Getting Dressed as the New Man

Don’t lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator, (Colossians 3:9-10, WEB)

Change of the deep kind rarely feels like a single dramatic moment. More often it feels like getting dressed again after you have fallen down, putting back on something you keep taking off. There is nothing glamorous about it, and it can feel discouragingly repetitive, the same clothes, the same floor, the same effort to stand back up.

Paul uses exactly that picture. He writes, Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Two things are happening at once here, and both are true. You have put on the new self; that is done, a fact about who you now are in Christ. And that new self is being renewed, which means the process is ongoing and unfinished.

Men in recovery often torture themselves for not being finished, taking every setback as evidence that the new self was never real, that the whole thing was a performance they have now exposed. Paul would gently disagree. The renewing is supposed to be gradual; it is being made new after the image of the one who created you, and that is slow, patient work that does not happen all at once.

So the falling and the rising are not proof against you. They are what the process actually looks like from the inside, for a man who has genuinely been given new clothes and is still learning to wear them. You are not faking newness while secretly remaining the old man underneath. You are a new man learning to live in his new clothes, and the learning takes time you are allowed to have. When you fall today, do not conclude you were never changed. Simply get dressed again, and keep getting dressed, because the man putting the clothes back on is the new one.