40 Days To Lasting Change By Kyle IdlemanSample

“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 honest, 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.

When Jesus taught about this spiritual transformation, He would most often tell stories. AHA can’t full 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. Here is one from a lady named Celina.

“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!”

*Pray the AHA prayer of David from Psalm 119:18. Write it down. Memorize it.