Daily Devotional
Transformation...Not Substitution

April 12, 2017

God is building His saints with spiritual steel so that we will have rock-solid faith in the storms of life. You see, God is going to put you in the fire of affliction to test you.

Why go to all this trouble? Why not just make us “instant saints”?

Because God wants to build character into our lives. To remove difficulty or pain from our lives is to skip the process it takes to build character. God is in the transformation business.

God did not take away evil. God transforms it. God didn’t stop the crucifixion. He gave us Easter. You see, God’s method is not the method of substitution. Most of us want God to give us health instead of sickness; wealth instead of poverty; friendship rather than loneliness.

We just want God to substitute things, but God is not in the substitution business. God is in the transformation business.

Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, when the Holy Spirit gives us new birth in Christ, we become a new creature to the glory of God.