By The Grace Of God I Am What I Am

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed on me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." (1 Corinthians 15:10). We sometimes labor under the misapprehension that coming unto Christ and applying His grace and Atonement into our lives means remaking ourselves into a completely different person. In some senses this is true. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things pass away; behold, all things are become new." (2 Corinthians 5:17). But it is better to think of the "new creature" that we may become with Christ's help is one that has been restored to its original, new state. We become new in the way that a piece of antique furniture becomes new again once it has been lovingly cleaned, re-sanded, re-painted, and so forth. We become new in the way that a computer that has become slow and sluggish due to too many programs and malware eating up its memory is restored to its factory settings. As we make our way through life, we accumulate traumas and scars and imperfect coping mechanisms and false assumptions and broken heuristics. All of these pile onto our souls, making them slow and sluggish and worn and tired. But through the grace of Jesus Christ, we can have all of these things that are not part of our true self stripped away, so that we can become new again, and more like our true selves than we have ever been before. Christ proudly declared "I am that I am." He did not allow a mortal life in a fallen world to get Him confused and transformed into someone that He is not, but stayed true to Himself and could truthfully say I am the same being that I have always been and always will be. He wants the same for us. If we come to Him, we can say with Paul "by the grace of God I am what I am."