Looking for Something New?

[HKHaugan]

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ:…For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith:…(Romans 1:16-17 KJV).””

What Paul is so excitedly telling the Roman Christians is that what he was given was really new, ‘new’ was personal, individual and unique. When God got his attention on the road to Damascus, Paul was so awed by the personal depth to which God would go to capture his heart, he found out what was possible for everyone. Thus his intensity and missionary zeal. It’s all about the One God revealing His true nature through a new Savior, a new Lord, a new morality, a new intellect, a new spirit, a new heart, a new relationship; everything the individual experiences in faith is what ‘new’ is all about. Paul was given direct personal access to God to experience an ongoing newness in everything. And God really wants this for each of us. To use a modern expression, ‘God is really into you.’ He wants you to experience Him personally.

What Paul realized was sin builds barriers (the gates of hell Jesus describes in Mt.16:18) against the bubbling creativity and unfolding of being what God intended, a constantly adventurous heart moving along His path to feel what He feels, thinks what He thinks and know God’s faithfulness as the event of eternal life abundantly producing every next moment. Sin is the divisive personal burden the devil introduced to stagnate us through fear and pride.

Those barriers, those gates, are what we call strongholds. They are the sin-motivated attitudes and ideas we construct out of fear and pride for self-protection so we don’t experience His newness. What Jesus did on the Cross was to cancel the power of sin that encrusts the heart, the spiritually stagnating force that lies hidden in the heart at birth. Sin is any stronghold’s binding power. Strongholds are the devil’s work.

Jesus frees us from our strongholds through faith in Him, His presence in our heart and His Word. In Christ we are born again spiritually. It’s why Paul is so wrapped up in preaching and teaching faith in Jesus as the means to really be restored as an image of God. If you read the Psalms you will find that there is one stronghold that replaces all the others and that is God Himself. This is what propelled the Apostles including Paul to move powerfully into a pagan world and deliver the true ‘new’ in Jesus, an eternal relationship of newness in Him. Jesus was their stronghold and fortress replacing all past dependencies.

In each moment ‘new’ is experienced in a series of faith events that result in whole set of ‘Oh, now I see’s!” What is new about this is that every person can have this ‘newness’ personally and live in the newness of that personal relationship all the time. It’s not about what the world calls news. It’s what is new in the heart. This kind of faith was and is new for everyone and produces newness in all generations. It’s what’s new personally every next moment. God is faithful and newly and personally involved with each person as a person.

The will of God is that we have this faith for eternity. But for each of us it is a personal unique faith. It is not the same as anyone else’s experience. While it is One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of us all, God has made it quite clear in Jesus that each of us is unique and special to Him, to each other and that each is called to give their uniqueness to the world around them. This was and is new. That was not only news to the world then, it is new to the world now because every person born is born brand new and, through faith in Jesus, individually conscious of being a new image of God, a conscious image of ‘I AM.”

This was not the same old ‘cookie cutter’ religion that was non-personal, institutional, feeding on fear of curses, treating everyone the same way, demanding obedience to the same set of rules, dress and behavior. It was based on a personal unique relationship unlike anyone else’s. In fact it was not ‘religion’ at all. It was a relationship in which every next moment was an event personally orchestrated and directed through personal faith as each person faced his or her unique choices and decisions. No intermediary between God and man, no set of laws to earn that relationship, no ethnic or tribal requirement, no animal sacrifices, no special foods, no ethical philosophy, just an openness in faith to a unique One God who made Himself known in His eternal Son Jesus the Messiah. This newness is available to everyone everywhere.

Again we need to understand what sin has done to mankind. We live in a world where standards are devised by human beings to make us look, act and feel the same. Fads, trends, advertising strategies, the media and social expectations shape us to be and look like whatever the devised social standard demands. Look at our definitions of success, fame and accomplishment--- rise to the top, gain admiration from peers, compete to see whose humanity is better than another, whose skills earn more, who can make the best impression and be number one, seek pleasure, peace, contentment, avoid pain and rejection, secure control, escape anonymity, hang out with the rich, make a name for yourself.

Sin makes us dependent on ourselves. No God or gods. No ultimate trust except in self. No hope except for how I can control my destiny and get what I want for the moments I live. We look around us and adjust out of fear and pride learning the social and economic strategies it takes to survive and succeed. The end is loneliness and death. That is hell in a nutshell.

In Jesus it is the opposite. It is growing into and with an eternal loving Savior and Lord, the living God. We are always in relationship growing with others, expanding our experience of the ‘new’ and being what God always had in mind for us. In Jesus we are always looking forward to the new, ‘from faith to faith,’ thus Paul, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus (Php.3:12-14 NIV).”