The Ultimate Do-Over
John Fischer

God worked His way into your life by faith; now He wants to work His way out through your life by making you into the person He had in mind for you to be all along—a person who can be used for God and His purposes in the world. You don’t fully know who that person is, except that he or she is like you and like Christ—a Christ-like version of you.

God has a claim on your life. He wants to make you like Christ. Not a clone of Christ, but a person with all your capabilities and personality traits with Christ’s character coming through you. It’s a lengthy do-over (it takes a lifetime) but it’s worth it because it is a life filled with purpose and it prepares you for an eternity filled with the same.

There seems to be a version of Christianity out today that places little emphasis on how you live your life; it’s all about being saved, or going to church, or worshiping properly. Yes, we are saved, but saved to what? To keep living our lives like we always did the only difference being we go to heaven when we die? Saved to keep sinning—just forgiven this time? I don’t think so.

Paul addresses this very thing in Romans: “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it” (Romans 6:1-2)? This doesn’t mean we don’t sin anymore; it means we don’t live to sin.

Sin once was what gave our lives meaning. We lived to sin. We lived for the weekend, as it were, when we could get in as much sin as possible. Now Christ gives our life meaning and we live every day for Him. We want to know what He wants to accomplish in our lives and that’s what we live for.

Is sin something you fall into and regret, or is it what you live for? Do you make plans for sinning or not sinning? The mark of a new life is set in a new desire to do the right thing. Paul goes on to say, “We died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives” (Romans 6:4).

There it is: a new life. You are in the process of a total do-over—letting this new life in Christ dictate more and more of what you do and what you choose.

How about it? Are you living your old life or your new one?

PDL