In nature God has provided us with many demonstrations of the life he breathes into all kinds of organic matter! In the last few weeks my garden has changed… the Virginia creeper has burst into leaf and looks set to smother the whole wall again, there’s blossom on the honeysuckle, the grass is starting to grow like mad and there’s evidence of some new inhabitants in the bird box (the increased interest of the local cat population is a giveaway!).
The seasonal changes in the natural world are often fairly straightforward for us to read – green leaf equals life! In our lives, it may not be so obvious. Our state of being seems to shift and alter moment by moment as outward experiences draw responses from a reservoir of feelings, values, expectations, dreams and disappointments that we carry around within us.
And yet for Christians there is something different, something new at the heart of us – a rock solid confidence and lightness of being that fuels how we engage with the world. Our faith in Christ is continually being renewed yet remains a steadfast foundation in our lives, telling us that we have been set aside for a purpose, assuring us despite all evidence to the contrary that we are people of hope. It is how we know instinctively that we are of the light and not the dark… Whether we can trace our coming to faith to a specific revelation of God or a more gradually unfolding sense of his loving presence, we know we are changed...
This month we’ll be spending two weeks looking at the theme of the new life we have in Jesus in a series by John Grayston. As you’ll see, the new life we have received because we have died with Christ and have been raised anew in him has to be lived out. The new world of God’s kingdom has to be demonstrated in our lives so that the old kingdom of sin, Satan and death can be overcome in the lives of individuals who recognise that there is something different, something better, something radiant happening to those who follow Jesus.
Though we are citizens of a new kingdom, we continue to live physically in the old one, but we have been radically freed from the law of judgement and death that governs it. It takes discipline and perseverance to resist the temptation to go back to living like a slave of the old order, but this can be done, for we have died to its way of life, and it can no longer have the same hold on us.
In the strength God provides we can model the heavenly life. Just as the new life transforms us on the inside, it is in the small unseen choices we make in life that our freedom in Christ is lived out. Our daily habits, our interests, how we furnish our minds, our attitudes to others, all need to be surrendered to Christ and have his glory as their goal. The new life is about being so full of Christ that it can’t help but show…
Every blessing,
Phil Andrews
Editor