Devotional for the song “Recreated”

When I started writing the song “Recreated,” I kept thinking about that moment in Genesis, at the start of everything, where there was darkness, no light, no life, just a blank canvas for the Creator.  And then, all the sudden, there was this explosion of light and color and life! And all of it happened because God spoke it into existence.

I see the same thing mirrored in the New Testament recreation of those who put their faith in Jesus.  Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come.”

You see, throughout his letters to the Church, Paul reminds us that before Christ, we were dead in our sins, but through His resurrecting power, we can be made fully alive again.  At the moment of our surrender, we’re no longer bound by what we used to be.  As Christians, we don’t find our identity in our sins, in our failures, or in all of the times we let down the people we care about.  Instead, we have a new identity and a new destiny.

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Paul reminded the Church in Romans that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is now living inside of us through the Holy Spirit.  For the first time, we actually have the authority and power to resist sin and turn away from it.  We’re no longer held in condemnation for those failures, but instead, we’re free to walk in the life of Christ.  We don’t have to live by the obligations of sin any longer.

At the moment of surrender, Jesus takes what was us and makes it a blank canvas. We get to move forward in a completely new life.  That doesn’t mean that we always get everything right.  We’re not perfect. In a way, we’re like Lazarus from the Bible.  When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and called him out of the tomb, Lazarus came forward but he was still bound up in his grave clothes. Then Jesus tells Lazarus’s family to help him out of those grave clothes.

When we surrender our lives to Christ, we sometimes still find ourselves bound by the trappings of death. Sometimes we still have the smell of the grave on us.  But through the Holy Spirit we can walk a little straighter and a little stronger each day. Sometimes we stumble and fall, and sometimes it takes the community of the Church to help us unwrap our grave clothes, but the good news is that we’re 100% alive!

This is the essence of the Gospel, the good news that the Church needs to share with the world! Once we’re in Christ, we don’t have to be the same person we once were.  We’re no longer identified by our sins. Instead, our identity is now in Jesus himself. We are fully alive, fully recreated!

Click here to buy the album Recreated.

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