2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
Easter is this Sunday! What a great day, the day we remember and celebrate that Jesus rose from the grave. This is a great day, the most important day in the church year, the most important day in history, after creation itself. On Easter we celebrate new life. We celebrate Jesus rising from the grave, receiving His new life. And we celebrate that He gives to us that life, our new life. We receive new life because Jesus rose from the grave. He makes us new!
Now, what is made new because of the resurrection? Let’s look at that.
Shortly before Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave, He raised Lazarus from the dead. That was a different sort of resurrection, that was more like a resuscitation when someone’s heart is restarted. Lazarus was dead for four days, so it is not like restarting a heart completely, but it is in this respect. When someone is brought back to life with our modern medical means, they come back and hopefully live a long time. But they will go on to die another day. Lazarus lived for a long time after Jesus brought him back to life, but he would go on to die another day. Lazarus is not walking among us today, so he did die another day, just like the others Jesus miraculously raised from the dead. None of them are alive, on this earth, today.
But, Jesus rose from the grave never to die again. He was changed. He who was buried a mortal body, was raised with an immortal body. He would never die again and is still alive today. He is alive in heaven.
If we believe in Jesus, we will be raised to a new life in heaven when we die too. We will be changed from having a body that will grow old and die, no matter what we do to try and stop that, to one that will never die, never grow old, never stop living. We will be changed.
That is one thing this means; we will be changed when we die and go to heaven. But the bible is saying something else besides. We will also be changed now, in this life. When we become a believer, we are changed at that moment. The old self dies a spiritual death with Jesus on the cross and a new self is raised with Jesus from the grave. Our old, sinful self dies, and we are raised as a new creature in Christ, a changed person, a new believer.
Praise God. I don’t want the old Gary raised up! I want that old sinner to stay dead. I want to live as the new creature God raised me up to be, not the old self who died with Jesus on the cross. I want to be the new creature God talks about in this text, and I am, we all are. When Jesus came into my heart, and your heart when we believed, the old self died, it passed away as this verse says. And in its place, God made a new creation, a new me, a new you. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation!” You are a new believer. That old you, that sinful you, died and Jesus made you new. He raised up a new person in the body of the dead you.
Unfortunately, while we still walk in this world, in the flesh we were born into, there is an on-going struggle between our dead self and our new self. The old self doesn’t want to die and so our old sins come back to temp us and lead us astray. In the previous chapter it says of that struggle between our old and new selves, “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” The old self is dying and the new, Christian self, is growing stronger. Let us feed the new self and starve the old self. Let us walk as believers, as new creations in Christ.
Pastor Gary.