Re-Created

by Keith Gardner
Sometimes it is hard to let go of the memories of our past. Our mistakes, or better yet let’s call them what they really are, our sins of the past like to hold on. They keep us from becoming what God intended all along. Let us understand why this is and how God has remedied this for us.

There is a cosmic struggle for the heart of man. On one side is God the Father; He created us in his image to have fellowship with him. It does not matter your birth story, God intended you. You were crafted at His good pleasure and to His delight. On the other side is another created being, once called Lucifer. Now called Satan, he attempted to ascend above his creator. He desired to be worshiped like God. After losing that battle he descended into the abyss with a singular goal; to destroy the created of God by interrupting God’s desired fellowship.

Because of Adam’s failure in the Garden of Eden, we are born with an automatic disruption in our relationship with the Creator. Our only hope for restoring that fellowship is to accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God, asking Him to forgive us for our sins and allowing Him to become our Lord. The Scripture has many metaphoric descriptions of this event; being saved, being born again, passing from death to life. Regardless of the description used they all have one thing in common; we are restored in our relationship with God the Creator.

For those of us who have accepted the invitation for a renewed fellowship, God’s enemy’s new goal is to keep us from ever becoming effective as Christians. A preferred method is to continually remind us of our many failures; calling us unworthy and unreliable. God has remedied this profane with the profound. In 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 we are taught: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”  God’s remedy… He remade us; we are re-created as new and in fellowship with Him. What a wonder! But we must be careful. In looking at this verse alone it would appear that there is a before and an after; a before I was saved and an after I was saved. It is this dichotomy that the enemy of God uses to exploit us. In Romans chapter four Paul is teaching us that we are justified (forgiven) through faith and not from any law. In the second half of verse 17 we read “…the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” Here Paul pauses from his lesson for a moment to tell us something about God and ourselves and that is, when we are re-created we are brought from death to life. But it does not stop there; God reaches into our past and remakes them too. “God…calls things that are not” (a perfect past) and calls them “as though they were”; our imperfect past has been remade. What we once called markers of our failures, God now calls memorials of His redemption.