Coping With Change, Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. He says it a little bit differently, but notice what he says, do not tremble or be dismayed.

Why is that? Because that's what happens when we undertake change. I can tremble and be dismayed. That's what we find out about change. You see, change is hard, it's destabilizing, it's discouraging to us. God says look, you can't eradicate your fear, but you can overcome your fear.

You need to be strong and you need to be courageous. This is interesting because they are struggling with this idea of change. And yet you and I would look back and say, why would they be that way? God has just told them what they should have. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt.

Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. Change is one of the most threatening things that virtually all of us face in life. Change. Change is a universal principle of the entire creation. The universe is changing, steadily changing. Everything is moving from order to disorder. Energy is consistently diminishing within the entire universe through the second law of thermodynamics.

And one day there will be no energy in the universe. It's changing. The world always changing, never stops changing. And they used to say at one time it would take a thousand years to change.

Then they started saying 500, then 100. And now they're saying that the world changes dramatically every 10 years. It's just expediting itself to more and more change, faster and faster change. People find themselves confronting change throughout their personal lives. We change jobs. We change spouses. We lose our health.

We lose loved ones through death. Change. Change is a universal principle of all created things. And now we are all experiencing change everywhere on the planet because of the same thing.

Because of the pandemic and covid-19, the whole world is changing together. The real question is not. Do things have to change?

They clearly do. The real question is this. How am I or how are you coping with change? And the reason I say that is change, dealing and coping with change is very difficult to do.

Someone said this. Change is like a forced march to a destination you would never choose. Often accompanied by disappointment.

That's a good description where we all are, isn't it? Who would have chosen this? Who would have said this is the route I want my life to go like or the whole world to go like? The Bible warns us over and over again that there's a lot of difficulty in dealing with change. I invite you to open your Bibles to the book of Joshua chapter 1. Joshua chapter 1. Great book.

But its context is interesting. Joshua chapter 1 in verse 1 says this. Now it came about after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord. What is that? Change.

That's change. Who led the people out of Egypt? Moses.

Who did the people look to to lead them? Moses. Moses is dead.

Tremendous change. Now it came about after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, that the Lord spoke to Joshua, the son of Nun. He said, Moses, servant. And he says to him, Moses, my servant is dead. Now therefore arise across this Jordan, you and all these people, to the land that I am giving to them, to the sons of Israel. Every place on which the sole of your foot treads, I have given it to you, just as I said to Moses. And then he gives the dimensions of it and for he says, from the wilderness and this Lebanon, even as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, to the land of the Hittites, which is up by Turkey. He said, and as far as the great sea toward the setting sun, that will all be your territory. He says, no man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I have been with Moses, I will be with you.

I will not fail you or forsake you. These were people of change. They had spent 400 years in slavery. 400 years.

What do you think should have been the happiest day of their lives? When it got out of Egypt, right? So what did they say when they were in the wilderness? We want to go back.

Let's go back to Egypt. They needed change. They didn't know how to cope with change.

Ten generations of slaves. And they didn't know what to do. How do we, I don't want to go back. And then they get to the verge of the promised land and you know how that went.

I don't think we can do this. And so for 40 years, they wander in the wilderness. Notice what God has said to them in these verses. I'm giving you the land. It's all yours. Now who said that? What do you think that means if God says it?

I'm giving you the land. Secondly, no man will be able to stand before you. Who said that? God. Does he know what he's talking about?

Yes. I will be with you, God. I will not fail you or forsake you. Sounds a lot like the New Testament to me. Notice, that's God's part. God has told them this.

Now, what's their part? Verse 6, be strong and courageous. He says, for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous. Be careful to do all according to the law of Moses, my servant commanded you. Do not turn from the right or the left, so that you may have success wherever you go. This book of the law will not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to do all that is written in it, and then you will make your way prosperous and then you will have success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous.

Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. Wow, what's their part? Be strong and courageous. You need to be strong and courageous. Now, up till now, how strong have they been?

Not very strong. In fact, why didn't they go into the promised land? They weren't strong and courageous.

They didn't think that way at all. They said, these are warriors, we can't go in there and do that. When he said more than that, he told them in verse 7, you better be careful. Be strong and be courageous, but be careful to do all that the law says. You better be careful.

You better do what the law says. And then he tells them, don't fear or fret. He says it a little bit differently, but notice what he says, do not tremble or be dismayed.

Why is that? That's what happens when we undertake change. I can tremble and be dismayed. That's what we find out about change. You see, change is hard. It's destabilizing. It's discouraging to us. God says, look, I can't eradicate your fear, but you can overcome your fear.

You need to be strong and you need to be courageous. This is interesting because they are struggling with this idea of change. You and I would look back and say, why would they be that way? God has just told them what they should have. Now, let's go to the New Testament for a moment, Hebrews chapter 4. The book of Hebrews chapter 4.

Same idea, completely different context. Why is the book of Hebrews even written? Because Jewish believers hated change. They didn't know how to cope with it. You see, they are Jewish believers in Jesus Christ. And so what happened when they became believers in Jesus Christ, their Jewish families disowned them. Their Jewish friends abandoned them. The Jewish culture persecuted them. And boy, they started falling to pieces. They couldn't deal with this change at all. They find it very, very difficult. That's why the whole book is written.

You see, there is a prevailing idea that they got among them. Let's not deal with the change. Let's go back. Just like let's go back to Egypt, they said, let's go back to Judaism. If we slip back into Judaism, everyone will like us again. It won't be painful. This won't be discouraging because just think about this. If you're a Jewish person, as a believer, and you're completely ostracized by the Jewish community, do you think that affected these people financially? Unbelievably so. I mean, unbelievably so. They're going through real hardship here. And so their solution was, I don't want to change.

I want to go back to where we were. So that's what he writes in chapter 4. Notice what he says in the first two verses. He says, therefore, let us fear if while a promise remains of entering his rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it. For indeed, we have had good news preached to us, just as they also. But the word they heard, it did not profit them because it was not united with faith in those who heard. And in verse 11, he says, therefore, be diligent to enter the rest so that no one of you will fall. He said, through following the same example of disobedience.

He likens the two together. He calls the promised land of the Old Testament, the faith rest life. That a Christian should be able to live the faith rest life, the life flowing with milk and honey. What Jesus called the abundant life in John 10.

That should be your life. That's what he's trying to tell them. And the whole book is about how they interact with this. How do you enter the faith rest life? Again, what's God's part?

Well, in the book, this is what you see. What the book keeps saying to you in the book of Hebrews is if you have Jesus Christ, you have everything. If you have Jesus Christ, you have everything.

There's nothing else if you have Jesus Christ that can compare to having Jesus Christ. And then the book tells you he is superior to the prophets. There is no prophet comparable to Jesus Christ. He is superior to Moses. He is superior to the angels. He is superior to the Levitical priesthood. He is superior to the law.

He is superior to everything that's Judaism. If you have Jesus, that's what they're saying. And yet they find themselves struggling. You see, what's their part? Believe it. You have to believe it.

You see, you actually have to believe this. They don't want to believe it. You see, they don't want the change. It's amazing when you think about how change works.

You hear so many people in our culture and basically hear the same thing. We don't want the change. Look, I don't want to even deal with the change.

Let's just go back to where it was and we'll just get on with it. Everything will be the same. I don't want the change. I don't want a new reality. I don't want any of that. I don't want to deal with change.

Change is inevitable. I mean, think of every aspect of your life. Who wants loved ones to die?

No one. Do loved ones die? Every day.

You see, every day. And some people don't even want to cope with that. It's funny if you study the five stages of grief.

What's the first stage of grief when someone you love dies? Denial. Why? I don't want that to be the case. You see, that's the point. We don't want that.

The same as they did in the time of Joshua, the same as they did in the book of Hebrews chapter 4. So the Bible reveals the difficulty we have with change. I want to say this, though. There is a science to change. We have lived long enough and can see there's a process here. You see, change is the outcome. Change is an outcome. The key to coping with change is the transition to change. The transition is a process.

It's different. You see, the outcome of change. Do people die? Do people lose jobs? Do people have new babies? Do people move into new jobs or move into...

Yes. Holmes Ray, who did stress tests years ago, took every change in life and gave you stress points for it. No matter what it was, if you had a change, even Christmas was stressful, vacations are stressful, all of them, and you get a certain amount of points, and it would say, that change produces enormous stress for a lot of people. Now, it was interesting that he said if you had like over 200 points, you were in deep trouble because of the amount of changes you're having to undergo. But I remember reading a Christian article on it, and the guy said he figured it out that Job had about 780 points.

Think of the changes he went through. Oh, 10 children die at once? You see, 10 children and they die at once? And then you lose all you have and your servants die? Then your wife strains your marriage, tells you to curse God and die?

Then you become unbelievably physically ill and you end up scraping with pottery, soars off of your body, and then you lose all the respect people had for you in the community and you live out on the ash heap? How many changes he had to go through? And boy, that book is tough because what made it so tough is he had to cope with that. You see, he had to cope with that, and ultimately he did, but it was a difficult process for him.

There's a book written by William Bridges. He's from the business world, and it's called Managing Transitions and Making the Most of Change. That's what he writes about. That's his expertise, managing transitions.

And here's what he says. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational, the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy, a new reality. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external. Transition is internal. And unless transition occurs, you'll never cope with change. There has to be a transition in the way you think.

He said when we talk about change, we naturally focus on the outcome that that change will produce. If you move from California to New York City, the change is crossing the country and learning your way around the Big Apple. Transition is different. The starting point for transition is not the outcome, but the ending that you will have to make to leave the old situation behind.

Situational change hinges on the new thing, but psychological transition depends on letting go of the old reality and the old identity you had before the change took place. You have to do this. The transition is I have to let go. You see, I have to let go of that reality. I have to do that.

You can just see how this would work no matter what it is. If I lose someone I love who's dear to me, I have to let go of that. No matter how I deal with it, even though I have a moment of denial, the whole truth of the matter is they're gone and they're not coming back.

That's change. I have to deal with that. If I don't deal with that, I'll never be able to cope.

And people run into that kind of thing all the time. What if you get a terrible diagnosis? You see, what if you get a terrible diagnosis?

Well, you get it. That's the reality. I have to let go. Well, no, I just want to be the way I was before I had the diagnosis.

Wanting to be the way you were before you had the diagnosis has never helped anybody because there's a change here. It's the change and how we cope with it. As I said earlier, Israel could not let go of Egypt and could not. And you and I would have thought, I don't understand that, ten generations of slaves. See, now they're in a position of the unknown. They're told they're going to a promised land. They don't know nothing about it. The Jewish Christians and Hebrews could not let go of Judaism.

They just couldn't do it. And now you hear people say the same thing. I just want things to go back to the way they were. That's what I want.

I want to go back pre all this stuff. Let's just do it and then we don't have to change. There's a reality to change. You have to be able to cope with it. Bridges goes on in his book and he says there's three stages. The first transitional stage is this, the ending. There has to be an ending in this transitional stage. In other words, you have to let go. You have to lose what was passed. I have to let it go. I'm moving to a new place. I have to let it go.

I have to. That's my first stage. The second stage is what he calls the neutral zone.

Nothing's happened yet, but once you let go, you're in a neutral zone. The third one is the new beginning of change. Now think of this from the book of Joshua.

What do they have to leave go of? Egypt. The neutral zone, the wilderness.

And then what's the change? The promised land. I mean, think of it in the book of Hebrews.

What do they have to let go of? Judaism. You see, where's the neutral zone? I'm a believer. We're part of a church. But what's the promised land?

The faith rests life. That's the process. So you may think, well, okay, I understand that, but how do I do this?

What does it take to actually do this transition and be able to cope with change? You see, that's the problem that we have so often. And what I want to do is go right back in a sense to where we started. Let's go back first to Joshua. Joshua chapter 1. You see, does God equip us to be able to cope with change? Yes.

Over and over and over and over again. In fact, a lot of what God tells us is to equip us to cope with change because we're sinful people. We live in a fallen world and change is everywhere. Life changes every day.

I can still remember one of the books that I read many, many years ago from a youth pastor and he talked about the change and he had a bunch of teenagers at a camp and he was one of those fun-loving youth pastors and they ran an obstacle course. And you ran the obstacle course and at the last part of the obstacle course there's a long vat of mud about 18 inches two feet deep and you had to dive into the vat and go under the finish line to do it. And so he ran it and then when he dove into the vat at the end, something happened and he couldn't move anything. He was conscious.

He could hear the kids laughing because he wasn't coming up. And then after a period of time, pretty long I imagine, someone jumped in and realized something is wrong and they pulled him out and he broke his neck and he's a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. The title of the book, Between the Lightning and the Thunder, everything changes. Between the lightning and the thunder, my whole life changes. That's change.

How do you cope with something like this? You see, how do you do this? You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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