We Can’t Change People—and Why That’s Good News
Mez McConnel writes, in his post on the Gospel Coalition website
Replace, Don’t Just Remove
The answer lies in the heart. We know Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” We also know from Mark 7:21 that the heart is the root of all bad behavior. Verse after verse points to our hearts when tracing our sin problem. The famous Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), in his famous sermon “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” hits the target:
Seldom do any of our habits or flaws disappear by a process of extinction through reasoning or by the mere force of mental determination. Reason and willpower are not enough. But what cannot be destroyed may be dispossessed. . . . The only way to dispossess [the heart] of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.
A young man, for example, may cease to idolize pleasure, but it is only because the idol of wealth has become stronger and gotten the ascendancy, and is enabling him to discipline himself for prosperous business. Even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart if it’s drawn into another world of ideology and politics, and he is now lorded over by the love of power. But there is not one of these [identity] transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered, but . . . its desire for having some one object of absolute love is unconquerable.
It is only when admitted into the number of God’s children through the faith that is in Jesus Christ [that] the spirit of adoption is poured out upon us. It is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominate affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, in the only way that deliverance is possible.
So it isn’t enough to hold out a mirror of its imperfections to your soul. It’s not enough to lecture your conscience. Rather, you must try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of him who is greater than the world.