Thursday, August 31, 2023
Finding Peace In Being A New Creation
We are all broken people. No matter how much we try to hide it, we cannot deny the fact. There is no shame in being broken - it is part of being human. The most beautiful part of following Jesus is that He takes our brokenness and turns it into something beautiful - a new creation in Him.
He wants us to come to Him in our brokenness. He meets us exactly where we are and if we let Him, He takes the burden of our brokenness from us, and He makes it into something we don’t even recognize - a new creation.
Following Jesus changes how we see the people around us, but it also supposed to change how we see ourselves. This one is very hard for some of us. Sunday Andy Brady said, “Broken people make bad decisions.” Sometimes those bad decisions have long lasting consequences. Dealing with consequences for a long time can even lead to more bad decisions because we don’t know how to deal with the difficulty properly. Even if we do, sometimes the sheer length of dealing with hardship causes us to cave.
We may have made bad decisions that might not have long lasting consequences, but the shame and guilt we feel and continue to inflict on ourselves keeps us from seeing ourselves as Jesus does. We almost refuse to believe that we could ever be worthy of His love. We cannot look at ourselves and see anything else but the mess we have made. It can consume us.
This is not God’s plan for us. He frees us from the bondage of sin so we can live free. He does not want us to be in bondage to ourselves, our wrong thoughts about ourselves, or our past bad decisions. The scope of Jesus’ love covers all of that and more.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; \behold, the new has come. v17
We cannot fix our brokenness, but God can. That doesn’t mean that we don’t still have to deal with consequences, but He makes us a new creation - the old is gone. The broken person that made those decisions is not who we are anymore. There is nothing we have to do to be worthy. We could never be worthy enough on our own. Jesus paid the price for all of us on the cross so we can stop trying so hard and find peace in who we are in Him. Our old ways and bad choices are gone and He wants to do something new in us.
Remember when you look in the mirror, that He sees His child. He sees His daughter or son. He sees His chosen, redeemed, new creation that He loves.
"Beloved, if you have no more religion than you have worked out in yourself, and no more grace than you have found in your nature, you have none at all. A supernatural work of the Holy Ghost must be wrought in every one of us, if we would see the face of God with acceptance." - Charles Spurgeon
