Putting Off the Old Boots to Walk in Righteousness
assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 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.
Ephesians 4:21–24 ESV Read More
It’s really easy for some people to quit a habit. My grandpa had an incredibly strong will. When he saw from the nightly news that smoking cigarettes were unhealthy, he took one out of his mouth, put it out, threw away the pack, and never smoked again. I’m not sure where those genes went.
The way Paul says it, ‘put off your old self,’ is much more than quitting some old habits. In light of everything we’ve talked about so far from Ephesians, it’s much bigger than biting fingernails. Putting off the old self is like taking off dirty boots when you come in the back door. You leave that filth outside so that your kids and grandkids can eat off the floor. That life that you lived in the backyard, with mud and dog poop and mowed weeds — that stuff doesn’t belong in your living-room carpet, so you leave it outside to enjoy the cleanliness of your house.
Beyond focusing on the habit to quit, look to the peace and joy that the Lord offers you in freedom; the peace of knowing He will give you everything you need; the excitement of watching Him guide your steps. Look to the Lord and the new life He offers, and you’ll suddenly be renewed. Whereas once we longed to find ways to do evil, we gain a desire to do good. Where we may have once spent hours in the day positioning and planning how we were going to pull off this secret sinful deed, after a while, those deeds just come up as a passing temptation.
How hard is it to put off the old self and resist the temptation to go back? C.S.Lewis says in Mere Christianity:
“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.”
Now we are new. We have a new self, created in the likeness of God in a different way than Adam was created in the likeness of God. We have a true holiness and a true righteousness that once put on enables us to walk through the backyard without even touching the ground. As we avoid the sin and filth of our former lifestyle, the temptation to sin doesn’t even stick to us. That true and permanent holiness guides us to our destination in the Lord and lights the way for others to follow along.
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