"The New Self"

This past week I spent a few days in Oregon visiting my parents. While I was there my dad scheduled not one, not two, but three tee times. In three days we played 45 holes of golf. It was a lot of fun but it was also a lot of golf. Golf is one of the most difficult and frustrating sports I have ever played. But golf also has this thing about it, and if you ask any golfer, they will tell you. It’s a game of perpetual hope. 

Every now and again one hits a golf shot that is like a shot you might see on TV. The club and the ball connect perfectly. The ball soars high in the air in a beautiful arc, and it lands softly on the green, just as you had planned. It’s rare (believe me…it’s rare), but it happens. And it’s that shot, that feeling, which keeps the golfer coming back time and time again. It’s the hope (or delusion?) that if we put in enough time and practice, all of our shots will feel like that one. 

It’s the hope of the New Self. The hope that we can be transformed from one thing to another through sheer will and effort. It’s the hope that, given enough time and practice, we will perfect this thing called life. That we can shed the old self and create for ourselves a brand-new self.

The good news is that Jesus has already done this for us. No, Jesus won't help us with our golf game. But Jesus has drowned that old, sinful self of ours and raised us up to new life and a new self. This is what Paul calls us to live into in Ephesians 4-5:

…put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Jesus has taken away that self we long so much to shed and has gifted to us His own righteousness and holiness. And now he calls us to follow him closely. To live as one focused not on ourselves but on others. For just as Christ forgave us and gave himself up for us, so too are we called to forgive and lay down our lives for the sake of others.