New man and new community

This quote from J.D. Hatfield is long, but his whole essay is worth reading:

We all have a part in helping others, like those who rolled away the stone and removed the grave clothes of Lazarus. We must help one another, after we have been born again, to come out of the dark and stop being hindered by the old dead life. We didn’t initiate this process, Jesus did, but we move ahead and live in it. The new man or your new self could have come into being without the need for preaching, teaching, fellowship and the church community, it could have come with a full set of new clothes, but it didn’t. Oh, there is a full set waiting, but it must be put on, and you have to go to the place where you find it, in the new man section, the local church.

It isn’t dressing up the old man for his best life now; it is puting on the new man who lives as Jesus would now. It isn’t trying to find your purpose in life; it is within Christ and the church is where you discover your purpose and you live as a light to the outside world.

When we find ourselves putting on these good qualities and putting off those bad ones, and we are doing this in the context of community, it is then that we can say that the Spirit is leading us. As our local community develops into a fully orbed and fully ordered unit, then we can be said to be full of the Spirit, in a sense. Of course all of this is predicated upon the fact that this unity is formed in and around Truth, specifically the truth of the Word of God.

Amen.