June 27, 2025

A New You

2 Corinthians 5:17 - 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here!

I’ll never forget some twenty-plus years ago being at an intensive training for church planters.

There was a pastor who shared his testimony of how the Lord delivered him from unspeakable atrocities as a child. His Mom was a drug-addicted prostitute and had countless men come into her home throughout his childhood. He saw and witnessed things a young child should never see - things that can scar someone for life.

Thankfully, he was removed from the home and taken into the care of a Baptist Children’s Home where he was no longer exposed to rampant drug use and explicit sex. Instead, he was exposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and nurturing, loving counselors who modeled their faith.

When he was led to Christ by one of those counselors, he remembers them sharing 2 Corinthians 5:17 after his decision to receive Christ.

When he heard that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, he took those words to heart. There was a complete transformation in his life. He graduated high school and the children’s home, went on to Bible college and later to seminary.

It was during that time that the Lord called him to plant a church. Having gone through the church planting process myself, there is an intense vetting process that prospective church planters go through. There’s background checks, personality profiles, you have to share your faith story and usually there’s intensive training. Mine was called Church Planting Boot Camp and it lived up to its name!

As this pastor was going through the vetting process to become a church planter, he breezed through the tests with flying colors.

There was only one problem. The board reviewing his application kept coming back to his testimony. How could someone who has been through all of these things be so well-adjusted? How can there not be deep-seeded scars just waiting to rise to the surface when things get tough?

So they called him to share his testimony in person before the board.

When someone on the panel asked him how he could be so unaffected by his past, he shared 2 Corinthians 5:17 with them and said, “When I learned that the Bible said that anyone in Christ is a new creation and the old is gone and the new has come, I believed it and I never looked back.”

Needless to say, he got the approval of the board and he would later go on to plant a thriving church in his hometown.

That is the power of God.

Someone today needs to be reminded of this. People often say “but you don’t know what I’ve done” when they offer reasons why they’re unworthy of Christ’s love.

But the truth is that it doesn’t matter what you did. Christ died for the most unspeakable sins you could imagine. He bore them all at the cross and overcame it all in his resurrection.

The Bible says that when we repent of our sins to Christ - which means we not only say we are sorry, but we also are turning away from those sins - he remembers our sins no more and casts them as far as the east is from the west.

Big sins, little sins, all of them. There’s nothing He can’t set us free from. Murder, addiction,  habitual lying, infidelity. You name it. God wipes the slate clean and we are a new creation.

There’s only one condition for this to take place- that we are in Christ. Only Christ can make the change in us. We can’t will it to happen or accomplish it by trying harder.

It’s a spiritual rebirth where the old self is replaced by the new. Christ and the Holy Spirit are now dwelling in you. For some, the change is radical and for some it’s more gradual, but change is the hallmark of authentic faith. You can’t encounter a risen Christ and be unchanged.

The old self is gone. The new has come. That’s not to say that you will never wrestle with old thoughts and habits, but the new creation in Christ is taking over. And it’s not to say that you won’t ever sin again. Or that your life will be easy. I stumble and fall every day. And life can be hard at times. But when I fall into old habits, I don’t want to stay there because that old life isn’t me anymore. That old suit doesn’t fit anymore.

God is calling out to you today. No more excuses. Just receive his grace today, take Him at His word and watch how He transforms your life.