A New Person

I was flipping through my bible today and I saw a highlighted passage that caught my eye.

The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you in power…and you will be changed into
a different person.
((1 Samuel 10:6, NIV))

A different person. Cool. But there was more to it than that, I knew. God would change me, but I had to be willing. I had to ask him to change me.
When we’re saved, when we ask God to rule our lives and make him the boss, the Spirit of the Lord really does come down on us, and it really does change us.
Another verse…oh, where is it?…says, "Behold: the old has gone, the new has come." It says more, but I can’t find it right now. I’ll ask my dad later, it’s his favorite verse. Anyway, there are a lot of verses that tell us of the changing inside us that takes place when God enters our hearts.

So, what is this change? It’s more than just being able to say, "I’m a Christian." It’s more than wearing a cross necklace or your mom having a little fish on her car. This change is inside us. When we become Christians, we God gives us the gift of life, so we will go to Heaven when our earthly bodies, damaged and flawed, die. God also gives us his Spirit, which helps us to love others and have faith. The final gift is the Word, the bible. This is our manual for life. It tells us just about everything we need to know to be happy and to live forever. Without those gifts, we are empty, but with them we are ready to face the world and share those three gifts with others.

When we become Christians, we become more like Jesus. No, we will never be exactly like him. But we will have the gifts that he has given us, and so we will be an image – a reflection – of him. And there’s no greater gift than that.