New Creation

I have a bookshelf filled with books. To an outsider, it may look like I really enjoy reading. Maybe well-versed in classic literature? Or the student of a particular study?

Last week I cleaned the bookshelves. Cleared them of books I hadn’t touched in years. The dust was thick. The nature of the pile of books I had tossed onto the floor was startling - even to me. A glimpse into my previous life. The one before Christ.

Diet and self-help books. Dozens of them.

You see, I spent the first 35 years of my life feeling inadequate and broken; as if something, possibly everything, was wrong with me. And while I longed to be fixed - to be whole - I was searching in all the wrong places.

I heard Priscilla Shirer speak this weekend and she spoke a truth to me that resonated:

“You are not the same person you used to be so you have no business going where you used to go.”

This truth is applicable in many parts of my life. But how does it relate to the piles of books? Those books represent idols in my life - something that took my focus off of God. My particular idols were the number on the scale and baggage from my past. Those things are now bagged up and thrown out.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature;

the old things passed away; behold new things have come.

  2Corinthians 5:17

I am not the size clothes I wear or the type of car I drive. I am not my messy house or what other people think me to be. I am not the sins I have committed.

I am a new creation in Christ.

  I am no longer a slave to things of this world.