Leave it All Behind
When most of us became Christians, we were living sinful lives. Sure, most of us weren’t mass-murderers or serial killers, but there was definitely obvious sin in our lives. When we become Christians, we need to leave the sin of our past behind us, and change.
Paul teaches in 2nd Corinthians 5:17, that when we’re in Christ, we’re a new creation, and our old selves are passed away. This means that we’re essentially a new person after we become Christians. We don’t do the same things that we used to do. Rather than focusing on US, we should be focusing on God and others. We should be able to look back, and see a definite change between who we are now and who we were before we got saved. More importantly though, the people around us should be able to see that there has been a change in our lives, otherwise, what’s the point? If the unsaved people around us can’t see a difference in our lives, are we really changed from who we were?
Ephesians 4:22-24 teaches that we need to lay aside our old life, which has been corrupted by sin, and take on our new life, that is created in righteousness and truth. We need to leave all the past behind us. All our sins, all our old fleshly desires, everything that causes us to sin or lead us into temptation needs to be dropped and forgotten. For some of us, those raised in a Christian home, that’s not too hard to do. But for the ones of us who got saved later in life, it’s a lot harder. How many of us still hold onto our old ways of living? How many of us still follow the same patterns of sin, even though we’re saved and have been for a while?
There is one thing though that we shouldn’t just leave behind. If we hurt someone or did something wrong to someone before we got saved, we need to make it right. We need to face the consequences of our sins, even though we’ve been forgiven by God for them, there are still earthly consequences for them. So, apologize to those your have hurt, and pay whatever consequences you must for anything wrong you did. Not only is it what we’re supposed to do as Christians, but it’s a large step in leaving the past behind.
Just because we’re saved and trying to change our lives doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy. We need to constantly stay on guard to make sure that we don’t start to fall back into our old patterns and sins. We can’t do it by ourselves, we need to pray that God gives us the strength so we can change and stay changed. It’s easy to change for a day or two, but it’s much harder to make a change that lasts. Pray that God helps us all make a change and stick with it.
