“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
2 Corinthians 5:17
One of the ways our church is looking to support our local community at this time is by collecting and donating laptop devices to local schools to help children who are learning at home. As part of this, last week I dug out an old laptop I haven’t used in a while to see if it was suitable to donate. If I’m honest, I wasn’t even sure if it would turn on.
It did…eventually!
You see, it was so full of old junk (out of date documents and files etc) that it took over an hour just to properly switch on and even then, it was painfully slow. I was beginning to wonder if I should just give up on it. However, I stuck with it and wiped off all the old files, leaving it overnight to reset itself. I wasn’t sure what to expect the next morning, but a beautiful surprise awaited me. Once all the old stuff had been cleaned off, the laptop started up straight away. A shiny blue screened informed me that new updates had been performed and it was running the latest software. No more staring at the buffer wheel spinning round and round…
This experience got me thinking “how often do we take the time to ‘clear out the junk’ in our own lives?”
The beauty of grace is that there is never too much ‘junk’ for God. When we put our lives in His hands, God undertakes a complete and thorough ‘system restore’. He removes the old and replaces it with the new and improved. If we allow Him, He will get rid of the things that hinder our growth and ability to reach our full potential (John 15:2).
Just like the factory reset on my old device, seeing the results of this can take time and is a process. It can seem unbelievably slow and sometimes we may want to give up or wish that it would hurry up and be over with. It can seem painful at times and sometimes we may wonder if anything is actually even happening. But rest assured God is at work.
Our progress to becoming more like Christ is an ongoing journey and we get to play an active role in this process. It involves regularly reviewing and updating our attitudes and behaviours; checking for any old habits or unhelpful things that may have snuck in. We have to choose to allow God to enter into our lives and give Him permission to clear out the ‘junk’.
We play an active part in putting into practice what we learn and receive from God.
Yet, we can take comfort in the knowledge that no life is irredeemable to Christ. No past is too messy, no mistake too big…when we place our lives in His hands, He makes all things new.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…”
Hebrews 12:1