We hear it all the time: “I am a new creation.”
Every single believer is a new creation. But what does it mean?
It means freedom.
It means that Jesus truly did die to set us free
from sin, rather than to set us free to sin.
See, He already broke the chains of sin and anything
else holding us down; but when we fail to acknowledge that He gave us the gift
of the Spirit (living inside of us
since the moment we first believed) so that we would no longer have to feed our
flesh and we would actually be able to die to ourselves, then we fail to embrace
this freedom He’s given us. We continue to walk around wearing these shackles,
weighed down and constrained, and we don’t look down to realize that the chains
we’re wearing are already severed. I bet that looks a little silly, huh? It
also looks like we’re not going to get very far, stuck in one place or stuck to
one thing. It’s crazy that we can live like this for years without even
noticing it. I was guilty of living like this for the entire first year of my
walk with Christ, and trust me, I didn’t notice it.
So often, we hear that we are born sinners, destined
to sin against our Father by our very nature; and this makes us feel like we
can or should settle for our mistakes. Like we can’t stop or help it, and that we
have grace to cover that; but we forget the ultimate grace: that Jesus had
mercy on us and paid the price of our sinning nature, taking on the wrath of
God for all of our sin so that we would not have to be a slave to it any longer.
We forget that sin has no hold on us, and it has no power over us. This does not mean our flesh will not lead
us into temptation or toward sin, it simply means that we’re strong enough
(through Him) to overcome our flesh and earthly desires because not only do we have
a Friend in the absolute highest place, but we have a Friend right inside us!
If being a new creation means freedom from sin, it
also means freedom from shame and regret, because we know and He knows that we fall short of
His glory and we are (and will be) in-process until the day we leave the earth;
but being in-process means we’re making progress and we’re no longer who we used
to be- we’re no longer instruments of wickedness. This opens the door for us to be instruments of righteousness.
It means freedom from excuses and performance because
we are no longer under the law, but we are under His grace where we obey from
our heart, not begrudgingly. When we
embrace the Spirit, our desires are changed. Our actual desires. We want to
obey our God, not to earn our way to Heaven (because we all know that we can’t,
right?), but to thank Him for everything that He’s done and doing for us. When
we embrace the Spirit, we have discernment and conviction, so excuses are void
and can only cover the truth for so long. The Spirit will show and tell us the
difference between right and wrong, and if we’re embracing the Spirit, then it
will be easier to make the right decisions and to correct the wrong ones.
It means freedom to change and freedom to be
transformed. Transformation is not immediate and I think I speak for most of us
when I say that becoming a Christian and deciding one night to follow Christ did
not mean I was a whole new person the next morning. I think I speak for most of
us when I say that being baptized and professing my faith to the world did not
mark the end of my struggle or my fight against sin. But, the second we truly
understand who God is, what grace is, what He meant when He said He made us a
new creation, and how we go about embracing the Gift He gave us (the Spirit!!),
then we can begin an entirely new chapter of being “in-process” and we can
allow the Spirit to take back the job we’ve allowed sin to steal, the job as our
master.
Being a new creation is freedom. I am a new
creation. You are a new creation. Let’s embrace freedom.
