Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
A Peacemaker’s Wardrobe Change
When we become a Christian, things begin to change in our life. We are a new creation. Old things are passing away. All things are becoming new.
Here we find the Replacement principle. That the way we are transformed is by putting off the old and putting on the new. It’s like changing clothes.
Remember Lazarus in John 11. When Jesus resurrects him to new life, what does He tell the onlookers to do. “Loose him. Take off the grave clothes. Take off the stinking mummy-like wrapping of death, this man is alive! Give him some new clothes.”
When we get saved, we need a wardrobe change. We can’ t keep wearing the same old garments of sin. We need a replacement. We need our grave clothes taken off and our grace clothes put on.
If you’ve ever had a baby, you know all about this. Your little baby is so adorable. They feel so soft, they smell so good, you could hold them for hours. But then you start to smell something.
And as cute as the baby is, as good as their skin smells, as adorable as they are, if you just let them sit there in that diaper for hour after hour, day after day, they’d be hard to live with.
You say “well I’ll just put a clean diaper over the top of the dirty one?” That’s not gonna help the problem!
Not only will the smell become unbearable for you. The rash will become unbearable for the baby.
And so what do you have to do? Put off. Take off the old, dirty diaper. But that’s not enough. Because that would leave them cold and exposed. Your carpet and your furniture would become sitting targets. No, after you’ve put off, then you put on.
I remember doing a youth activity at a church in Denver. I’d asked the maintenance guy to dig a huge mud hole for a tug-of-war match. Well, for some reason, he dug it where a drainage ditch ran off. And so I take 80 teens out to this hole and it smells like we’re in the sewer. The water was freezing. The mud was nasty. And by the time I went home, I was shivering, covered in mud from head to toe and everything in between.
Now what do you think I did when I got back to the house. “Hmm, maybe I should fix something to eat? I usually shower in the morning so I think I’ll just wait until tomorrow.” No, the first thing I wanted to do was to get out of those filthy, freezing clothes, take a long hot shower and put on some new warm, clean clothes.
In the same way, we are to put off what is morally wrong and dirty. But not just stop there. We need to replace the old with the new.
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