Colossians 3:9-10 “Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self. You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator.”

I want you to note a couple of things here that give us the confidence to slay our sins. First, note the tense of the verbs. You have put off the old self. You have put on the new self. That’s in the past, isn’t it. These are accomplished facts. You are not who you used to be. Your sinful nature died with Christ. You are a renewed, holy person God sees with him in heaven. You have been given power to live a different kind of life.

Someone has well said that we aren’t human doings, we are human beings. And the key to living the godly life we want to live is not so much in what we do, but in the new people God has made us to be by his grace. You are a new self.

Second, look at how that new self is described: “…being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” You may remember that when God first made Adam and Eve, they were made in the image of God. Morally and spiritually, they were little copies of God. They didn’t look like him physically. They thought like he thought and wanted what he wanted. If there were such thing as a spiritual mirror that reflected what goes on in the soul, it would show Adam and Eve’s souls to look like the love and holiness of God himself.

As we slay our sin in repentance, as we believe the good news that God forgives us and decrees us his holy people, that is exactly what is happening to us. The Lord is making us into little spiritual and moral copies of himself, with a mind that works like his own. And that means we can live a new life.

Someone once told Yogi Berra about a Steve McQueen movie, to which Yogi replied with one of his famously obvious statements, “He must have made that before he died.” That would be right. Less obvious, perhaps, is that the Christian life does not begin until after we have died, died with Christ to sin and raised to a new life of faith. Then we can live like those who truly live in Christ.