to impress God so He'd give her what she wanted.

The instinct to self-atone runs deep in our hearts. We want to make amends for our sin on our own. But God has done it all through Christ because of his grace, his undeserved love to us. Grace is so simple to understand and yet so hard to grasp. It’s not its complexity that makes it difficult. The problem is that we seem to be hard-wired to think we must do something to make God favorably disposed toward us. We want to take the credit. But all the time God is saying,
“In my love I gave my Son for you. He’s done everything needed to secure my blessing. I love you as you are, and I accept you in him.” God can’t love you more than he does now, no matter how much you change your life. And God won’t love you less than he does now, no matter what a mess you make of your life. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

2.I would like to change to prove myself to other people‏

This is often the reason I want to change: I want people to be impressed by me. We may want to fit in or win approval. We certainly don’t want people finding out what we’re like inside. We wear a mask to hide our real selves. Wearing the mask can be a great strain; it’s like acting a role all the time. But we dare not let people see us as we really are.

One of the problems with trying to prove ourselves to other people is that they set the standard. Their standards may be ungodly, but we adopt their behavior to fit in. Or their standards may be godly, but we’re living in obedience to people rather than in obedience to God. Often what happens is that we settle for living like other people even when that falls short of living like Jesus. Or we measure ourselves against other people and decide we’re more righteous. We may point the finger at others’ faults so we can feel better about ourselves.

Instead we should be comparing ourselves to Jesus, finding we fall a long way short of God’s standards and discovering that we desperately need a Savior.

3.I would like to change to prove myself to myself‏
Another common reason why we want to change is so we can feel good about ourselves. When we mess up, we feel the shame of our sin. So we want to put things right. We want to think ourselves as
a "former user of porn" rather than a "porn addict" We want to say, “I used to have a problem with anger” rather than “I have a problem with anger.” So when we mess up, our primary concern
is that we can’t think of ourselves as “a former sinner.” We can’t feel good about ourselves until we’ve put some distance between ourselves and our last “big sin.” For us, sin has become first and foremost sin against ourselves. If I sin, then I’ve let myself down. What I feel when I sin is the offense against me and my self-esteem, not the offense against God.

Justified by Grace
What's wrong with wanting to change so we can prove ourselves to God or people or ourselves? It doesn't work. We might fool other people for a while. We might even fool ourselves. But we can never change enough to impress God. And here's the reason: trying to impress God, others, or ourselves puts us at the center of our change project. It makes change all about my looking good. It is done for my glory. And that's pretty much the definition of sin. Sin is living for my glory instead of God's. Sin is living life my way, for me, instead of living life God's way, for God. Often that means rejected God as Lord and wanting to be our own lord, but i can also involve rejecting God as Savior and wanting to be our own savior. Pharisees do good works and repent of bad works. But gospel repentance includes repenting of good works done for wrong reasons. We need to repent of trying to be our own savior.

Excerpt: You can change - Tim Chester