new clothes

Col. 3:9-10 (NLT)
Don't lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old evil nature and all its wicked deeds. [10] In its place you have clothed yourselves with a brand-new nature that is continually being renewed as you learn more and more about Christ, who created this new nature within you.

It would be a cruel God indeed who would tell us we must not sin and then not give us the capacity to not sin. The God of Jesus offers a remedy. When we connect to Jesus we are a new creation. We are no longer bound to our human desires for pleasure and control.

The metaphor Paul uses is powerful. Who hasn’t stripped off some really filthy clothes, took a long hot shower, and put on some clean sweats, smelling the fabric softener when you pull the sweatshirt over your head? Or getting into fresh clean pajamas? Maybe you just returned from a long tent camping trip, where there were showers. Maybe you were out in the yard digging all day. Whatever the case, just get out of those smelly, dirty clothes, and wrap yourself in the new.

This is not a once in a lifetime thing. It keeps going on all our earthly life. We continue to become newer and newer as we “arrange and rearrange our lives as apprentices of our Master Teacher Jesus to learn from him all that we can to become the kind of people who can do what he would do in any situation of our lives if he were us.” (Dallas Willard)

This is why the life of discipleship is not giving in to the need for pleasure and the need to control, and the corresponding despair that will surely come when they begin to destroy you. This is why being a disciple is being a hope-filled person, or a “hope-wrapped” person, as it were. Clothing yourself (your choice) for what is to come.