Unleash the New You

There is a verse I used to read and quietly argue with. Every time I came to it, something in me pushed back, because I could not make it match my everyday experience. It is a short verse, and it makes an enormous claim about you.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

2 Corinthians 5:17

When I first became a Christian, I knew this couldn't mean I looked different on the outside - I was the same person in the mirror. So I was told it meant I would no longer sin or even want to sin. That worked for a little while, until I noticed that the good I wanted to do, I often wasn't doing, and the very thing I didn't want to do was exactly what I kept doing.

Then it was explained to me another way. You are being changed into a new creation, the reasoning went; God wants you to be holy, so you have to start working toward it. In theory you are holy; in practice you are not, and the long road between those two is called sanctification - a lifelong project of trying to become what the verse says you already are.

Two Ways to Read One Verse

I want to set those two readings side by side, because most of us are living inside one of them without realizing it. The first says: here is who God wants you to become - now start working and walking to get there. God wants you holy, so start building fences and avoiding this and that. God wants you to prosper, so start grinding until you finally arrive.

Notice what that does to a person. It keeps you sin-conscious - always aware of the mark you've missed, always measuring the distance between where you are and where you're supposed to be. Underneath it runs a quiet message that you are not yet anything good. And it leaves the Christian looking no different from everyone else, forever chasing an identity we never quite reach.

The gospel - the good news - says almost the opposite. God went to great lengths to tell us who we already are. He does not say, "I want you to be holy." He says, "You are holy already, so stop handling things that are unholy, because they are not for holy people." He does not say, "Work yourself to the bone until you prosper." He says, "You are already provided for, so live like it: manage what you have well, be generous, and put your time toward things that matter, because that is how secure people live."

That is what I call being righteousness-conscious instead of sin-conscious. And in the end the whole thing turns out to be a matter of faith. Do you believe God, or do you believe your eyes, your ears, and your feelings? We all have faith - many of us simply place more of it in what we can see than in what God has said.

A City That Makes Church Planting Look Easy

To feel the weight of this, it helps to know where these words first landed. Paul wrote them to a church in Corinth, and Corinth was not a gentle place to start anything.

Paul had just been run out of Athens, the intellectual capital of ancient Greece, where his message about a crucified and risen Jesus made no sense to the philosophers. He didn't quit. He moved on to Corinth, the second great city - if Athens was the center of ideas, Corinth was the center of commerce. Picture the busiest, hardest-edged port city you can imagine, and you're getting close.

Corinth had a reputation for loose living, and especially for sexual immorality, much of it tied to the worship of Aphrodite, whose temple sat at the center of town. In classical Greek, "to act like a Corinthian" simply meant to live immorally. That is where Paul went to plant a church. So the next time we think starting something new in a quiet suburb is hard, it helps to remember Corinth.

No wonder Paul later admitted he had come to them in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. You can read the whole story in Acts 18. He made tents alongside a couple named Aquila and Priscilla, reasoned in the synagogue, was rejected, and kept going. Slowly the church grew - and then, one night, Jesus spoke to him: do not be afraid, keep speaking, for I am with you, because I have many people in this city.

Jesus looked at that hard, immoral, unlikely city and called the people there "my people" - before they had cleaned up a single thing.

What Paul Actually Told Them

Once the church was established, Paul wrote back to those same Corinthians and reminded them exactly what they had been.

Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Read that last line slowly. Not "you are trying to be washed" - you were washed. Not "you are working to be sanctified" - you were sanctified. Paul names the very worst of what these people had done, and then draws a line under all of it: that is what you used to be. Now you are a new creation.

This is what it means to unleash the new you. Jesus is not standing over you saying, "Now that you're a Christian, work harder, pray more, fast more, do this, don't do that." He is saying, "You are washed, you are clean, you are holy - now please live like who you already are." And it doesn't stop at holiness. Whatever good gift God has for you, the pattern is the same: it is already yours in Christ. Your job is to live from it, not toward it.

Believe What You Cannot Yet See

So why do so many of us stay stuck? Because we keep our eyes fixed on who we are not.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

2 Corinthians 3:18

Change comes from beholding - from fixing your gaze on the glory of God already at work in you - not from staring at your failures. You will never be transformed if you spend all your time focused on where you are not.

A survey by the Barna Group put numbers to how backward we have this. About three out of four Americans believe it is possible for someone to become holy, no matter their past. Roughly half say they know someone they'd call holy. But only about one in five consider themselves holy - and among born-again Christians the number barely moved, to under a third. We believe holiness is possible. We believe we've spotted it in someone else. We just cannot imagine it is true of us. That is exactly the gap the gospel closes.

So here is a simple experiment. Take one area of your life and, for a season, believe God about it instead of believing your feelings. Suppose you struggle to love difficult people. Don't pray, "God, please make me a loving person" - that keeps you weakness-conscious. Instead, thank God that his love already lives in you, and then talk, act, and pray as though it's true. You will find it was true all along, because your circumstances rarely change until you change first.

Roger, and the Family You're Already In

When I was a child, my father brought home a twelve-year-old boy named Roger, whose parents had died of a drug overdose. There was no one to care for him, so my folks decided to raise him as their own. At first it was hard for Roger to adjust. Several times a day I would hear my parents gently saying, "No, no - that's not how we behave in this family. You don't have to scream or fight or hurt people to get what you want. We expect you to show respect here."

In time, Roger began to change. Did he have to make those changes in order to become part of the family? No. He was already part of the family, by my father's grace. But did he have hard work to do because he was in the family? You bet he did. The change was real, and it cost him effort - but it was driven by gratitude for a love he had already been given, not by fear that the love might be taken away.

That is the Christian life. Do you have real work ahead of you now that God's Spirit has adopted you into his family? Certainly - but not in order to become a son or a daughter. You already are one. You make the changes because of who you already are. And every time you drift back toward the old patterns, the Spirit says the same thing my parents said to Roger: "No, no. That's not how we act in this family."

Is Any of This for You?

Maybe you're wondering whether any of this could really apply to someone like you. Let me make it simple with two questions. If you can answer yes to both, then Jesus is for you.

First: do you agree that you are not perfect - that you've made mistakes, done things you know are wrong? If you have never lied, never cheated, never had an unkind or impure thought, then you don't need Jesus. But if you're honest about your flaws, then it was precisely for you that he came. You are one of his people.

Second: do you want to be free from the consequences of those flaws - pardon, forgiveness, a second chance, a fresh start? I do. If you do too, then Jesus is for you.

Here is what God has done. Jesus was completely clean - no flaws, no sin. Picture it like this: he was cancer-free, and we were riddled with a cancer that was killing us, killing our hopes and relationships and dreams. On the cross, God took the cancer of the whole world and laid it on Jesus. Then he does something staggering - he takes the clean, living life of Jesus and puts it into you. You walk away with a fresh start, a new you.

If that is the desire of your heart, you can simply tell him so: "Lord Jesus, I admit I am flawed and broken, and I've made a mess of things. But I don't want to stay here. Take away my sin, take away what is killing me, and fill me with your life. I come to you today. In Jesus' name, amen."

If you prayed that and meant it, welcome to the family. You are not a project God is hoping to finish someday. You are already washed, already his, already new. So go and live like it. Unleash the new you.