BECOMING NEW

Sometimes we can get much better because we can’t get much worse. In reality I think that the gospel teaches us not to become better but to become new. It appears that the Holy Spirit of Jesus wanted to make us new…completely new, a new creation, a new person, and a new race. Someone wrote, “He became what we are that we might become what He is.” That is the pattern.

Paul, an apostle, wrote, “For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” (Romans 14:7-9)

When we truly become new, ‘if we live or if we die, we live to the Lord’ that is not by becoming better. New beats better by a resurrection and ascension. We are now baby-butt new. Jesus wants us new… alive or dead. Alive seems better until we are dead.

“But now, as to whether the dead will be raised—even Moses proved this when he wrote about the burning bush. Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, he referred to the Lord as ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ So he is the God of the living, not the dead, for they are all alive to him.” Jesus