Redemption Is a New Nature
“To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
EPH 4:22-24
God does not redeem the sinful nature, He gives man a new nature. He puts to death the sinful nature. Do we realize this? Any version of redemption that is based on the idea of redeeming the sinful nature is a lie—and it is this lie that is the world’s definition of redemption.
God kills our sin nature. There is nothing about it that can be redeemed. He gives us a new nature in its place—that’s redemption.
The danger today is that many people imagine redemption to mean patching our nature up, and this is based upon the lie that there is anything good or redemptive in man. But God makes it clear to us that we are not in need of patchwork but in need of an entirely new nature. This is why we must fully die to ourselves and our life is now the life of Christ within us (Gal 2:20). And why we must be born again (John 3:5-6).
God is not turning sinfulness into saintliness. He’s no longer counting past sins against us, and He’s cutting off any partnership we have with sin so we can be freed from being its slave.
We must be busy killing anything to do with our old nature; not just vices, but also ideas, fears, prejudices, attitudes, and ideas about ourselves. God’s work inside us is so much deeper.
As well, we’d must be very careful to never pity sin, either in ourselves or in others. This is not grace, but is a false sympathy, it is sympathy for the devil, and it stands in the way of the truth of the Gospel.
One of the greatest hindrances to the Gospel today is the very morality of the world, for its basis is the lie that there is something redemptive in man—that goodness dwells within man. The Christian must not be so easily deceived, but remain steady with the Truth of God.
August 31, 2020