The New Self [Reconstructing Faith 08]

Ephesians 4: 17-32 // Tom Nelson
I think it is fair to say that our contemporary culture is one marked by an identity crisis. We don’t know who we are anymore. In our modern quest to know ourselves, we have become more anxious, confused, isolated and despairing. As members of God’s family and the Christian faith, we are knit together in community. Like changing our clothes, we are called to put off our old self and put on our new self. We are not to live as we used to live because we are not who we used to be. We are a new family with a communal code of ethics tied to the relational outworkings of joyful Christian love. Paul points out three distinctives of our new family, the new us, the true us. We must be wise with our words, good at anger, and radically forgive others. These disciplines are not only about experiencing God’s power to change, but more to deeply encounter his abiding presence with us moment by moment.