My First Blog-Exchange

So this is my first blog on my site. I have been wanting to create a blog for some time, and I just decided that today seemed like the day to do it. What I want to write about today is something very unfamiliar with many people. 

When we come to Christ we come because we realize that we cannot do this thing called life on our own. We need help and we need Him to save us from the death that we are owed because of our sins. If we go through our entire lives without ever coming into a relationship with Jesus then we will be destined for an eternity in hell. That's not a fun thing to think about, but it is in fact a reality.

I was taught from a very young age about the love of Jesus and about the sacrifice that He made on the cross and that He did it because of His love for me, so that I would not have to suffer eternity in hell. I was also taught that I was supposed to be good, and that I had to change the ways that I did things and that I had to continually work on myself to become the person Jesus wanted me to be. My faith in Christ, and my understanding of His promise was solely based off of earning His love and earning His affection. 

I am a musician and I love playing various instruments. About 2 years ago I picked up an electric guitar for the first time, and I really enjoy the Fender Thin-line Telecaster that I play at church. It's  a great guitar and it is very appealing to the eye. When we purchased the guitar I didn't know a whole lot about electric guitars or the pedals needed to play them correctly. We ended up getting a Pod XT Live floor pedal for the guitar. I know how to tweak the factory settings on the pedal, and I know how to do a few things to enhance the sound on the pedal, but I have no idea what the thing is capable of. There is so much locked inside of it, that I don't have access to, because I don't have knowledge of how to use it. 

I feel like life as a Christian can be viewed in much the same way. We have this new life that God has given us through our faith in Jesus Christ and our acceptance of His sacrifice that He made on the cross, but we aren't sure about everything that is included in the new life we are given. 

As I said earlier, my early life as a Christian was based solely upon works and on earning God's favor. The bible doesn't teach us that though. No one can earn their way to Jesus though. We can't ever be good enough, and we can't ever do enough good things to earn the love of Jesus. Yet, for some reason we are always trying to do things in order to change ourselves into what we are supposed to be. 

In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul says in verses 17-20 "¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:^[a] The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. ²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin^[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

The word "reconciliation" in this passage is a word that means "exchange". So what this passage is saying is, God was in Christ exchanging Himself for us. So what does this mean? If you go to another country eventually you will be forced to exchange your American currency into whatever national currency is used in that country. When you go to Israel for instance, they would exchange your American money for shekels. Now, when you hand them your dollar, does it change into shekels? Does it magically change it's substance and all of a sudden where once there was a dollar now there is a shekel? No! And you would be foolish to think that it would. What happens is you give them a dollar, and in return they give you shekels. The person will keep the money you give them and give you their form of currency. 

It's the same way with the old creation. We can not change the old man into the new man! You will get tired and run down and will eventually go back to the old ways of doing things. It is impossible to live out the promises of the new man or the new soul, while walking in the old soul. God doesn't say that He was in Christ on the cross changing who we are to be more like Him. He was exchanging our old man and our old soul, for His new perfect soul. In fact in 1 John 4:17 it says that "...we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world." If we are saved and have accepted Him, then we are viewed by God exactly as He views Jesus! That's great news! 

When we try to change the old soul and make it into the new soul it's like this. There was a man that went to the local garden store and bought a few bags of potting soil, some shovels, some plant food, and water hoses. He had a telephone pole on his property and he went and dug a trench around the pole. He then put down the potting soil and the fertilizer, and lastly he watered it. He continued this way for the next month or so. He would go buy fertilizer and put it around the telephone pole and he watered it every day. At the end of the month he got so frustrated and angry because the telephone pole was still a dead piece of wood sticking out of the ground. So he got a great idea, he would start praying that God would make the telephone pole sprout branches and grow leaves. So he continued this way for a few weeks. Finally he gave up and decided that God wasn't real because the telephone pole was still a telephone pole and not a tree. If you saw a person doing this, would you think he was a little loony? Yes! Yet, we try all the time to make our old soul better and keep asking God to change our old man into the new man and it will never happen!

So as you go through this week, continually remind yourself that you are in the new. When you start slipping into the old ways of doing things stop yourself and say, "That is not me! I am a new creation and those old things have passed away!" Remember, you can never change a telephone pole into a tree, and you can never change the old man into the new man. God bless!