New Creation

I was in a discussion with a friend the other day, about being a ‘new creation’. I decided that what I was sharing with him would be a good blog post. I haven’t updated the blog much because I began to think that what I had to share wasn’t new, people knew it already and I would just be posting “duh” material. This discussion reminded me why I started the blog in the first place; Christ has given me wisdom to share that He desires to use for the kingdom, and I need to be obedient.

What does it mean to be a ‘new creation” as Paul has put it? As a young Christian, I learned that “Christ was in my heart”, that if I “open the door, He would come in and sup with me”. This meant to me, that a little piece of Christ was tucked away in my heart, and when I needed Him, I could pull Him out of this tucked away place and get advice. It also meant that He was watching me, ready to pronounce judgement at any time on my actions. Later, I was taught that I could receive the “baptism of the Holy Spirit”, which would allow me to speak in tongues and use other spiritual gifts. I found out that neither of these were the fulness of ‘Christ in me’, in fact they were a pretty poor explanation of the true meaning of ‘Christ in me’ or ‘new creation’.

See, I believe that man (I’m speaking of man as humankind, not as ‘maleness’) is triune, just as the Godhead is triune. Man has a spirit (God breathed life into Adam and imparted His Spirit), a soul (mind, will, and emotions), and a body (the flesh). I understand that when Adam fell, God separated His spirit from man and every man born since is born with a soul, a body, and a hole where the Spirit should be and isn’t. Man thereby tries to fill that hole and satisfy the need with things like drugs, alcohol, sex, religion, etc. We are dual instead of triune, and our soul tells our flesh what to do. We act on the natural, we behave on what our mind or emotions tell us to. The only thing that will satisfy and fill the hole is the Spirit of God. When we accept Jesus, and he “comes into our hearts” and we “get filled with the Spirit”, what we are getting is God’s Spirit back into the hole, fulfilling us and making us triune once again. There is a part of God in us, that should now be the driving force, instead of our soul. The Spirit should be influencing the soul, and then the soul tells the flesh what to do. Now the flesh is acting and behaving according to the Spirit because we have allowed our soul to conform to the Spirit (a lot of christian teaching tells us in our flesh and by our own strength to try to conform to the Spirit, which is backwards…allow the Spirit to conform your soul, and your flesh will fall in line with the Spirit).

Ok, now that the Spirit has come and made us triune again, we are a new creation. There has not been one like us since Christ, and there had not been one like Him since Adam before the fall. This new creation is not like the old creation. We have a power, a resource, an understanding, and wisdom from on high. We have a connection to the Father that Christ and Adam had. We may walk and talk with our Father in the garden of His kingdom. We don’t just have a little piece of Jesus in our hearts that will only appear when we do bad things, we don’t just have some gifts that the Holy Spirit will use when we ‘meditate and activate’. We have God inside, a spiritual connection to a spiritual being, giving us access to His power, His wisdom, making us unlike any other being, apart, separate, not of this world, belonging to another kingdom. Get the picture? We are different than the world around us. We should see things differently. We should behave differently. We should understand spiritual things differently. We should seek after kinship with others of our kind…we should be one just as Christ and the Father are one. And most important, we should LOVE ONE ANOTHER, for they will know we are HIs disciples by our love for one another!