The more obvious teaching from the key verse is one we have all heard in our walks. We are a new creation in Christ! As if Paul was concerned that such a short statement might become trite to us he explains that it means our old life is gone and we now live a new life! That is what it means to be a new creation in Christ and if there is anyone in the entire Bible that needed a new life, it was Paul.
Paul is introduced in Acts, Chapter Seven as Saul. The first martyr Stephen was being stoned to death and those that participated laid their coats at the feet of Saul. But Chapter eight begins with who Saul really was:
And Saul approved of their killing him. On that day a great persecution
broke out against the church in
God would use this to His advantage as the church
was scattered and the Gospel went out from
Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out
murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and
asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any
there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as
prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared
This is who Saul was before he encountered God. He was a great persecutor of the early church, who presided over the deaths of many Christians. Talk about an old life you would want to forget! Jesus would forever change Saul's life that day. He blinded him for three days and then sent someone named Ananias to restore his sight. Once he could see again, he was filled with the Holy Spirit and was baptized. His old life was now dead and his new life in Christ would begin.
This is the freedom God offers all of us when we come to Him. Blinded by the world and the lies it sells us we remained steeped in sin until God reached down to save us. Saul understood this. God had to reach far down to save the man who was responsible for the deaths of many of the early Christians. But as the Lord explained to Ananias, Saul was a chosen instrument in the hand of God:
But the Lord said to Ananias, "Go! This man
is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and
to the people of
God always has a plan and a purpose. We probably would not have conceived to use such a vile man to carry the Gospel to the lost but God's ways are so much higher than ours. By using Saul, he stops the primary persecutor of the church and shows everyone that God is willing to save anyone! So many people stay away from church and salvation because they feel their past somehow disqualifies them from God's love. This story proves that is a lie from the pit of hell. So many feel burdened by their past even though Christ is so willing to take it from us and make us a new creation! We can walk up to the altar so many times with our baggage and beg God to take it, only to strap it onto our backs again and walk back to our pew. That is not living as a new creation beloved. That is not God's design for your life. The enemy wants you living in your past so that you are ineffective for God in the present and cannot possibly believe you have a future. The will of God has so much more for you than that. Your old life is gone!
Years later, after the
Apostle Paul had evangelized the known world, he still felt that he had not
apprehended the reason why God met him at the dark place in his life on the
road to
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3: 13-14
Note the two keys in these verses for success? First, we must forget what is behind us. There is nothing you can do about your past. It is over. It is done. There is no point in lamenting it. There is no point living in it. So many Christians bear the shackles of their pasts. The Apostle Paul was once the ruthless Christian killer Saul. He could have carried those shackles around with him but he knew he would not be able to be effective if he did. His past humbled him to remember how far God had to go to save him but it did not crush him. So many times we can allow our pasts to simply crush us under the weight of condemnation that Christ never intended for us to bear:
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, - Romans 8: 1
