All things new

And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. Rev. 21:5

That same Spirit of God who taught us that we were ruined in our old estate, led us gently by the hand till we came to the New Covenant promise and looked to Jesus, and saw in Him the full atonement for sin. Happy discovery for us, it was the kindling of new life in us. From the moment that we trusted in Jesus, a new life darted into our spirit. I am not going to say which is first, the new birth, or faith, or repentance. Nobody can tell which spoke of a wheel moves first, it moves as a whole. The moment the divine life comes into the heart we believe; the moment we believe the eternal life is there. We repent because we believe, and believe while we repent. The life that we live in the flesh is no longer according to the lusts of the world, but we live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Our spiritual life is a new-born thing, the creation of the Spirit of life. We have, of course, that natural life which is sustained by food, and evidenced by our breath, but there is another life within which is not seen of men, nor fed by the provisions of earth. We are conscious of having been quickened, for we were dead once, and we know it, but now we have passed from death into life, and we know it quite as certainly. A new and higher motive sways us now, for we seek not self but God. Another hand grasps the tiller and steers our ship in a new course. New desires are felt which we were strangers to in our former state. New fears are mighty within us—holy fears which once we would have ridiculed. New hopes are in us, bright and sure, such as we did not even desire to know when we lived a mere carnal life. We are not what we were, we are new, and have begun a new career. We are not what we shall be, but assuredly we are not what we used to be. As for myself, my consciousness of being a new man in Christ Jesus is often as sharp and crisp as my consciousness of being in existence. I know I am not only and solely what I was by my first birth, I feel within myself another life—a second and a higher vitality which has often to contend with my lower self, and by that very contention makes me conscious of its existence. This new principle is, from day to day, gathering strength, and winning the victory. It has its hand upon the throat of the old sinful nature, and it shall eventually trample it like dust beneath its feet. I feel this within me, don’t you? [A loud voice, “Yes! Yes!”] Since you feel this, I know you can say tonight that Jesus Christ, who sits on the throne, makes all things new. Blessed be His name. [Several voices, “Amen.”] It needed the Lord Himself to make such as we are new. None but a Savior on the throne could accomplish it, and therefore let Him have the glory for it.

Sermon for a New Year's Day, sermon 1816 - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Photo credit: By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA (VISIONS: Seeing the Aurora in a New Light) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons