The past week offered a study in contrasts. It began with our nephew’s photo welcoming his new baby son into the world and ended with old friends bidding their youngest son goodbye in the wake of a tragic accident. Both scenes occurred in local hospitals, but the accompanying emotions could not have been further apart.
The text from an old friend came early Saturday morning, asking us to come downtown to pray for their son who’d been struck by a car and was not expected to live. We promptly dressed and drove downtown, winding our way to the ICU. But upon arrival we learned the unconscious young man was on a ventilator, no longer breathing on his own. Laying hands on his still body, we prayed, believing God to heal and restore, though we saw no immediate change.
After praying for the parents and giving long hugs, we headed back toward our car, passing a hopeful “Expect a Miracle” sign at the ICU desk. I felt exhausted, with a heavy heart for my distraught friends. We got down on our knees that evening at the time the family would make a decision regarding life support. As we prayed, my wife suddenly received a clear picture of her long-deceased grandmother, with an elderly face but dark hair. What stood out in this vision was her grandmother’s huge smile. I learned the next morning our friends had let their son go that night. Based on his faith in Jesus, they took comfort in his now being fully restored and in a much better place.
As I prayed and reflected the next morning, I saw something unexpected through the week’s experiences of physical birth and death. When we are spiritually born again, we get a new life. It’s not simply an improvement to our old life. The Bible tells us sewing a patch of unshrunk cloth to an old garment won’t work; and new wine requires a new wineskin (Matthew 9:16-17). To be more contemporary, the new birth is not an incremental software patch to an old program. It’s not Flesh 2.0. It’s a total, perfect rewrite from the ground up, called New Creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Now I’d been discouraged in the middle of the night at how short I fall of righteous behavior. I’d silently repented of pride, insecurity, selfishness, willfulness, all my junk— praying God could somehow salvage and use me. But this morning waiting on Him, I glimpsed the real me—the new creation me. I suddenly remembered that I have died and my life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). I am no more stuck in fleshly mindsets than my friend’s son is in a traumatized body. He left that body behind, and I guarantee he is not thinking about that body now!
In the same way, I put off the old and put on the new, no longer identifying with what is dead and gone. It is a paradigm shift that changes how I see today, how I see tomorrow, because I don’t have to strive to be good enough; God’s already taken care of it! Now that’s good news!
