by God's Little Boy
© MakeshiftDarkroom.com 2024
Posted 5/2/24

It is said that first impressions are lasting impressions. This is too often the case, but this should not be so, especially among Christian believers. Why? Because the Christian is always a work in progress - always changing, always growing, and in an overall sense, never remaining the same. We are being changed by a force that is outside of ourselves. We are always becoming more like Christ through God’s work of sanctification. If we are being changed then we are always putting distance between what we once were and what we are becoming. We are always making upward progress in God as partakers of his divine nature. So why then should our estimations of one another be so deeply influenced by some earlier impression? Lasting impressions don't change, so they do not track and keep pace with what we are becoming. Impressions can be based upon outdated perceptions that may no longer be so. The person that you suppose someone to be may no longer exist. The Christian is different than he was yesterday, and this will be true of him tomorrow as well. We have learned, we have grown, we have moved on as seasoned people of God bearing his image more clearly than before.

Some of our greatest changes have come out of our biggest failures. It is often in coming face to face with our worst failures that we realize the deepest and most enduring change of our lives - and it is in the seeing that we are changed. We must be allowed to fail and make our mistakes without being identified with them and being made to own them for life. As Christians, we shouldn't have to make a good name for ourselves, because one has already been given to us. Let all of us be impressed instead with the great change that is wrought in us all continually.

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