You are what you are, but that is not all you are or all you will ever be. You are what you are but you will become what I make you into.

A) Becoming like Jesus

Jesus Christ single life affected the life of millions of people by the end of the first century literally all over the eastern world. Within 300 years his single life had affected virtually the entire world in one way or another.

If it’s true that we are being morphed into his character,… that He is being formed in us…. Then it makes sense that our individual lives would in time be like ripples in a lake affecting many others as well.

Do the math… If you’ve been a Christian for 20 years and all that time Jesus is being formed in you it just makes sense that a few thousand people will have been changed as a result of your life.

Gallup says that 84 million Americans say that they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as their Savior….that’s almost 1/3 of the population of this country….who are the salt of the earth…

Illustration: I had a man approach me in a McDonald’s and ask how to get to the beach. I gave him directions and when I went outside I wished I hadn’t. He had a motor home with a sign on the front that said something about Fred’s traveling motor home ministry. Then written all over the sides were denouncements of certain theological views that are widely held as Biblical theology. He would spell out the view and then put = 666 , the mark of the beast. He went off to the beach to spread his weird view of evangelism and I’m sure returned home to his church in the hills of somewhere and reported that like Paul the Apostle he had had a wonderful outreach trip telling the world the good news.

I would say the man had never “morphed”…. He’s one of those 33% who claim Jesus as his Savior but the true character of Jesus has not been formed in him.

My task in these top ten sermons is to show us how to be attractively different than the world around us. What kind of disciplines in our lives will allow one to truly morph into the character of Jesus.

I’m not approaching this from the angle of,….. read your Bible and pray…. We will talk about those things but from the practical perspective of how these fit into your daily lives.

1) Hurry sickness exposed

I don’t think I’ve ever given an illustration that more people instantly related to than the one about the car and supermarket last week. I have been evaluating myself this week, and it amazes me how steeped in hurry sickness I am…. I’ve had so many of you confess this week how caught up you are in this civilized sickness. I’ve been practicing reversing the effects this week by forcing myself to stay in the slower lane of traffic and as I begin to seethe inside because the person ahead of me is allowing so much space between them and the person ahead of them or they are traveling 4 mph below the speed limit rather than the 5 mph above that God intended.

I’ve discovered that there is a growing peacefulness inside of me, I’m not getting any less done, and I often find what I always expected: the person who races around me in frustration is often sitting right beside me at the next light.

Jesus didn’t hurry... Jesus was often busy... but he never hurried.

We are so caught up in the modern philosophy that if we will just hurry we will have time to do more things. Where did we ever get so off base as to believe that doing more things would make us more like Jesus?

We must purge the idea and practice from our minds that living at a frantic pace is the pathway to success.

1) Studies show that over the long haul Type A personalities do not tend to accomplish more than everyone else.

As I look back at my life, All the years that I pastored and tried to run a business at the same time (That is at an end)…. Every ride down the road was a time to make phone calls. Every stoplight was a time to write something down or dig into a briefcase for another paper. Every conversation with somebody left 5 other pressing conversations waiting in my mind.

As I look back the times when God broke into my life in transforming revelation were not with thoughts planted into my mind between two other thoughts at a stoplight. He didn’t break into my life with truth as I scrambled between two appointments, He didn’t reveal life changing truth to me during commercials as I watched a good movie.

His still, small voice would finally, and only finally, get through when I slowed down long enough to listen. You’d think I’d learn from that… wouldn’t you?

I understand that some of your jobs force you to move quickly and constantly… it is then all the more true that you learn to include #9 in your life

1) Come away to a deserted place....alone......with God

Our American Society can be spiritually lethal, American society is filled with ideas and values, and pressures and temptations that are godless to the core and in some cases we will not even notice how distorted they are… unless there is sometime in our life where we become quiet enough for God’s truth to wash our minds and cleanse it from all of the misinformation we have been chewing on.

2) Unlike any other aspect of your life, solitude is not about doing something, your quiet time with God may be a brief piece of solitude, it may also be a time when people in the house are talking loud, the phone is ringing, and your mind is distracted by dozen of other things.

Solitude is all about… not doing something.

The words solitude, and telephone, television, cell phone, day-timer are not even in the same universe.

In solitude you come to God in the words of the old hymn: Just as I am

Doesn’t it strike you as odd, that we have all been promised that if we surround ourselves with things happiness will come running in our direction, yet when we buy everything that is supposed to bring happiness we find that in the long run, some of those very things literally suck the happiness from our lives.

Even though we have done everything we know to make our lives happy, we find that most of our hours are in two categories:

1) Getting through today

2) Waiting to really live tomorrow.

Much of our time is spent in transit. Trying to get somewhere, waiting to begin, waiting for what we were waiting to begin to end. Trying to get a task completed so we can get on with life. Worrying that something bad might just happen, or working through the anger in our mind when it does….

We are very often using great chunks of our life, literally… killing time!

These are all moments when I am not likely to be fully present, I am impatient with life, I’m not in any position to hear the voice and purpose of God.

Every time I watch my grand daughter I am amazed. The other night I was at her house and she took me into her room and showed me her little tent castle, then we went out on the porch and she showed me her table and chairs. Then she proceeded to bring each of the toys out of the house onto the porch and start up there noisemaking to which she would do a little dance.

You know what’s interesting….Every action she finds immense joy in…She does one thing joyously, then turns to the next and finds great joy in that too. Once in a while there is an un joyous occasion followed a few minutes later by another season of pure joy.

What makes a young child who hasn’t grown smart enough yet to realize that life is not supposed to be joyful,… what makes them so full of unfettered joy?

We think of Jesus as a man of sorrows and God as sorrowing over the sin in this world, but the sorrow of God is his temporary response to a fallen world.

Every second is pregnant with possibility for what is coming next.

The problem is not that we as humans are just too happy for God’s taste. We are obviously not really happy enough.

You have an infinitely joyful God who is trying to get past all the junk out world puts into our minds and fill us with true joy.

There is a being in this universe that wants you to live in sorrow, but it’s not God. The evil one is pleased with sadness and depression because he, himself lives in sadness and will for all of eternity. He wants to bring you down to his level.

Not God’s plan: