Old Things Must Pass Away
By Tammy Lacock
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV)
Throughout Apostle Paul’s epistles, he consistently tells about the importance of renewing our minds as we live our new life in Christ.
Paul proclaimed a new gospel to believers, that by Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, our sin-nature—which passed down by the curse of Satan through Adam—has been literally uprooted and replaced with the incorruptible Seed, Christ, making us now brand-new creations. When Christ died, our old lives died, too. We were freed from the bondage of sin and Satan. When Christ arose, we arose as well, to a brand-new life in Him!
Paul tells us an integral component to renewing our minds to our new life in Christ is to understand that, although our pasts can never go away, by the help of the Holy Spirit, we can learn to let go of our old identities, no matter what they were.
In this week’s podcast, Warren Litzman boils it down to letting go of anything and everything that made us who we thought we were before coming to Christ, even down to our first birthing. As new creations in Christ, we must understand that we have been rebirthed and are babes in Christ now. We now have no past in our brand-new life. Yet Paul tells us that our minds have been so deeply rooted in our old identities that we need a constant mind renewal to who we are now in Christ, if we are ever to fully live who God created us to be. Our pasts keep our minds from learning and growing in Him. We must learn to let go of our pasts and old mindsets so that we can allow the new knowledge of Christ living in us to take hold.
Paul wanted nothing more than to let go of his old identities (his upbringing, his status, his education etc.); yet he suffered these losses every day as the Holy Spirit renewed his mind to the knowledge of his new life in Christ. He says it plainly yet ever so passionately in Philippians 3:8:
“Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”
Paul’s gospel of Christ living in us ushered in what Christ is now doing in our inner being, as opposed to the outer works, he performed while he was here on earth.
As brand-new creations in Him, God no longer sees the “old man” and no longer sees what we do or don’t do (our outer works) to be saved. He sees Christ in us. He is our righteousness, our only hope of glory!
May we undergo this radical mind-change by letting go of our pasts and living our new identity in Christ, allowing Him to come through us now.
“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.” (Galatians 6:15 KJV)
