Putting on Christ

Good morning everyone!

Let us remind each other to put on the new Man. Putting on Christ like we heard on Sunday is a deliberate decision to put on the spiritual clothing of Love, grace, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, wisdom, and all the characters of Jesus we read about in His word.

We need to get rid of the old self and put on the new self. The first suggestion the apostle Paul makes to the Colossians regarding this particular subject is, “Do not lie to each other!” That is something we need to practice diligently. He continues, saying “you have put off the old man,” referring to Adam, the sinful nature, the one born of the flesh many years ago when each one of us was born. Only through the work of the Father, by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we can put off the old man and understand we should not keep manifesting Adam’s character in our lives.

The Bible compares Adam’s nature with drab, dirty, smelly, and ragged clothing, like an old robe with holes everywhere, unpleasant to the eye. Those clothes are the doings and actions of the old man, the old self, the old nature, as a result of living without God since the moment we were born. The clothes of the old self may consist of a lot of things, all of which we must put off.

Given this, we must put off the old man, our old sinful self, and put on the new man, our new self made in Christ’s likeness. When someone gives us new clothes, it is our decision to wear them or not. Someone gave them to me, gifted them to me, but it is up to me to wear them or not; it is my decision. God has given us by grace, as a gift, a new self to wear, but only we can decide if we want to walk wearing these new clothes or leave them in the closet. That is why it says that we should put on the new self, which is being renewed; God’s clothes do not get old, they renew themselves in the image of the One who created them. 
The old man, the old self, grows old, and in time it makes us more like Adam. The new man, the new self, is being renewed, and in time it makes us more like Christ. That is the work of the Father, that we become less like Adam and more like His Son every day. That we can get rid of our old garments each day, like the socks we talked about, which we wore for a long time and did not want to change because we were clinging to them until we decided to remove them from our lives and start wearing new ones, to be more like Christ. We act differently in Adam and in Christ.