You are a new creation! “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV
At the point of salvation, Christ comes to reside in you. Instead of being dead in your sins, you are made alive in Christ (Colossians 2:13). God transfers us from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13).
After salvation, you are no longer rotten. Many songs we sing give the false impression that Christians are rotten to the core and continuously sin. This is simply not the case. 1 John says that if we continuously sin, we are not saved. “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.” 1 John 3:9 NIV
At salvation, the core of our being is CHANGED and we WANT to please God. We accidentally sin because of our flesh, but we repent as soon as we discover that we have sinned.
Romans 7:15-24 describes the struggle we have with doing what we don’t want to be doing because our bodies are instinctively selfish because of built-in self preservation and wanting to pamper ourselves and have comfortable lives full of pleasure. We instinctively go after the things of the world as long as we don’t have our greatest delight in Jesus. If we delight in Christ more than anything else, it’s easy to walk by the Spirit. All you do is yield and abide. It’s not self-effort. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. That means we don’t feel the burden, if it’s light. Yielding feels fresh and full of oxygen and freedom. It feels clean and refreshing.
If you have asked God what sins you have committed and opened your heart to Him in silence and listened, He has brought them to your mind. You have repented of them. You are clean. If you have no unconfessed sin, you are holy. God commands us over and over again to be holy. “Be ye holy, even as I the Lord your God am holy,” says the book of Leviticus over and over and over. Is God asking something impossible, and then suffocating us with condemnation and make us feel that it’s impossible to please God? That is not who God is!
God is not stupid, and what He asks us to do is possible. We can walk in holiness. If we accidentally sin, we feel bad right away because our connection with Jesus is blocked. The fruit of the flesh comes out, and our actions and words are ugly. It should be so weird when that happens that it’s obvious that we got disconnected from Jesus. All we do is confess our sins and renounce them, and we are immediately restored to God.
The false doctrine of Christians continuously sinning has led to people being in chains and not overcoming. The church in the book of Romans thought they were still sinners after salvation, but Paul corrected this false doctrine by referring to believers as saints, not sinners. (Scriptures proving we are saints, not sinners: Daniel 7:21; Psalm 116:15; Acts 9:13, 26:10; Romans 1:7, 8:27, 15:31; 16:2, 16:15; 1 Corinthians 1:2, 6:1; 2 Corinthians 8:4, 9:1-2; Philippians 4:21-22; Colossians 1:12 & 26; Ephesians 5:3-4; 2 Thessalonians 1:10; 2 Peter 3:11; Revelation 13:7 & 10, 14:12, 16:6.) The old creation is gone, and the new creation (who is YOU) is from a different substance.
When Scripture says that all have sinned (Romans 3:23), it means that everyone has sinned. We were born into sin, and we were sinners (characterized by sin) before salvation. After salvation we accidentally sin, but that is not who we are any more:
“Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.” Romans 6:6-7
You are a new creation. Walk in holiness and freedom!
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My daughter and I created the artwork for this series from the course {aff} “You are a Masterpiece” by Alicia Gratehouse. If you love to do art and are discovering who you are in Christ, this is a great art course for you!
