4. To help people change, we must change their beliefs first.
Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and it will set you free.” (John 8:32 NIV) Why? Because to help people change, you’ve got to help them see the lie they’re basing their behavior on. That’s why when you know the truth, it sets you free.
5. Trying to change people’s behavior without changing their belief is a waste of time.
If you ask a person to change before his mind is renewed, it won’t work. He’s got to internalize God’s Word first.
For example: Your belief patterns are in your mind. Every time you think about a belief, it creates an electrical impulse across your brain. Every time you have that thought again, it creates a deeper rut.
If you want to see change in your church, you must help people get out of their ruts and change their autopilot. For instance: Let’s say I go out and buy a speedboat with an autopilot feature on it. I set the speedboat to go north on autopilot, so the boat goes north automatically. I don’t even have my hands on the wheel. If I want to turn the boat around, I could manually grab the steering wheel and by sheer willpower and force, turn it around. I can force it to go south, but the whole time I’m under tension because I’m going against the natural inclination of the boat. Pretty soon, I get tired and let go of the steering wheel, and it automatically turns around and goes back to the way it’s programmed.
This is true in life. When people have learned something over and over, being taught by the world’s way of thinking, they’re programmed to go that way. What if a man is programmed to pick up a cigarette every time he’s under tension? But one day he thinks, “This is killing me! I’m going to get cancer.” So he grabs the steering wheel and turns it around forcibly, throws the pack away and says, “I am going to quit!”
He makes it a week without a cigarette, a week and a half, two weeks…but the whole time, he’s under tension because he hasn’t changed the programming in his mind. Eventually, he’s going to let go and pick up a cigarette again.
If you want to change people radically and permanently, you have to do it the New Testament way. You have to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Just telling people, “You need to stop smoking…You need to stop doing this…You need to stop doing that…” isn’t going to work. You’ve got to help them change their belief pattern.
6. The biblical term for “changing your mind” is “repentance.”
What do most people think of when I say the word “repent”? They think of a guy on the street corner with a sandwich sign saying, “Turn or burn. You’re going to die and fry while we go to the sky.” They think of some kook.
But the word “repentance” is a wonderful word—metanoia—which means in Greek “to change your mind.” Repentance is just changing the way we think about something by accepting the way God thinks about it. That’s all repentance is. The new words for repentance are “paradigm shift.”
Pastors, we are in the paradigm-shifting business. We are in the repentance business. We are about changing peoples’ minds at the deepest level—the level of belief and values. But let me clarify this with the next point.
