The New Guy Is Moving In

    This week has been a time of transition for me. I've been on staff at Meridian Baptist for almost two years. When I first came, I inherited an office that was used by multiple staff members before me. Before this week, I had been using the old, large bookcases that were put in here by an old staff member I never met. Because of how they were positioned in the air, the bookcases made the office feel twice as small as it actually is. Finally, this week I got up the energy to stop talking about it, and to actually tear them down with the help of my pastor.

    Our secretary told me she was glad to finally see those bookcases go. She told me, "You're the youth pastor. You don't need bookcases that make you look..." For some reason she didn't want to say the word, "old," but I knew what she meant. "You need some bookcases that look... different... like what a youth pastor would have," she said. 

    In the spiritual sense, all of us also have old bookcases that we need to muster up the energy to tear down. In Ephesians 4:17, the apostle Paul wrote, "I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds." He goes on in the next verses to describe how some of the things we used to do before we had a relationship with Jesus are not the way God wants us to do things anymore. 

    I loved the way The Chosen series said it through the character of Mary Magdalene, "I was one way, and now I'm completely different. And the thing that happened in between was Him."

    Paul further explains that every Christian is expected to "put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:22-24).

    Paul is writing to Christians and is telling them to do the hard work to bring every aspect of their lives under the authority of their new Boss (Jesus). Not everything in our lives is automatically fixed when we turn to Jesus - we have to continually surrender (and re-surrender) to Him those things that represent the "Old Man." In one sense, Christ has made us a "new creation" (2 Chorinthians 5:17), and in another sense, He is still making us a new creation, as we see in Ephesians 4.

    Getting rid of the "old" can be hard - especially when there are 4-inch toggle bolts and several layers of caulk and paint holding it in place... wait, now I'm talking about the old bookcases again. Not only is it hard, but it requires community, as Paul said in verse 25, "having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." I couldn't have gotten those old bookcases down myself - I needed my pastor's help prying them off the wall while I unscrewed the toggles, my worship pastor's help providing comic relief, and my secretary's help sitting on the couch laughing while she filmed us. 

    In the same way, we need people in our life who can help us dismantle our old behaviors and replace them with Christlike behavior. The way this happens is through "speaking the truth" (v.25). We need people we can "speak the truth" to and who will "speak the truth" back to us. Truth telling is the tool God uses as we are getting rid of our old ways and replacing them with Christlike behavior. Paul even said in verse 21, "the truth is in Jesus." As we tell the truth to one another and let the truth shape our new life, we are allowing the One who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" to progressively change us for the better.

    My new bookcases came in as I wrote this blog, and as you might expect, they're in boxes that look nothing like bookcases... "assembly required" definitely applies here. I still feel like the "new youth guy" at Meridian, and in a sense the work I'm putting into changing bookcases feels like moving in again. But the assembly is worth it. I'm also working on surrendering more and more of my life to Christ... because I'm still the "new guy moving in" spiritually. And the work it takes is worth it, because Jesus is everything to me.