The only way you know that you are growing in your Christian life is that you are changing.

Dr. Tony Evans says the Lord is uninterested and you only looking good.

God's goal is not external reformation. His goal is spiritual transformation.

This is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans. Author, speaker, senior pastor of Oakcliffe Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas.

And president of the Urban Alternative.

Spiritual transformation begins when God brings us into a new relationship with the Lord.

Today, Dr. Evans explores how the Holy Spirit works to align our character and conduct with the image of Christ.

He'll be referring to the third chapter of 2 Corinthians shortly. Let's join him now as he begins.

You and I, when we were born, picked up from our parents, not only our skin tone and type and racial identity and hair texture and the other things that are part of the physical DNA, but they also transfer it to us as a sin nature.

A nature that is prone to rebel against the standard of God. It's built in.

And it is known as indwelling sin. It is inside your human nature that has transferred it to your damaged soul that manifested self by the activity of our bodies.

So your body does what your soul says your souls does what your human spirit has allowed and since the human spirit at birth is affected and infected by the virus of indwelling sin, the soul becomes distorted and the body winds up doing stuff is not supposed to do.

The question is how do we address this infection that we all have?

Now, most of the time we try to manage it. We try to keep it from fully expressing itself. We try to do external reforming of it.

But then most of us just try to hide it. We try to camouflage it with the way we look, the money we have, the car we drive, the place we live in, we try to hide the fact that we have been infected.

But the infection just keeps showing up. It shows up an angle we can't control. Language that we shouldn't be using that spurts out all the time.

Addictions that take over that we keep hidden in secret.

Everyone who's under the sound of my voice, me, you and us are living with a distorted soul. If you ever been to one of those carnivals that have mirrors that distort you, they make you real tall and skinny or real fat or real, you know, reconfigured.

You may think you're okay, but your soul has been distorted. And it comes up with all kind of configurations that damage our lives, the infection that has infected every single person on planet Earth, although it is expressed to different levels of degrees.

To different levels of intensity. But that we all possess it is the predisposition built in to every person to do wrong and to rebel against the standard of God.

Now I have to say something to you to begin this.

Verse 18 says three words. I don't want you to miss. He says, but we all. But we all. So whatever I'm getting ready to say you are not an exception to.

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