In Philippians 3 Paul said that he was “forgetting what was behind” so that he could strain, press or reach forward toward what was still in front of him. In Isaiah 42, God, speaking to Israel, describing and announcing the coming of the Messiah said “the former things have come to pass” (meaning that they have done their job, been accomplished and have no more work left to do and we have no more need of them) and new things are now being declared. Hebrews 8 tells us that in Jesus we have a better covenant built on better promises that produces a better ministry. The Bible is filled with stories, examples, commands and teaching that reveal that the old things have to give way to new things or else we are, because of our sinful nature, a people who will simply stay as we have always been. How many of us have said “Here we are again” or “I feel like I’m back where I started”? How many of us repeat cycles, revisit struggles or simply stay in familiar patterns, places, relationships and ways of thinking? I’m going to start today with a hard truth that I hope we can unravel together so that we won’t feel overwhelmed by it: Jesus did not die to change our lives, He died to change us so that we would live differently. He died to change our hearts, our minds, our thinking and our understanding, our views and our beliefs, our longings and our desires, our relationships with each other and our relationship with our Creator, He died to change our very nature. Jesus did not die so that He could make us better versions of ourselves, He died so that He could transform us into who we were meant to be. He didn’t die because we had some flaws, He died because we were fundamentally broken. He died because there was nothing good in us, because all of us had sinned and gone our own way, He died because we were all living for ourselves and we were created to live for Him and by Him. Jesus will not change our lives, He will change us so that we can then, in turn live differently. So far in this passage we have seen that the truth that Jesus died for all is supposed to become the one thing that takes such a firm grasp of our hearts that we literally end up controlled and compelled by Christ’s love for us and our love for Him. That truth, that Jesus died for all is then supposed to teach us that He died for one important reason, that we would all stop living for ourselves and begin to live for Him by living like Him. As we discussed last week, living like Jesus begins by how we view or regard others. Jesus came to do the will of the Father and He saw mankind both corporately and individually as those whom God wills that none would perish but that all, even each, would come to repentance. He didn’t view us by our sins, by our stories, by our talents or our abilities, He viewed all of us and each of us by the fact that His Father desired to save us. We must view everyone in the exact same way, not according to the flesh or from a worldly point of view, not by how they make us feel, what they’ve done to us or what they can do for us but by what God has done for them. If Jesus has died for them then I must live for Jesus by living like Jesus, I must be humble, loving, selfless, truthful and above all else obedient. How we view others actually reveals how we view Jesus. We can’t have love for God and not have love for people. Jesus said that the entirety of the Law and the Prophets hangs on two simple things: Love God fully, love each other in the same manner you love yourselves. He actually quoted Moses in saying that the greatest commandment was to love the LORD our God with all our heart, soul and strength but then Jesus went even farther by saying “and the second is like it”, that means it’s equal to it and can’t be separated from it, “love your neighbor as yourself”. John wrote that you cannot love God if you hate people, how we view and love God is directly linked to how we view and love people, there is no division between the two. Today we will move into verse 17 and talk about how we are supposed to view ourselves. I’m supposed to see you as someone Jesus died for and I’m supposed to see Jesus as the One who willingly and lovingly died for all but how am I supposed to see myself? At some point every single week I talk about the two aspects of God’s character that are our foundation, in all things and at all times God is good and everything God does is birthed in love because God is love. Today my prayer is that we will be able to see that because God is good and because we are loved by God that we now need to be changed. It time for all of us to see ourselves as having died with Jesus so that we can start living fully for Jesus.