Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
John the Baptist told the Pharisees who came to him in the desert: "Produce fruit in keeping
with repentance." (Matthew 3:8) The original Greek word for repentance, "metanoia", really
means changing your perspective from the ordinary viewpoint to the large viewpoint: the deeper
self, where God dwells. For any of us, this would be a kind of waking up, or a kind of
new birth, a fruit of a deeper perspective that comes to the surface.
The more we permit this perspective to rise in us, the more we live as the "new self"
or the "new man" that St Paul mentions, the "new man" who, as he says is "created to be
like God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:24; see also: Romans 6:3-5; 1
Corinthians 1:30, 6:11; 1 Peter 1:14). We are called to walk in the Spirit of the new
man. We can let this happen the more we rest happily in God, instead of resting in our
natural man or ordinary self. We usually live by the ordinary viewpoint,
and that "natural man" as St Paul calls it, is darkened, it's like wearing dark sunglasses
in a beautiful temple at night - you cannot see the beauty. Paul tells the Corinthians,
"The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God,
for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually
discerned. (I Corinthians 2:14). "They are darkened in their understanding and separated
from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their
hearts." (Ephesians 4:18). God through Christ gives us the indwelling
of His Holy Spirit. Therefore, as St Paul tells the Corinthians, "if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). It's
the old man, or the natural man, that has "gone" and the new man has come, in Christ,
for as Paul tells the Colossians, "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"
(Colossians 3:9-10). And the fruit of the deeper or higher perspective
is a peace, "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding" (Philippians 4:7).