God is Sneaky

This is more of a ‘have you ever felt like this’ article rather than a BIG QUESTION I am struggling with though I do feel that it could start off some interesting stuff about how God affects our lives/influences us in a real way…

So, enough ‘prep’ and here is the real thing.

Has anyone ever found that God has sneakily changed your mind about stuff when you didn’t even want to change your mind?

I have

Especially about those really fun things that _good christians_ aren’t meant to do – like getting drunk, snogging random (inappropriate?) people, smoking… need I go on?

I have

Let me give you an example: at age 17 – very definitely a committed christian – I regularly went out and got really drunk with all my friends (one other of whom was a christian). The way I saw it was – I was ‘being real’ with them and being’one of them’ but really, I was just doing what I wanted to do and having lots of fun. (This did not stop me having a relationship with God where I was striving to do what He wanted etc) This may have led to lots of unfortunate things (or not) but this is not my point….

My point is that, at some point around 18/19ish, God managed to convince me that maybe this might be something I should at least look at. And the weird thing was – I didn’t resent him for making me think like this – I actually agreed.

What I’m getting at is – God somehow changed the way that I thought about the whole thing so convincingly that I actually believed him… I had always thought that if ‘God stopped me having fun’ I would put up with it, but not necessarily agree.

(Please note at this point that some of this particular change was also due to growing up a bit but let’s leave that as another aside…)

So – what do you think? Not about getting drunk etc but about how God influences us and how he moulds us to be more like him.

How do we know what is HIM and what is socialisation/growing up/suppressing ourselves/christian culture?????