New Year, New You

New Year, New You.  Every January the multibillion-dollar self-improvement industry adopts the same marketing strategy from diet plans and vitamin supplements to gym memberships and day spas: Be the best version of yourself. This January alone, I have seen many versions of that tired slogan. Sadly, even sacrilegiously, a billboard for a church stands above I-40 in Greensboro, NC, preaching a startlingly similar message to the self-improvement mantra of the world, “A place to belong and become a better you.” No worries if you missed that sign because other similar signs wait for you in every city large enough for a downtown district: Winston-Salem, Statesville, Hickory, Morganton, Marion, etc. “Come to Jesus and solve all your problems.” Wait a second! Is self-improvement what the church is peddling?

From cover to cover, the Bible and therefore the church teaches a totally different message, starting with the bad news: New Year, Same You. Wardrobe upgrade or not, humans cannot change their nature just as surely as a leopard cannot change its spots (Jer. 13:23). Humanity cannot reforge its identity just as surely as it cannot revise its history. Men, women, boys, and girls might be able to turn over a new leaf relative to other humans, but biblically speaking, they cannot improve themselves spiritually with respect to God. “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). At our very best while we exist apart from Christ, we are as Christ summarized it in Matthew 23:27. “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.”

If it were not so tragic, then it might be comical how much unredeemed humans resemble zombies—animated but not alive—the walking dead who paint their cheeks with rogue and attempt to reverse their decay with B-12 injections. Death is not the cessation of biological life but the absence of spiritual life. Spiritual death limps along until biological death catches up, somewhat active and able to do certain functions but spiritually disconnected from the source of true, eternal Life, who is Jesus Christ (John 1:4; 11:25; 14:6; 1 John 1:1-2; 5:11-12).

The good news (i.e., the gospel) answers that bad news. “The wages of sin is death but the free gift from God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). Death isn’t the end but, by God’s gracious intervention, merely the middle. Jesus conquered his own grave and conquered our death, too. By grace through faith in him, he unites us to himself so completely that the Bible calls it regeneration, a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Just like the first creation in Genesis, God makes something from nothing in the new birth, too, a re-genesis. In that sense, we are not better, renovated, cosmetically altered versions of our old self. We are totally transformed, forgiven, adopted, accepted, and spiritually resurrected with Christ.