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.”
Scripture can be hard to grasp at times. Sometimes, we have trouble understanding. Sometimes, we understand but we just have some trouble believing. It’s like our heads get it but our hearts don’t.
And yet, our ability to understand God’s Word and apply it to our daily lives by faith can change everything about our walk.
I don’t know about you but today’s verse can be so far from my mind and heart in certain moments. Even if the Holy Spirit helps bring it to my recollection, it feels like a real stretch to truly believe and allow it to change me.
See, I don’t feel like a new creation on most days. There are some days when I am really tempted to focus on everything about me that’s yet to be transformed. Everything about me that feels ugly and sinful. Everything about me that makes me weary and certainly must confuse, hurt or challenge those around me – often times, the ones I love most.
But I’m learning…
THAT’S when I need to lean into the promise of God’s precious words to me more than ever.
The moment we accepted Jesus, He made all things new for us. He took out, as Ezekiel prophesied, our heart of stone and gave us a heart of flesh. He put a NEW spirit within us.
Another passage in 2 Corinthians says:
“And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”
Not on stone – but on human hearts. Not by laws, written on stone and too high for us to ever ascertain. But by the living God dwelling within us. By a SAVIOR who bent down low, in all His heavenly glory and through all earthly agony, to write a new word upon our hearts and put a new song into our broken hearts.
Let’s be honest, as long as we live on this earth, we will struggle with our frailty; our humanness; our failures.
But every time it becomes too much, we can make a conscious choice: not to live as though we’re hopeless and helpless but to BELIEVE, with everything in us, that even on the days when nothing feels new, we most certainly are.
This is where real transformation occurs…and it makes us want to glorify the One who made it possible. The woman who poured out her gratitude on Jesus got this. She was weeping. She poured out tears that couldn’t possibly be held back on His precious feet, anointing them with everything she had within her and drying them with her hair.
Do we see, as she saw, what our Jesus has done?
Because in the moments we feel least worthy and yet we take Him at His Word,
we pour out ourselves to love, anoint and HONOR the One who wouldn’t leave us where we were and Whom we can fully trust to get us where we’re going.
Jesus, we come broken. But we come NEW! What could we possibly need that we don’t already have in You? You capture our hearts and transform our lives. You overwhelm us with a love so deep, so strong and so REAL that we are left defenseless and wrecked in its wake. No longer do we pick up our old excuses to continue in condemnation. No. We set them now before the throne and we BELIEVE we are made new. This is where our transformation begins and where sin no longer has dominion over us. This is where we start living as people of faith no longer crippled by our shame. Jesus, as much as our weary hearts can afford, we offer our most sincere gratitude for doing what You did to make this our reality. Now and forevermore, thank You for what You’ve done. AMEN.