A Word in Season: Created New in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17)

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There's a delightful sense of wonder in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 17.

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Paul is talking about the radical change that takes place in someone who now belongs to Jesus Christ, and the way that that changes not just them but even the very way that we are to view them.

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He says that if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, behold all things have become new.

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There's a absolute declaration and then there's a couple of sentences or phrases of explanation.

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If someone is in Christ, if anyone is in Christ, anybody who has now been joined to him by faith, they are a new creation.

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There is a radical change in them. It's a change that begins in the inside and works throughout the whole of our humanity.

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It is a truly fresh start. It is an entirely new beginning.

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The same power by which a world was called into being at the beginning is now at work in every believer so that there is in them this entirely new beginning.

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What that means for the Christian is that the old things have passed away.

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They are gone and they are gone for good. The old way of life, the old appetites and attitudes, the expectations and desires, the miseries and the dreadful gloom that lies ahead at the grave, these things are all swept away once and for all.

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There is no longer any part of them in the life, in the experience, in the expectation of the believer.

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We're not saying that there's no struggle with remaining sin, but the entire way of life, the whole pattern of existence has been once and for all put away.

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And then there's that note of wonder. Behold, look at this. I wonder if there's something there of that sustained sense of the amazing grace of God that was in the

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Apostle Paul who remembers what it was like when he, breathing out threats and violence against the disciples, was confronted by the risen

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Christ on the Damascus Road. Here is a man who knows in a distinct way what it is to be a new creation.

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For him to say the old has gone and has gone for good means that he must say with an air of wonder and humility.

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Behold, the new has come. The new has come. All things have become new.

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And the sense there is almost of a continual renewing. Life now floods into those who belong to Jesus Christ and they are being continually transformed.

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There is no part of their redeemed humanity that is accepted from this wonderful work of grace.

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Everything that they used to think, everything that they used to want, all their affections and appetites, all their attitudes and expectations, all is entirely transformed.

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There's a wonder here that we do well to go on considering.

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Perhaps we've lost our sense of what it really means for somebody to be converted. Perhaps we don't understand what we should about the radical nature of this shift that takes place.

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For example, maybe we still have too low an expectation or we're too accustomed to people who say that they've become

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Christians but there's no corresponding change in their life. But when somebody is in Christ, that one is a new creation and we should expect that, we should demand that, we should celebrate that, we should support that, we should anticipate that the old pattern of life should once and for all be swept entirely away.

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That there will be a radical break with the whole direction of life and that the person who's now in Christ is transformed and being transformed.

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That that new reality, that life in the soul, is now going to work its way out insistently and consistently through every part of the existence, through every room in the house, if you will, so that the whole building of your life is renovated under the new ownership of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So let us pray for such a change, let us anticipate such a change, let us pursue such a change and cultivate it and encourage it in ourselves and others in dependence upon the

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Spirit of Christ by whom we have new life in him and become a new creation.