It’s easy for us to look from a place of comfort here and criticise them for giving up and becoming disobedient to God. But that road from dream to reality is often a tough one. Implementing change in our situations isn’t easy. How many times have we started to implement change in our lives and become discouraged and defeated? How many times have we made decisions and then gone back on them?

There are many areas in which we may want to see change in our lives. We may want to want to be fitter. Maybe we want to lose weight, maybe some of us want to put on weight. Maybe we want to clear our debts or to live lives that are more closely connected with God. Maybe we want to see more of God’s power manifest in and through our lives.

Perhaps we’ve tried to implement change in these areas before but have failed. Perhaps we got discouraged. Perhaps the harder we tried the further we seem to get from our goal. Maybe we just found that it was all too difficult and gave up.

We want to enter into the Promised Land, not just wander around in the wilderness for years, feeling discouraged and defeated. Here are three keys to implementing change in our lives.

Desire

Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” He knew what he was about. He knew what he deeply desired to see and he worked towards making that dream a reality. If we are going to see things change in our situations, there needs to be a desire to change. So firstly, we need a desire or dream.

If we want to see things change we need to know what we want. What do we want to see? What’s our dream? What’s your dream for your personal life? What’s your dream for your family, your friends? What do you deeply desire? I believe that we need to get a picture of the future that we want to create, and to keep it in the forefront of our minds.

What’s your dream? What’s your desire? It doesn’t have to be as grand and noble as Martin Luther King’s. What personal goals do we want to see fulfilled? Maybe it’s to clear those debts. We need to feed that desire, that dream, that passion. We need to put fuel on that fire to keep it burning, so that staying where we are is not an option. What is it that’s going to feed that desire. Perhaps you want to get fitter so that you can play 90 minutes of football. To feed that desire, all you need to do is to play for 15 minutes and start weezing… that’s pretty motivating.

Bill Hybels feeds his desire to see a church that is growing and winning the lost by visiting smaller churches that are just starting out in their vision. What’s going to feed your desire? How are you going to keep it burning in your heart? If you don’t do it, no one will.

Maybe you need to write down some of those desires. Maybe do something visual. Maybe set some goals. Maybe draw a chart. Do something to feed that desire.

Decision

Secondly we need to make a decision to change. What’s the decision we’re making? Write it down, make it clear. We need to make it hard for ourselves to go back on the decision. So, tell somebody about it… a decision shared is a decision doubled.

Discipline

Thirdly, we need discipline to go from dream to reality. Discipline is the ongoing battle in implementing change, and we need to stick with it until we see the changes that we deeply desire. We need to remind ourselves that there will be a season of sowing before we reap. There’s often a delay before we begin to see changes beginning to happen, but if we stick with it we will reap the harvest. Just as the researcher experienced, if we stick with it we?ll see the changes that we deeply desire.

Somethings that will help us to keep on in our disciplines:

• Tell someone about the decision that you’re making.

• Ask them to keep you accountable. Ask them to ask you how it’s going. Maybe even ask them to make the same commitment so that you can support and encourage one another.

• Create a “stop doing” list. There may be behaviour patterns or thought processes that get in the way of us achieving the desires. Write them down, and maybe even write down how you will change those patterns.

• Ask for advice. Often we can struggle with problems on our own, when just a word of guidance and encouragement from someone can save us from weeks of frustration.

Conclusion

God has placed great potential within us. We don’t want to get to the end of our lives and have people say he or she “had great potential”, but we want them to say we “fulfilled our potential”.

We need to press through the challenges of living in the wilderness, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, and fueling our desires, so that we enter the Promised Land.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” (Hebrews 12:1-4)