Help God! I Want to Change — Bearing Fruit for What Jesus Paid For

Help God, I want to change: that is the prayer behind this message, and Dr. William P. Hohman gives it a sharp edge. Jesus bought you with His own blood, he teaches, so He rightly expects fruit from what He paid for. That fruit grows from three kinds of seed you sow every day: the people you keep closest, the words you speak, and the thoughts you meditate on. Pastor Hohman walks through Psalm 1, Proverbs, Romans and Philippians to show how to uproot corrupt seed and plant the Word instead. This message continues from Help God! I Want to Change, Part 7: Choosing Right Words.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries on October 10, 2021, and posted on October 13, 2021, as part of the Help God I Want to Change series. It runs about 69 minutes and ends with an invitation to receive Christ. Pastor Hohman opens with a picture everyone knows: buying something that does not work as advertised and feeling cheated.

Then he turns the picture around. Jesus, the one through whom everything was made, invested Himself into corrupted time to bring us eternal life. We are His purchase. The question is whether we are producing what He bought us to produce.

Bought at a Price: God Wants What He Paid For

Pastor Hohman begins with seed. There are seeds that corrupt your life and seeds that bless and transform it, and believers are born again of an incorruptible seed, the Word of God, which lives and abides forever (1 Peter 1:23). Jesus did not only bring us out into eternal life; He brought eternal life into us.

So he asks a gardener’s question. If you bought tomato plants in the spring and, six months later, they had not even budded and fall was coming, would you be glad you purchased them? He has the church read 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 aloud: your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, you are not your own, and you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

Some people say they have given their lives to Christ but do not want to change. Something is clearly wrong, he says. Once you have experienced a love you never knew existed, it changes you and makes you want to be different. Salvation is not an insurance policy. Jesus bought us to make us a brand new species in Christ, one with Him, and that means continually wanting to change, no matter what.

That also means being discipled. Many people think becoming a Christian means nobody can tell them anything, but Paul said, in effect, follow me as I follow Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). Just as parents are given children to train, the church is a family where believers are mentored to become the best they can be.

Help God, I Want to Change: The Heart of Worship

During worship that morning, Pastor Hohman says, the Lord reminded him of a story from a large church in England. A visiting minister told the pastor the praise and worship was fine if you wanted a concert, but the team was not honoring Jesus. They practiced to be skilled, not to be Christlike. When the pastor told the team, all of them left angry except one.

That one stayed in the sanctuary, went to the Lord, wept and asked God to forgive him. Out of that came the song “Heart of Worship,” with its confession that it is all about Jesus. Pastor Hohman says the song put the young man, Matt Redman, at the forefront and opened doors for him around the world, because he chose to humble himself and receive correction.

His summary is one of the most quotable lines in the message: “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; humility is thinking of yourself less.” This is the posture behind the prayer help God, I want to change. We are not here to ask, “What can you give me, God?” We are here to bring Him fruit and glory.

Wanting God to serve you while refusing to change, he says, is just religion; it treats God as a servant, and He is the King of glory. In a corrupted world we love getting more than we paid for. We can never give God more than He expects, so the only way forward is a change in our thinking toward His.

The Seed of Your Associations

The central passage is Psalm 1:1–3. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and whatever he does shall prosper.

Pastor Hohman reads the first verse as being about the company we keep and the way we talk. Business people understand that some people belong in your closest circle, some further out and some you know only by name. Why, he asks, do business people know that while Christians could not care less?

He confesses daily that whatever he puts his hands to prospers, but there are conditions. Everyone should have acquaintances who do not share their faith, but we are there to influence them, not to be influenced. If they will not be influenced toward something better, he says, let them go their way. “I’m here to build; I’m here to produce fruit for the Lord.”

He backs this with two verses. “Evil company corrupts good habits” (1 Corinthians 15:33), and he who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed (Proverbs 13:20). If someone sucks the life out of you every time you are together, his advice is simple: quit giving them the straw.

Associations are seeds too, and they also shape speech. You might never have talked a certain way, but spend time with certain people and you pick up the same slang and the same curses. What comes out of your mouth reveals what you have grown in your heart.

The Seed of Your Words

God made us His soil, Pastor Hohman says, so whatever is planted in us will come up. When people go through a bad time and start cursing it, their life only gets worse. Instead of saying what you have, declare what God has said about your finances, your health and your future.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (Proverbs 18:21). He remembers a Navy saying, “loose lips sink ships,” and says loose lips will sink your life too, because a real devil is listening for words that give him a way in to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10).

Words are seeds. He compares careless speech to kicking your own tomato plants and then asking why you have no tomatoes. Tithing protects what you have, he teaches, but your own words can still destroy your crop. Nobody else controls your heart. Peace, he adds, is not the absence of war but the presence of God in the middle of it.

He calls for the opposite: “The opening of my lips will be right things” (Proverbs 8:6–7). Words of faith are near you, in your mouth and in your heart, and if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:8–9). What you speak, he says, determines what you believe.

He also tells of a season when staff kept saying “what does it matter?” He gathered them and told them that if he heard it again, they were fired. Everything matters, he says: how you do things and what you say all build or tear down.

The Seed of Your Thoughts: Repent and Renew

The third seed is the thought life, and it may bear the most fruit of all. Pastor Hohman marvels at the brain God designed, with about 100 billion neurons and, by the estimate he cites, around seventy thousand thoughts a day. But our thoughts are not always God-honoring. Some thoughts grow fear and some grow faith, and when something triggers the fear you have grown, your mind races and you lose sleep.

He uses a Charlie Brown cartoon. After striking out again, Charlie Brown says he will never make the big leagues. Lucy tells him to set nearer goals, like standing close enough to the plate to hit the ball. He answers that he is afraid of being hit by the pitch. That, Pastor Hohman says, is what fear does: it keeps us from doing what we need to do to win. God made us to be the head and not the tail (Deuteronomy 28:13).

This is where repentance comes in. John the Baptist and Jesus preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). The word is often pictured as a man with a doom sign, but Pastor Hohman teaches that it means to think differently, to receive thoughts beyond your own. We have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16), and the kingdom is here now. He says the Lord put it to him this way: repent means reconstruct your thoughts to produce life, faith and goodness.

Paul says the same. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind so you can discern God’s good and perfect will (Romans 12:2). To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace (Romans 8:5–6). God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7).

Pastor Hohman admits he has lost sleep to fear. He realized he was rebuking the wrong person: he had sown the seeds himself. So he asked forgiveness and uprooted those thoughts in Jesus’ name. He has the church declare, “I am working to train my mind to be stronger than my emotions.” You can have faith for something just as easily as fear for it, he says; Job said that what he greatly feared had come upon him (Job 3:25).

Meditate Day and Night on God’s Favor

The weapons of our warfare pull down strongholds and bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4–5). Pastor Hohman gives a practical example from Psalm 30:5, which he reads as saying God’s favor lasts a lifetime. When a thought says the favor cannot last, cast it down.

Biblical meditation, he explains, is not the emptying taught in Eastern mysticism. It means filling yourself with what God said, muttering it under your breath over and over: God favors me every day. That is the promise of Joshua 1:8: meditate in the Word day and night, and then you will make your way prosperous and have good success.

He tells of a woman who bought an expensive house plant and began to think it would die. Her husband pointed out that all her other plants were thriving, but she kept agreeing with the thought until the plant shriveled. The Lord showed her that she had killed it by her thoughts. Her husband’s reply: he hoped she was thinking good thoughts about him. Gossip, Pastor Hohman warns, works the same way and brings a harvest back on the one who sows it.

Jesus said a good man brings good out of the good treasure of his heart, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). God’s plans are to prosper you and give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11), and that includes the person who cut you off in traffic.

Good seeds in the mind bear good fruit in life. So set your mind on things above (Colossians 3:1–4). That does not mean ignoring your job. It means thinking, “I have the mind of Christ on my job today.” Any dead fish floats downstream, he says, but it takes a living one to swim up and jump the dams.

Living It Out: Planting Good Seed This Week

Pastor Hohman closes with his own testimony. He gave his life to the Lord at 11, but through the people he associated with he fell into drug and alcohol addiction. Lying in a San Diego apartment gripped by fear, he says Jesus sat with him, called him by name and told him he would not die. He eventually committed his life to Christ and was changed so visibly that his wife Pam called out from 200 feet away to ask what had happened to him.

• Audit your inner circle. Ask whether the people closest to you help you bear fruit, and quit giving the straw to those who drain you.
• Speak the promise, not the problem. When you face a need in health or finances, declare what God has said about it.
• Uproot fear on purpose. When a fearful thought comes, take it captive and command it to go in Jesus’ name.
• Meditate on one verse. Mutter a promise like God’s lifelong favor over and over, day and night, following Joshua 1:8.
• Think on the right things. Use Philippians 4:8 as a filter: true, noble, just, pure, lovely, of good report.
• Stay teachable. Be discipled in a local church, and let correction shape you the way it shaped the young worship leader.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:01 Seeds that corrupt and seeds that bless
• 1:17 Jesus invested Himself; tomato plants that never bud
• 2:23 Bought at a price: 1 Corinthians 6:19–20
• 4:36 Discipled like family; a visiting minister in England
• 6:38 Heart of Worship and true humility
• 9:01 Choose your associations wisely
• 10:09 Psalm 1:1–3, the tree by the rivers
• 12:24 God made us His soil
• 15:41 “What does it matter?” Everything matters
• 22:28 Evil company and wise companions
• 23:33 Life and death in the tongue; loose lips
• 25:26 A declaration to uproot corrupt seed
• 26:51 Words of faith: Romans 10:8–9
• 29:02 The brain God designed
• 33:45 Charlie Brown and the fear of the pitch
• 35:53 What repent really means
• 40:31 Romans 12:2 and Romans 8:5–6
• 44:09 Not a spirit of fear: 2 Timothy 1:7
• 46:41 Every thought captive: 2 Corinthians 10
• 50:17 Meditation means to fill; the house plant
• 53:28 Out of the abundance of the heart
• 55:49 Think on these things: Philippians 4:8
• 59:33 Joshua 1:8 and good success
• 1:05:00 His testimony and the prayer of salvation

Help God I Want to Change Series

This message is part of a teaching series at NTC Ministries. Start from the beginning or go back to the previous message:

• First message: Help God! I Want to Change, Part 2 — Eternity in the Hearts of Men
• Previous: Help God! I Want to Change, Part 7: Choosing Right Words
• You are here: Help God! I Want to Change — Bearing Fruit for What Jesus Paid For

Frequently Asked Questions

Is bearing fruit a way of earning salvation?

No. Pastor Hohman’s point is that salvation is already a purchase Jesus made with His blood, and fruit is the natural response of someone who has experienced that love. He contrasts it with treating salvation as insurance. Changing is not working to get something God withheld; it is cooperating with what He already gave, laboring together with Him so that heaven inside you produces something others can see.

Does setting my mind on things above mean ignoring my job?

No. Pastor Hohman says you had better think about your job and redeem the time. The difference is how you think about it. Instead of worry, you think that God is prospering you there, that you will think more clearly than ever, and that you have the mind of Christ at work today. Heavenly thinking is meant to change how you do earthly work, not replace it.

What should I do if fear keeps coming back?

Pastor Hohman says to stop blaming the devil for seeds you planted yourself. Ask God’s forgiveness, uproot those thoughts in Jesus’ name, and replace them by meditating on a promise until it fills you. He adds that once you start producing good fruit, fearful thoughts will make you feel uncomfortable quickly, and that conviction is a sign you are growing.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 — bought at a price
• Psalm 1:1–3 — the tree planted by the rivers of water
• Proverbs 13:20 — walking with wise men
• Proverbs 18:21 — death and life in the tongue
• Romans 12:2 — renewing of the mind
• 2 Timothy 1:7 — not a spirit of fear
• 2 Corinthians 10:4–5 — every thought captive
• Joshua 1:8 — meditate day and night
• Philippians 4:8 — think on these things

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

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