Put On The New ManSample

Put On The New Self 

 God offers us new clothing, and we decide whether to wear it or keep wearing our old, smelly, raggedy clothes—our old self, our old man, Adam. 

There was a father who threw a big party for his son, and we know that story as the parable of the prodigal son. The first thing the father did with his smelly, dirty, muddy, broken son, was to give him a new robe. Not only was it new, but it is written that it was the best robe. What God has for you is not only something new but the best; that is the business of the Father. God is in the business of not only improving your life but of giving you the best. 

The letter to the Colossians teaches us that a person puts on the new self and is renewed. “Put on the new man,” or self, is an order; it is something we have to do. What is the new man? That is no other than Jesus Christ. We must put Jesus Christ on as our new clothes—His character, His mind, His philosophy, His actions, His vision. To put on Christ is to stop wearing our old man who was Adam, to stop thinking the way Adam thought and put in Christ. 

Given this, we must put off the old man, our old sinful self, and put on the new man, our new self made in Christ’s likeness. When someone gives us new clothes, it is our decision to wear them or not. Someone gave them to me, gifted them to me, but it is up to me to wear them or not; it is my decision. God has given us by grace, as a gift, a new self to wear, but only we can decide if we want to walk wearing these new clothes or leave them in the closet. That is why it says that we should put on the new self, which is being renewed; God’s clothes do not get old, they renew themselves in the image of the One who created them. 

The old man, the old self, grows old, and in time it makes us more like Adam. The new man, the new self, is being renewed, and in time it makes us more like Christ. That is the work of the Father, that we become less like Adam and more like His Son every day. That we can get rid of our old garments each day, like the socks we talked about, which we wore for a long time and did not want to change because we were clinging to them until we decided to remove them from our lives and start wearing new ones, to be more like Christ. We act differently in Adam and in Christ.