We talk a lot about making positive changes. These include eating a healthy diet, achieving a healthy weight, and taking care of your body from your head to your toes. But let’s be real, lasting change is hard. We’ve formed habits, reactions, and brain pathways (these work like muscle memory) from early childhood until now. Much of how we act is ingrained in us.
As you continue in this New Year, maybe it’s time to look to the real Change Maker. The one who can take any life, any habit, any stressful or reactionary lifestyle, any person, and make them new.
Lasting Change, Strength, and Newness
God tells us He can make us a new creation. It’s in our weaknesses that He is strong. So every time you feel like you’re beating your head against a wall trying to make a healthy change only to fail time and time again, look to God’s strength rather than your weakness. Strength is magnified.
Goals, resolutions, and healthy habits are all great. But if you first build on the foundation of a new life in God, the other changes become much easier. I am incredibly thankful for how many times the Bible talks about newness. From the beginning of man until now, humans have needed it. Newness is an amazing gift and promise.
We are being made New. We get a new day each day. The New Year is a beautiful reminder that God gives us the gift of newness.
Here are 7 Bible verses to keep with you throughout the year; they are God promises that we can be made new.
God Can Give You Lasting Change & Make You New: 7 Verses and 7 Promises
1. In Christ, You are a New Creation
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-21)
Are you haunted by your past, your families’ past, your past actions or habits, etc.? You too can be new. God promises us that anyone who’s in Christ is a new creation being made new; the old is gone. Christ’s life and death can make you new, and you can choose this new life with lasting change.
2. You Are a New Self, so Take Off Your Old Self
Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. (Colossians 3:9-11)
What a promise! We have the power, through God, to be new. A new self. We can take off our sinful nature, our old habits, our old self. Christ is in us, and we can live as a new self.
3. A New Birth of Hope
4. Mercies are New Every Morning
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)
Wake up! Each morning is a gift of new mercies. Each day a new opportunity to live in God’s faithfulness.
5. I am Doing a New Thing
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Isaiah 43:18-19)
Ever feel like a wasteland? No more! We get to join God in a new thing. We do not have to be pulled down or dwell on the past. He makes streams (life) where there was none.
6. God Renews Us Day by Day
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. (2 Corinthian 4:16-17)
God’s encouragement is all around us. Day by day we are renewed, we are being made new, despite our troubles. And best of all? Our future is glorious!
7. ALL Things Made New
And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new ” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” (Revelation 21:5)
It’s not only you who will be made new. He sits on the throne, and is making ALL things new.
Live in God’s Truth of Lasting Change
He’s given you these promises. You can live in them, and move forward in your life. The newness God offers is the foundation. On it, you can build a healthy, hopeful, joyous, new life with new habits. Whether you make big or small changes, keep feeling renewed day after day. He starts the day with new mercies, and is with you, holding you up, every day, day after day.
Bottom Line
As we settle into this New Year, I am thankful for the promise of lasting change and newness. Look to God each day and lean on His promises. When you are weak, remember, He is strong (this is a gift!). Make the newness He promises your foundation, and believe you can experience lasting change and be a new creation this year.
