Co-creators, with Christ, of the New Creation
Posted on Monday, February 11, 2008 at 6:36 AM by Duncan Bouwer
Let's read 2 Cor 5. Later we will read a much longer passage from this chapter, but for now I just want to read verse 17:
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So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
When I gave my life to the Lord in 1991, I was sharing a flat with a friend of mine, who taught me some valuable things about the word of God. According to one of those truths, "if the word of the Lord said something, it was so", and it was to be acted on as such. So according to 2 Corinthians 5:17, I, who used to be homosexual, was no longer so, and could now consider myself to be a "new creation", which would mean that the "old identity would have passed away, and that everything had become new", which, as you can see, is exactly what the verse says.
And it was so. I became new. Even people who spoke to me on the phone could sense that something had happened to me. My face changed, I stopped swearing, and in the theatre, that more than anything, caused a stir. Everybody swears.
So there I was, practising the reality of this short verse, which for a person who formerly was unequivocally gay, and now no longer was, was a life-transforming experience. It seemed that my former friends were in two minds whether they believed in this change or not. One group broke off acquaintance with me, because they sensed the presence in me of the One that made me this new creation. The others were convinced that I would be back in all the old haunts soon enough. Estimates varied from six weeks to six months. And neither was completely right. Because what neither I nor they knew, was that while it is absolutely true that once you receive Christ, you are a new creation, and you are something completely different from what we were before, you are not yet what you will be, and no matter how much you wish it were so, you will not be that new creation completely this side of the grave. It has taken nine years and (more significantly) marriage to convince me of this, and I think it is what separates the spiritual men and women from boys and girls.
The moment we start to mature arrives when we, flushed with youth and the thrill of knowing it all, find ourselves increasingly confronted with situations that defy our superior intellect and insight, and we are slowly reduced to the unenviable position of those (older) men and women we see around us. Increasingly we have to admit that life is not an amusement park ride, and what we took for brilliant insight was merely a shallow unawareness of the painstaking and hard-won progress that characterises true growth and self-awareness.
Let's turn back to the 2 Cor 5. Lets start reading from verse one.
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5:1 Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.
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2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling,
As you can see, we are off to a good start! We start reading this chapter hoping to hear that we are new creations to which there is no further work to be done as we while away the time until Jesus returns, and already we hear that there are two dwellings. One is here, and in it we groan while it is demolished around our ears, and the other one is in heaven. And we all know what has to happen before we will see that one: we have to die to posses it.
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3 because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4 For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, (again we groan!) because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling,
Just in case you have forgotten, these are the verses which are going to lead up to the triumphant conclusion that we are "a new creation in Christ." It's just as well that at this point Paul thinks it appropriate to give us a little bit of encouragement�
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.....because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, �so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. 6 Therefore we are always confident�! (speak for yourself Paulie!) and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 7 We live by faith, not by sight. (oy!) 8 We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 9 So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.
On to verse 13: 13
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If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
What does this all mean? Paul seems to contradict himself here. He talks about the destruction of the old tent, and not being found naked, since we have a new home in heaven...then he says a whole bunch of other things and ends up saying "Therefore", that is, as a result of all that, "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"
I must be missing something. He describes a process, and then says because of that process which will only be fulfilled when we are in heaven, something has already happened in heaven!
We have to try and make sense of this somehow. Let's try and put it into terms that refer to our daily lives. We know that the tent he refers to refers to the body we live in here on earth until we live in heaven, in our new bodies. We don't have to interpret the words "meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling" too much. It's obvious what that means. Why do we groan? It says here, in verse 4: "we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed, but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling,".
It's my opinion that this is quite and important phrase. In my mind it implies that we have to be unclothed, before we can put on the heavenly body. I don't think unclothed means a one-time death, which after all would be a relief. I think it means a perpetual death, during which we are slowly and painfully relieved of garments, or parts of the earthly home, and although we are not yet in heaven, we are clothed in our heavenly dwelling by hands that are not human. By God's hands. That's why we have to live by faith and not by sight. Because we can see what we have to take off, but we will only see in heaven what it is with which we have replaced it.
That is why I have called this talk "Co-creators with Christ, of the New Creation". The sermon is actually over. But it is important to see how this takes shape in daily life, and why. It is really important, because otherwise we will lose heart and give up.
You will forgive me if I illustrate this talk with numerous examples of my own walk out of homosexuality, since it is probably one of the most relevant examples of the process described above, that I can think of. If you ask someone who struggles with something which has become part of their "earthly dwelling", or identity, they will say the same thing. And really every one of us has things that fall into this category, otherwise we would have no need to go through this painful process, and we can just be raptured away like Enoch!
When you find that you are attracted to members of the same sex it's usually too late to just simply change. By that time the damage is usually done, and while it is easier at that stage to decide not to take up the option of living like that, than to try and change later when you have put on several more of those garments, you have in reality already put on quite a few which need to be taken off.
1) You have put on the garment of rejection. To put it simplistically, a man or woman who is attracted to the same sex, has gone through a long process, which in most cases starts with an initial problem with the parent of the same sex. I said this is a simplistic description, and so I am not going to qualify this statement. There is something which is perceived as rejection, and the young boy or girl loses the ability to receive love from the parent of the same sex. The rest of childhood is spent growing up without the ability to receive nurturing care of the parent of the same sex, even if it is given. This usually also involves an inability to be accepted by the peer-group, for one reason and another. So by the time the child reaches adolescence, there is a deficit of several years, which somehow needs to be filled. The soul is empty and has stayed behind where it was last loved, and yet the body of this emotional child is growing and suddenly finds itself washed in the hormones which announce the onset of puberty. The need to be loved by a person of the same sex, which remains, is eroticised, and there the desire is felt.
My point here is that, by the time the first twinges of same-sex attraction are felt, many consecutive garments have been put on which now have to be painstakingly removed and replaced with other more appropriate ones.
Now, if you then at this point choose to act out the feelings of attraction, you
2) Put on the garments of reinforcement. Every time you now act out the behaviour which for a short time relieves the need for same-sex love, you put on another garment, which further builds the house of identity in which you live. Every time you put on another item of this clothing through any deed which reinforces this dwelling, even if it is not sexual as such but only even associating with a set of people who adopt a certain way of talking and acting, you further establish your residence in this place where you live. You are in fact building up a false creation which provides you with a great deal of safety and security, since it is a place to live, even if it is not a good place to live. This might carry on for many years of constant reinforcing of a flawed way of relating, to satisfy needs which can never be satisfied that way.
3) Now comes the day when you look out of the window of your dwelling, because you heard a knock at the door, and there stands someone who by the very expression on his face, makes you believe that he will be able to love you as you deserve to be loved. You invite him in, one thing leads to another, and he moves in. But it is still the dwelling you originally built, and so you go on adorning yourself in the garments of rejection, because that is what you know best, even while someone who does not reject you, is living in your house with you.
But because he is God, and he is eternal, and he has claimed you for his own through the work he did on the cross, you are guaranteed that one day you will move on to a "dwelling that was not created with human hands". So the phrase
"if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! "
is as good as true, in the eternal scheme of things. But as quickly as we take off our old dwelling piece by piece, we tend to put those garments back on again. Verse 4 says: "For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling�" We want to change, but we do not want to go through the extremely painful process of undressing out of those wrong and hurtful garments!!!!
When I was a child we had an old 16 mm projector and some cartoons which we always watched with glee. One of my favourites was one where a bunch of crows live in an old double story house, and one day the house catches on fire. They call the fire brigade, and everybody starts carrying pieces of furniture out of the house through the front door. But as fast as they do that, the fire reaches out through the upstairs windows, and carries the furniture back into the house.
In spite of this, the whole point of this talk is the following. Every time we decide for Christ in some way or another, after that initial moment when we first invited him in, we are building something eternal. As it also says in Vs 4, "What is mortal [is] � swallowed up by life."
Please turn to 2 Corinthians 4:10-11:
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10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.
When I invited Jesus into my house that day, he had already died the death that overcame the death that was at work in me. So it is not that everlasting death that I now carry around in me any longer. It is HIS death, which leads to life. So every time when I am faced with a choice whether to put on the garment of rejection, which was leading to my death, or the garment of his acceptance, which leads to life, and I choose to do the latter, I become a CO-creator, with Christ, of my own, "new creation"!