The Lord tends to teach me lessons in batches over a period of time. I’ll go for months and everything I bump into, or hear points me to a certain truth He wants me to learn. Lately, the Lord has been showing Jonathan and I a lot about working out our salvation, so it was no surprise to me when I attended Bible Study with my sister here and they were studying Ephesians 4. It’s just how God works things in my life.
Anyway, I read Ephesians 4:21- 24, and I saw something that evening that I had never seen before. In this passage it says that we need to
- put off our old self
- be renewed
- put on our new self
Individually, I understood all of these things to be true, but in my mind I had always lumped them together. This passage makes them 3 unique commands. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve realized that a lot of times we define ourselves by what we DON’T do, and what we AREN’T.
We can’t just take off the old self, we’ve got to be renewed, and then put on the new. The things we used to be should be eclipsed by the things that we are now. Instead of defining ourselves by what we aren’t we should define ourselves by what we ARE in Christ.
It’s a small thing, but it made me think.
