NEW BEGINNINGS

Saturday

 

Colossians 3:9-10

 

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:

 

 

LESSON

 

The Christian must kill self-centeredness; he must regard as dead all private desires and ambitions. There must be in his life a radical transformation of the will, and a radical shift of the center. Everything which would keep him from fully obeying God and fully surrendering to Christ must be surgically excised. The “old self” is the person the Christian was before God united him or her with Christ. The “new self” is who the Christian is after his or her union with Christ.

 

Verse 10 describes the process of individual sanctification, in which the new self is being “renewed” or “renovated” into Christ’s image. “True knowledge” is full knowledge of God and His will. Sanctification results in increasing likeness to Christ. Only by sanctification can people attain to the full image of God and Christ that God created them to bear.

 

Memory Verse: Genesis 1:1

 

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.