Get Your Pretense On!

100 • Get Your Pretense On!

putting on a new self based on God’s actions for us in Christ. As believers, God created for us a new identity “after his likeness,” an identity that displays the righteousness and holiness of the Lord. It is not rooted in how we feel, or in the past, or what others think or say or suggest. We have been rescued in Christ, made new in him, and now we are to flesh this out in how we act and behave. Paul speaks of this in Romans 6.4: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life .” He further states that since we have been released from the law, and have died to what held us captive, now we can “ serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Rom. 7.6). We have been made new in Christ, we are a new creation, the old has passed away, and now the new has come (2 Cor. 5.17). We have died with Christ, risen with him and now we have put on the new self, that is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator (Col. 3.10). All of this has nothing to do with how we feel, or modern notions of what it means to be authentic, or being consistent with our own idea of what it means to “be true to myself.” We actualize the truth when we speak, act, and conduct ourselves in ways consistent with the truth. We live into our new identity in Christ when we commit to forming new habits of thinking, speaking, and acting that align with what Scripture says about us. We put on a new self, affirming that who we really are now is determined by what God has declared, and what God has promised. We can do and accomplish what God says we can, which frankly is not limited by what we can conceive, or what others say our potential is. God is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us (Eph. 3.20-21).