Years ago, I arrived at a spiritual turning point. It had been about a half-dozen years since committing my life to Jesus Christ and I was working full-time on the staff of a Christian ministry. But something wasn’t right.
I’d read through the Bible several times, had memorized lots of verses, and could talk “Christianese” as well as anyone. Outwardly I might have appeared on the right track spiritually. But two of the verses I had learned troubled me.
One was 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” The other was Galatians 2:20, which declared something similar: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
My problem was despite having accumulated considerable Bible knowledge, I was still struggling with the same areas of sin I had before becoming a believer – including anxiety and anger. I was trying hard to overcome them but didn’t seem to be making any progress. If anything, it was like taking a step or two backward.
I didn’t feel like the “new creation” the Bible talked about. And if Christ was supposed to be living in me, why was I so often acting like the same old knucklehead I’d been before praying to receive Him into my life? The thought kept recurring that maybe I was fooling myself – and others. Maybe I was like the folks Jesus had described, going through the motions without truly knowing Him as Lord and Savior. People to whom He would say, “I never knew you; depart from Me” (Matthew 7:23).
Perhaps you’ve been there. You might have wondered why living the so-called “Christian life” seems so much harder than it’s supposed to be. The first time I heard a preacher declare, “The Christian life isn’t difficult to live; it’s impossible to live,” I thought, ‘You’ve got that right!’
Then one October weekend I was assigned to report on a Christian businessmen’s event in Minneapolis, Minn. I stayed in the home of a man named Loren and his wife. You could call it fortuitous, serendipitous or coincidental, but I’d call it part of God’s plan for me. A divine appointment.
Loren and I spent hours during our free time discussing what he termed “the real you from God’s perspective.” The point, he said, was to focus on what the Lord says about us in the Scriptures rather than what we think or feel about ourselves.
Look at it this way: Weeks after the wedding, the groom or bride might wake up one morning and think, “I don’t feel married.” Perhaps not, but in wedding ceremonies they don’t say, “I now ask you to feel like husband and wife.” Nope. They say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” It’s a fact, asserted in public before witnesses – and there’s a marriage license to prove it.
In the Scriptures, we’re repeatedly told what’s required to become members of God’s holy and eternal family. John 1:12-13 declares, “Yet to all who received [Jesus Christ], to those who believe in His name, He gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
Did I truly receive Christ as my Savior and Lord, accepting His gift of forgiveness and eternal life? If my answer was yes – and it was – then it didn’t matter how I felt. What mattered was trusting in what God says in His Word.
Other passages confirm this: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). And in Titus 3:5 we’re told, “He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
The Scriptures teach there’s nothing we can do – not anything – to earn or deserve God’s love and acceptance. It totally by His grace and mercy, receiving what we don’t deserve and not receiving what we do deserve.
During my discussions with Loren, other verses I had been studying started making sense. For instance, Romans 6:4, a passage we often hear when someone is baptized, states, “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.” I might not have been feeling like I’d been given a new life spiritually, but if I believed in what God says about me in the Scriptures, it was true nonetheless.
Some verses later it adds, “In the same way, count [reckon] yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). Whether I felt that way or not, the Bible says I’m “dead to sin” – no longer enslaved to it – and have a new spiritual life through Christ’s Spirit living in me.
How often have you heard someone say, “Well, I’m just a sinner, saved by grace.” That’s true in a sense, and it sounds quite humble and contrite. But we need a different mindset. Because 1 Corinthians 1:2 explains we’re “called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It says we’re saints! If that’s true, then a more accurate perspective is that we’re “saints who sin.” How we see ourselves – who we think that we are – can revolutionize how we approach life as Christ’s followers. As it did for me.
Romans 12:2 puts it this way: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” We live in a world in which many trust only their feelings, but we’re called to trust not in feelings but in God’s ‘eternal verities’ – becoming transformed as we renew our minds to believe and act upon what He has revealed about us in His Word.
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