No Longer Who We Once Were

by Susan Sampson

“WE ARE NO LONGER WHO WE ONCE WERE!”

All caps is how I wrote this on my lecture notes when Laurie said this because it is so huge! To be able to begin to comprehend the truth of our identity in Christ!  We were sinners, children of wrath and now we are saints, saved by the grace of God!  Truly breathtaking!  Humbling!  Impossible to fully understand the depths of the reality of these truths on this side of heaven and yet we cry out to the Lord to enable us to do so by the power of His Spirit—to know and believe the truth that the old has gone and the new has come!

So I think that I have been starting to see what the Lord has been showing me of how I still bow down to self, but this week, it went to a whole new level.  Not just self–my idol is my “old girl!”

The truths of who I am in Christ are jumping off the pages of Scripture.  It’s all over the New Testament.  The old is gone.  Yet I continue to identify with and act as if I were still my old girl.  She is so familiar.  I read that the old has gone and the new has come, and yet I don’t believe.  My wrong thinking goes, “Well that can’t be true because I still sin.”  The devil’s schemes are so subtle.  Yes, we all will still sin!  We won’t stop sinning until heaven when we will finally be completely delivered from the presence of sin.

But the truth is, for those who are in Christ, our sin has been completely paid for by the shed blood of Jesus.  Sin no longer has the power of death over us.  We have been given new life in Christ.  A new identity!  Our Father has adopted us and given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.  “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).

Lord, we need your grace to believe the truth of your Word.  We need your grace to put our flesh to death.  To mortify our old girl.  To become who you have made us to be.  Can we ever get tired of hearing Galatians 2:20? “I have been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” 

We are in Christ.  We are no longer in Adam.  I don’t want to live the way I used to live before Christ redeemed me.  What Laurie said is painfully true: “when we walk as who we once were, we deny the living God.”  I have been given mercy and grace.  I don’t want to trash that any more.  Lord, help me to renounce the idols in my life.  Grant us all the gift of repentance.  Help us to die to self and live for Christ because He died for us.

Help us, Lord, to choose for ourselves this day to serve Christ and no longer serve self and the old girl.  May you be glorified and may many see and fear and know that you are God!