Good morning!
How are you doing today? I hope that you’re doing well. Right now I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three amazing meetings yesterday in three different churches. Now we have 4 busy days left before I head home on Thursday evening. There is so much going on right now. Israel is under pressure; there have been pleas from Bombay to rescue children from the sex industry; and new doors are being opened to unreached people groups.
I received a message yesterday from someone who had seen one of our TV programs. She wrote: “I am not my past.” No matter who you are or what you’ve done, when Jesus breaks the evil cycle in your life, he also begins a process of separating you and healing you from the parts of your past that have wounded you. God has, as it says in the King James, presented you “holy, blameless and spotless in his sight.” So when he sees you, he doesn’t see the dirt, he sees you in Christ, and it is he who is presenting you to himself. You are standing there now! Do you realize who you are? You are already presented – you aren’t going to be presented.
You are a new creation in Christ, the old has gone, the new has come. It is written that “your new life is hidden in Christ.” So it has already taken place. As Paul writes in the King James, it is a secret and a mystery. A secret because you can’t see the new man with your eyes and a mystery because if you aren’t saved, you can’t understand what it is to sense the new creation. That is why you’ve received faith; it is the substance, the spiritual component, that makes it possible for you, through the Holy Spirit, to have the secret revealed and to gain insight into the mystery. Wow! Now I’m almost starting to preach! Do you realize what grace God has given you? Hillsong sings, “In your grace I stand.”
But it is a process to become the new creation in your thoughts as well, and it’s not always easy. But it’s possible. How? You do it the same way you would eat an elephant – a little bit at a time. Jesus pulls up the evil root, he breaks apart the spiritual shackles, he fills you with himself and then he wants to help you exchange one thought at a time, and for every thought that you exchange, you will think more and more like Jesus.
You are not your past. You don’t belong to your past and your past does not own you. You are a new creation in Christ – here and now.
Father, in the name of Jesus I pray for every person reading this blog right now. Thank you Jesus that the one reading this is a new creation. You are found in Christ, you are circumcised, you are a child of God, you are born again / you are born again / you are born again / you are born again / you are born again and your citizenship is in heaven. You are not your past – you are the future, so in Jesus go and take what is yours, and be who you are in Christ.
In brotherly love,
Good morning!
Tommy
