Getting Dressed as the New Man

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. 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. 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. You are not faking newness while secretly remaining the old man. You are a new man learning to live in his new clothes. When you fall today, do not conclude you were never changed. Simply get dressed again.