Often turmoil is required to bring a new lifestyle. A nice calm household can have a newborn baby, and you think, “Oh, a new life.” You started a family, but it comes with turmoil. You get that baby home, and you do not know what to do with it. Now you have to deal with diapers. You cannot just go out and play like you used to; it changes your life. Likewise, our lives are changing through the turmoil that God puts us through.

I think we are headed into more turmoil than we have ever experienced. The reason I feel that is because everything that God is and every way that He moves, thinks, feels, and expresses Himself is perceived as turmoil by the carnal mind. So we must have faith and a revelation that God is not trying to destroy us or destroy what we have prayed for. But in order for Him to give us fulfillment, we have to go through what seems like destruction and turmoil as God turns our lives upside down.

We are conformed to this world just by the way we were raised. It influences the way we think, what we eat, how we work, and even the way we worship. Everything about us has conformed to our surroundings. So it is difficult for us to relate to what Paul wrote to the church in Rome when he said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).[1] If the Lord is going to bring us into His ways and His thinking, He must turn everything upside down until it looks like turmoil because He cannot use us in our current state. Therefore, God transforms us into another form that He can use.

Malachi explains this process: “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the LORD offerings in righteousness” (Malachi 3:2–3). There is nothing in our existing state that is presentable to God. But Christ brings the transformation that makes us acceptable to the Father.

Rather than focusing on the difficulty of this transformation process, we should focus on the thoroughness of it. God wants to bring us into His presence but first He must pull us out of conformity to this age and transform us. A classic illustration of how we are conformed to this age is in our diet. What we consider food may not be food at all. But often people will not change their diet even if they are dying. They would rather die than change. We are conformed to think that things are good for us when they are absolutely our destruction; yet people do not want to hear the truth because the truth means change.

God has a way of bringing us through devastation and then giving us a double portion. That is what He is doing with us now. So I want to stop trying to get out of difficult situations and be transformed. God is in the business of making a new creation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). That is where He is taking us.

[1] All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).