Be Who You Are

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.2 Corinthians 5:17There is a wonderful line in Victor Hugo’s great book Les Misérables. It is the story of Jean Valjean, a heartless criminal. A bishop shows him great kindness, and it changes his life.But later in the story, Jean Valjean’s past gets the better of him, and he steals a coin from a little boy. This is what Hugo says about Jean Valjean:Let us say simply it was not he who robbed, it was not the man but the brute beast that through habit and instinct stupidly placed its foot on the coin... When the intellect woke again and saw this brutish action, Jean Valjean recoiled with agony and uttered a cry of horror. It was a curious phenomenon, and one only possible in the situation he was in, that, in robbing the boy of that money, he committed a deed of which he was no longer capable.Like Jean Valjean, your sin is not who you are. It is who you were, it is not who you are. You may still fall into some of the things that you once did in the cage. You may do them out of habit. You may do them out of weakness. You may do them out of choice. But you do not have to do them.The fundamental truth about you in relation to sin’s guilt is that you are clean. The fundamental truth about you in relation to sin’s power is that you are free. Your life has been redeemed by grace. Be who you are.Have you been redeemed? Be who you are!