CONTENTS
Introduction: Selfless Help
Day 1: Seeking AHA
Day 2: Where Are You?
Day 3: A Tale of Two Fathers
Day 4: Wake Up
Day 5: Right Word at the Right Time
Day 6: Words of a Friend
Day 7: Erasing Famines
Day 8: Getting What We Deserve
Day 9: Redeeming the Pain
Day 10: Escaping the Country of the Blind
Day 11: Let Go of Regret
Day 12: In Plain Sight
Day 13: Seek the Silence
Day 14: Willing to Listen
Day 15: Honest with Myself
Day 16: Honesty That Brings Healing
Day 17: Turn Off Denial
Day 18: One Step at a Time
Day 19: Tricks We Use
Day 20: Confession Is the Cure
Day 21: Blame Game
Day 22: The Usual Suspects
Day 23: It Is a Big Deal
Day 24: Excuses, Excuses
Day 25: This Time It Is a Big Deal
Day 26: Settling the Bill
Day 27: Time to Get Up
Day 28: Change or Die
Day 29: Changing Your Story
Day 30: Getting Past Passivity
Day 31: Obey Anyway
Day 32: Pick Up Your Sword
Day 33: Little Guy, Big Change
Day 34: Killing Time
Day 35: Not Too Late
Day 36: Come Home
Day 37: Older Bro
Day 38: You May Be an Older Brother If …
Day 39: All about the Father
Day 40: More to the Story
Notes
Extras
40 DAYS TO LASTING CHANGE
Published by David C Cook
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Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com; MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group; NCV are taken from the New Century Version®. Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved; NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved; NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. TLB are taken from the The Living Bible, © 1971, Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60189. Used by permission.
LCCN 2014948794
ISBN 978-0-7814-1268-1
eISBN 978-1-4347-0900-4
© 2015 Kyle Idleman
Published in association with the literary agency of The
Gates Group, www.the-gates-group.com.
The Team: Alex Field, Amy Konyndyk, Helen Macdonald, Karen Athen
Cover Design: Nick Lee
Cover Photo: Shutterstock
First Edition 2015
KYLE IDLEMAN is the teaching pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, the fourth-largest church in America. Author of the bestselling books Not a Fan and AHA, he speaks regularly at conferences and events around the world. He and his wife, DesiRae, have four children.
Visit DCCeBooks.com for more great reads.
Introduction
Selfless Help
If you’re looking for a self-help book, you can put this one down. Bookstores and libraries are filled with them—including some hilarious titles and topics—but this is not one.
AHA is not a self-help process. It’s an “I can’t help myself” process.
The goal of 40 Days to Lasting Change: An AHA Challenge is not to find ways to change ourselves—it’s to seek and encounter God in ways that allow Him to change us. Instead of self-help, we are asking for God’s help. We are declaring that we are helpless. We are inviting God to do what we can’t do on our own.
AHA is a spiritual experience that brings about supernatural change. More specifically, AHA is “a sudden recognition that leads to an honest moment that brings lasting change.” With striking consistency, AHA always has three ingredients:
1. A Sudden Awakening
2. Brutal Honesty
3. Immediate Action
If any one of these ingredients is missing, it short-circuits the transformation process
If there is an awakening and honesty, but no action, then AHA doesn’t happen.
If there is awakening and action, but honesty is overlooked, AHA will be short-lived.
But when God’s Word and the Holy Spirit bring these three things together in your life, you will experience AHA—a God-given moment that changes everything.
Your AHA Journey
This book is about humbly seeking God and opening your heart to His Word and His Spirit. It’s about making yourself available to discover how God wants to use Awakening, Honesty, and Action to bring about growth and spiritual transformation in your life. It’s about living in the Father’s house. It’s about interacting with God, walking and talking with Him, and learning to recognize His voice and His ways in our lives. It’s about our lifelong journey of awakening to His guidance, living openly and honestly before Him, and taking action as He guides us. And it’s about our transformation, initial and ongoing, as our Father shapes us into the image of His Son through His extravagant love and grace.
Our forty-day journey together centers on the parable of the prodigal son. It’s my favorite AHA story. With this one short parable, Jesus revealed so much about our heavenly Father. It’s almost impossible to read this story without finding yourself in it. My prayer is that it will be impossible not to find yourself and encounter God in a transformative way. Let’s begin your story with the story Jesus told in Luke 15:11–32:
There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them.
Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.” So he got up and went to his father.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
The son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
But the father said to his servants, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” So they began to celebrate.
Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. “Your brother has come,” he replied, “and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.”
The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!”
“My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
Day 1
Seeking AHA
Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.
Psalm 119:18
I love witnessing AHA. I see it almost every weekend at the church where I serve. I listen to people as they tell about the spiritual awakening they have experienced. In that moment there was a beautiful collision. At just the right time, a person’s life collides with God’s Word and the power of the Holy Spirit, and everything changes.
When Jesus taught about this spiritual transformation, He would most often tell stories. AHA can’t fully be explained. There is a sense in which it has to be experienced to be understood. So it’s through stories that AHA is best captured. Thankfully, as a pastor, I get to hear a lot of them, especially after writing the book AHA. Here are a few that people have shared with me.
Celina wrote,
After seven years of infertility and my final round of fertility drugs in 1996, I stopped by the prayer room at Southeast Christian Church. As I prayed I asked God to take away my desire to become a mother if He did not want me to become pregnant. It was at that moment I sensed God speak to my heart, You don’t need to become pregnant to be a mother, Celina. AHA. Two weeks later, Aaron and I were chosen by a teenage mother to adopt her beautiful baby girl. We welcomed our daughter Hannah home four weeks later. God is so faithful!
Courtney told me how she turned to compulsive eating to cope with life. Stress at work, at home, in relationships meant more desserts and bingeing. Despite trying every self-help diet and exercise fad, she reached 325 pounds. This seemingly unstoppable weight gain put her at a point of dark depression, which only worsened her eating. Finally Courtney realized something: food was never going to fill the emptiness in her heart. At church she heard a message from John 6 in which Jesus described Himself as the “Bread of Life.” She suddenly realized that she had been trying to make food do for her what only Jesus could do. That was four years and 170 pounds ago. But the outward change was really just a by-product of the inner transformation she experienced when she started looking to Jesus to fill the emptiness of her heart.
AHA.
Ashley’s husband was not a Christian. Jim had no interest in church; he didn’t think it had anything to offer him. Ashley hoped and prayed he would change his mind and heart. As the years passed, the couple had children. Eventually the children became Christians, and mother and kids prayed that God would open Daddy’s heart. But the children grew, and Daddy didn’t budge. Ashley wondered why God wasn’t answering their prayers. Then after twenty-two years of marriage, she began to see a change in her husband’s heart. It was amazing to watch as Jim read his Bible and hungered to learn about God. Then Ashley and her two teens held hands and watched with tears in their eyes as Jim was baptized. What a powerful testimony to two teenagers to witness the answered prayers in the heart of their dad. “All those years I thought God was moving too slow,” Ashley said. “God’s timing—not mine.”
AHA.
Maybe you’ve prayed for someone and kept praying and kept praying and thought, What’s the point? Nothing’s going to change. And then God breaks through.
Michael wrote, “My big AHA happened when God showed me my obsession with myself. ‘Christian’ was more of a title than a lifestyle for me, but God has been helping me take the focus off me and put it on Him, where it belongs.”
This is the kind of AHA many of us need to experience. We need to be reminded and understand that we are not the center of our faith; we are not the main character in the Bible; church doesn’t primarily exist for us; all of this life is for God’s glory and God’s kingdom and His purposes. This is the AHA of realizing that the focus of the parable of the prodigal son is really on the Father, that the key to “Jesus loves me” is really Jesus.
Kevin’s life had been an ongoing struggle with alcoholism. The numerous self-help programs helped for a season, but he was never really on the wagon long enough to fall off. Even when Kevin thought he’d finally hit rock bottom, he managed to fall even further. One day he was listening to a sermon about the Bible passage where Paul said, “Do not get drunk on wine … Instead, be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18). Immediately, this truth from God’s Word opened Kevin’s eyes. He had been looking to alcohol to do for him what the Holy Spirit was meant to do: give him comfort, security, boldness, courage, strength, direction, and hope.
AHA.
Open Our Eyes
What is God trying to tell you?
I don’t think it’s an accident that you’ve picked up this book and come across the AHA message. God wants to speak to us. He is trying to get our attention and wake us up so we can have AHA.
We need an awakening. We need honesty. We need action. And we can begin with seeking and praying for AHA. AHA is an ongoing process of recognizing, returning, and relating to our heavenly Father.
Living the AHA journey is living in expectation.
My AHA
Pray the AHA prayer of David from Psalm 119:18. Memorize it. Write it down.
Pray it regularly as you read and work through this book. The Message says it well: “Open my eyes so I can see what you show me of your miracle-wonders.”
Day 2
Where Are You?
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
Genesis 3:9
Have you ever been lost or disoriented in a mall or maybe an amusement park? You may have known where you were trying to go, but unless you knew where you were starting from, it was impossible to figure out how to get there. When you walked up to the giant map, the first thing you looked for was not your future destination but your current location. Your eyes scanned the map looking for that familiar “You Are Here” symbol.
AHA begins with recognizing your current location. In one area or another, all of us are in the Distant Country. The Distant Country can be defined as any area of our lives where we have walked away from God. It may be that every part of you is living in the Distant Country, or it may just be a specific area of your life where you’ve left out God. You’ve posted No Trespassing signs around the perimeter and made it clear that God is not welcome.
How we ended up where we are isn’t always clear. There are many reasons why we leave the Father for the Distant Country, but the Bible says that all of us will find ourselves there at some point. Isaiah 59 explains that sin is what separates us from God. And Romans 3 tells us that all of us have sinned. Sin is the vehicle that every one of us has taken to the Distant Country.
In fact, sin—in whatever form we choose it—is universal and has been since the beginning. Way back in the beginning, Adam and Eve found themselves in the Distant Country. You know the story, but here’s an abbreviated overview:
God: You can eat anything in the garden except the fruit on that one tree.
Serpent: Did God really say that? What He really meant was you’d know everything. Mmmm, look at this yummy, delicious, juicy fruit.
Eve: Sooooo shiny—I want it!
Adam: Sure, babe, I’ll take a bite.
A & E: Ah! We’re naked!
Adam: Come on! I know where we can hide!
It wasn’t that Adam and Eve decided to set out for the Distant Country. It was one decision. One line crossed. One turn away from God’s directions, and the couple was running and hiding out in the Distant Country, overcome with shame, trying to avoid God.
They were in the Distant Country, and the big, red “You Are Here” arrow showed up in the garden of Eden.
Only the Beginning
We don’t usually think of Adam and Eve’s story as a happy one. It’s certainly marked with serious loss, regret, and pain. But don’t miss the beauty and hope too. You see, Adam and Eve’s sin wasn’t the end of the story. Neither was their attempt to escape to the Distant Country—or even the dire consequences that they had to face. Those were only the beginning—for Adam and Eve and for all the rest of us. Their fall, and our fall, was the “You Are Here” that was the starting point of their journey.
God didn’t abandon Adam and Eve. The most beautiful moment in their story is represented by a short, three-word question: “Where are you?” It can be easy to overlook, but it says everything.
God didn’t say, “I know what you did, so you can forget seeing Me again” or “That’s it! Forget it. It’s all over for you two and the rest of humanity.”
Instead, God said, “Where are you?” God came looking for Adam and Eve. He knew they’d headed into the Distant Country to try to avoid Him. He knew that everything had changed. He knew that His Creation had been broken.
But God came after Adam and Eve. It was the beginning of God coming after you and me and every person who would ever exist on this earth. It was the beginning of His redemption story. It was the beginning of His repair. It was the go point of the plan that would cost His Son’s life to restore us. But still He came seeking Adam and Eve and us. God extended love across the chasm of guilt and shame that surrounded the Distant Country. And He never stopped.
“Where are you?” God still asks us today. It’s a rhetorical question from Him. But it’s an invitation filled with longing. It’s a plea filled with all the love and expectation and acceptance of the Prodigal Son’s Father. It’s an open invitation to return home.
It’s the beginning of our AHA, the awakening that will point us back home.
My AHA
I am here.
Pause and identify areas of your life that could be described as Distant Country. Take a moment and give a specific location for this general description. Write down the areas of your life where God is not welcome. If you’re feeling artistically inclined, draw the “No Trespassing” signs you have posted for God around your “You Are Here” marker.
List your Distant Country here: