ODJ: truly human (again)
September 23, 2013
READ: Colossians 3:5-10
Put on your new nature (v.10).
Last year at an international summit of world powersin Doha, the capital of Qatar, global leaderslaunched the Educate A Child project. The project seeks to build bridges between nations, calling us to recognise our shared humanity and to intervene on behalf of those at risk. Further, the project believes that funding children’s development will ultimately yield to a more peaceful world.
The apostle Paul suggests that through Jesus, God has opened up a new possibility for all the people of the world—an entirely new way of being human. God created humanity as good, but our rebellious choices have marred God’s work. Rather than abandon us, God fashioned a way for us to be “renewed . . . in the image of [our] Creator” (Colossians 3:10 NIV). With this renewal, God returns us to the good, human life He intended from the beginning.
Our new life, renewed in Jesus, sheds “sexual immorality, impurity, lust and evil desires” (v.5). It casts off anger, malicious behaviour and slander (v.8). In return our new life transforms our human nature and reorders our core human identity (no longer Jew or Gentile; v.11).
C. S. Lewis wrote: “One has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. The thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe.” —Winn Collier
Scan Genesis 1-2. What picture do you get of the kind of humanity God intended for us? How does Jesus renew this vision?
Where does your humanity need to be renewed in Jesus? Where does the humanity of our world need to be renewed?
