D.H. Lawrence said, "Sometimes snakes can't slough. They can't burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don't care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out."
I think this is a variation on Jesus' parable about the old wineskins. It's about always reinventing ourselves. Jesus reinvented himself at thirty! The carpenter became a minister. The bottom line is this: it's never too late to be who you might have been. I don't think we ever stop discovering God or discovering ourselves. And we have to keep shedding or sloughing our old skin.
For what it's worth, that's what our bodies do as well. We're in a constant state of renewal.
· Skin replaces itself once a month
· The stomach lining every five days
· The liver every six weeks
· The skeleton every three months
· Cheek cells are replaced three times a day
Within the next year, 98% of the atoms in your body will be exchanged for new ones! You literally aren’t who you used to be. Right now you’re carrying around about three kilograms of dead cells. Before you finish reading this blog, millions of cells will die. But that is a good thing because they will be replaced by new cells. The point is simple, change is evidence of life. Stagnation is evidence of death.
Luke 2:52 says, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and favor with God and with man.”
Verb tense in the Greek language is like a secret code that unlocks new levels of understanding. The word “grew” is an imperfect imperative verb. That tense is used when something is done repeatedly or continuously—a non-stop process! Jesus never stopped growing intellectually (IQ), physically (PQ), spiritually (SQ), and relationally (EQ).
Paul describes the process of renewal in II Corinthians 4:16: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
All of that is to say this: God designed us to live in the imperfect imperative! We must keep growing. Stagnation is never the will of God!
