You Can Change: God’s transforming power for our sinful behaviour and negative emotions Tim Chester IVP, Leicester, 2008. 192pp.
Picking up Tim Chester’s You Can Change, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a self-help book. It has all the trappings—a title promising transformation, testimonies of change, an invitation to choose a personal “change project”, ten chapters with titles like ‘What would you like to change?’ and questions for self-reflection. You Can Change is designed to communicate to a society obsessed with personal change, but it turns the self-help genre on its head. It quickly becomes apparent that the only change Tim Chester is interested in is transformation into the likeness of Christ. The power for change is not inner strength or willpower, but the grace of God through the death of his Son, applied by his Spirit. The method for change is not rules and programs, but faith and repentance. The context for change is not the counsellor’s office or a solitary retreat, but the community of God’s people speaking the truth in love. The goal of change is not to find yourself, but to forget yourself in love and service. The message is not so much that you can change as that God can change you. You Can Change is honestly and engagingly written. Chester is an experienced pastor familiar with the messiness of people’s lives, and he includes many reallife examples. Instead of using superficial proof texts, he prints Bible passages in full and exegetes them clearly and carefully. Chester outlines the building blocks of the Bible’s teaching on change, such as becoming who we already are in Christ and sanctification through faith not law. He doesn’t shy away from controversial issues like sinless perfection and the place of counselling, responding to these with discernment and clarity. Chester writes, “I’ve read books full of good theology and I’ve read books full of day-to-day advice. What this book tries to do is connect the truth about God with our Monday-morning struggles” (p. 13). He succeeds: his book is both theologically astute and practical. As Alison Payne puts it, this book is “like cognitive behaviour therapy driven by the gospel and the character of God”.[1. ‘Meeting Alison Payne’, EQUIP book club, 30 May 2009: http://equipbooks.blogspot.com/2009/05/meeting-alison-payne.html] Many of us have lost confidence in the sufficiency of the gospel to change persistent behaviours and negative emotions. We’ve lost the skill and sensitivity of previous generations as they applied the Bible to issues like addiction, anxiety and depression. We’ve forgotten the days when Puritan pastors like Richard Baxter cared for individuals suffering from delusion or “melancholy” (see The Reformed Pastor) and when popular preachers like D Martyn Lloyd-Jones counselled discouraged parishioners (see Spiritual Depression). In recent years, their wisdom has been recovered by the biblical counselling movement (see Jay E Adams’s The Big Umbrella, Tim Lane and Paul Tripp’s How People Change and Elyse Fitzpatrick’s Idols of the Heart). These books have clearly influenced Tim Chester, and he combines their insights with classics on holiness by authors like John Owen, JC Ryle, JI Packer and Jerry Bridges to produce an unusually readable and practical book on Christian growth. You Can Change has a tight argument. Chapters 1-3 lay the groundwork: the what, why and how of change. Tim Chester exhorts us to give up our small ambitions to be emotionally healthy or relationally secure for the greater goal of transformation into the likeness of Christ (the ‘what’). He invites us to stop trying to change in order to prove ourselves to God, others and ourselves, and instead realize that we are already acceptable to God through the cross (the ‘why’). He encourages us to put aside rules, vows and programs, and depend in faith on God’s work in us through the gospel (the ‘how’). Chapters 4-6 form the centre of the book’s argument. Chapter 4 establishes that we can’t blame emotions and behaviour on our circumstances, for they come from the heart. With our hearts, we think and believe, and with our hearts, we worship and desire. The key to change is therefore “the only two spiritual disciplines” (p. 153) —faith (turning from lies to the truth that God is great, glorious, good and gracious[2. The price of the book alone is worth this wonderful overview of transforming truths about God!]) and repentance (turning from our sinful desires and worship of idols to the God who is better and bigger than anything or anyone else). Chapters 7-9 spell out the practicalities of change, identifying obstacles that stop us changing, outlining strategies that support faith and repentance, and encouraging us to turn our ‘pious churches’ into ‘messy churches’ of honest confession and mutual encouragement. Chapter 10 invites us to a life consisting of daily warfare, slow but certain change, and hope in God’s power and grace. There are four areas in which I can see You Can Change proving invaluable: