Having spent a few weeks on a philosophical topic, I want to celebrate what remains of Lent from now until Easter. Historically, Lent is a time to focus on our need for a savior. As I was preparing for this particular Lent, I came across a post by a young evangelical asking why repentance is necessary since Jesus forgives all of our sins. I believe this young person felt that because he had accepted Christ and believed, he no longer needed to worry about sin. This is a serious mistake, and one that many Christians share. The first time we confess our sins and ask for God’s mercy is just the beginning. There will be many other moments when we need to repent and receive new life.

Deep within every human heart is a longing to become something we’re not. This desire reflects the image of God imprinted on each of us. God is constantly creating new things, and we naturally long to become new as well. An essential part of the Gospel is that God can do what we cannot: He can transform us into a new creation! At our core, we yearn to be new people, and we also want to help others become new. This process isn’t a one-time event but occurs repeatedly as we confront our brokenness and realize how far we fall short of God’s perfect plan for us.

Almost everyone goes through times when they wish they were someone else. During our teenage years, we sometimes wish we were taller, shorter, heavier, skinnier, had a different nose, or different ears. We become obsessed with being someone other than who we are. In middle age, we sometimes doubt the wisdom of the choices we made when we were young. We wish we had chosen a different career, attended a different college or even gone to college at all, studied harder, and so on. We wish we had chosen to live in a different city. At my age and beyond, people often wish they had taken more risks, saved more money, or lived differently. At every stage of life, we long to be different and better. The old saying is true: We are either growing or dying!

Just as God is always active in creating a New Heaven and a New Earth, guiding history into an unknown future, God is constantly working to create a new creation within His children. We human beings understand deeply that we are capable of becoming more than we are today. It is part of God’s image in each of us to recognize when we have sinned, fallen short of God’s plan for our lives, taken long paths, and need to change.

If Anyone Is in Christ…..

My favorite scripture is Second Corinthians 5:16. When I was a new Christian in the 1970s, this was the first verse I memorized. It goes like this:

From now on, we no longer view anyone from a worldly perspective. Although we once viewed Christ this way, we do so no more. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has arrived: The old has gone, the new is here! Everything is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and entrusted us with the ministry of reconciliation—namely, that God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. He has also given us the message of reconciliation. As a result, we are Christ’s ambassadors, as if God were making his appeal through us. We urge you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made the one who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:16-21, NIV).

If you go back and read Second Corinthians, you’ll see that a central theme of the first few chapters is “life and death” (see, 2 Cor. 5:5-9; 2:13; 3:9; 4:10, 15, 16; 5:1, 7). Paul understood that his life before Christ involved a kind of spiritual death. He had been a persecutor of the church. He was a self-righteous, self-centered Pharisee who obeyed the outward requirements of the law but never, before his salvation, experienced God’s life. As a missionary, he faced threats of physical death many times, yet he knew he already possessed eternal life in Christ. Even if his earthly body was dying, he understood that eternal life was growing within him (4:16). Paul realized that in Christ he had a kind of life more important than his physical life. In Christ, he experienced a new life that changed everything. Moreover, he knew this new life wasn’t just for him alone but potentially for everyone.

Nevertheless, Paul does not view this in a simplistic way. He knows that he is not, even at the end of his life, all that God intended for him to be. He still has to press on to become all that God intended. In Philippians, Paul puts it this way:

Whatever I have gained, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I regard them as garbage, so that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own based on the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and somehow to attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:7-14).

Paul does not believe that the Christian life of fighting against sin ends when we accept Jesus as the Messiah. He understood differently. When we start the Christian life, our effort to become the person God designed us to be has only just begun. This is why, near the end of his life, he could tell his child in the faith, Timothy, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (I Tim I:15).

Dying Among the Living.

This may seem strange, but I believe most of us, most of the time, think we are living among the dying. We know that someday we will die, and we recognize that we are surrounded by many people who will also die someday. But today, we are alive, and others are dying. I belong to a Facebook group of my high school graduating class. Many posts are about one of our classmates who has passed away. This has caused me to realize I will be one of those posts someday. What if today we are actually dying? What if what we call our daily life isn’t truly life at all? What if we’re dying among the living instead of truly living among the dying? If this is true, then we need to die to a lot of sinful patterns that prevent us from being the people God calls us to be.

One of my favorite parables is the parable of the rich fool with many barns (Luke 12:13-21). It goes like this: There was a rich man who owned a lot of good farmland. He had such a large crop that he didn’t know where to store it all! So, he came up with a retirement plan:

He said to himself, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and possessions.’ Then I will say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things stored up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.’’ But God said to him, “You fool! This very night, your life will be demanded of you.” (Luke 12:18-20).

The rich fool thought he was living among the dying, but he was wrong: He was dying among the living. There are a lot of people, Christians and non-Christians, who are dying among the living,  fail to realize it, and act foolishly.

Most of us spend a lot of our time building many barns. We are constructing bigger houses, trying to afford more expensive cars, learning new hobbies, acquiring more possessions, searching for better jobs, growing our IRAs, and the like. We do this under the mistaken belief that if only we had more money, more muscles, more leisure, more rest, more square footage, and the like, we would finally experience the good life. But whether we live five more minutes or five more decades, none of those things are truly living: they are just ways of dying among the living.

Living Among the Dying.

As the apostle Paul reflected on his own conversion and spiritual growth, he concluded that instead of dying among the living, Christians should be living among the dying. We are called to live out a new life and eternal life in the midst of a dying world. Paul clearly understood that the meaning of the Gospel is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus empower us to live a new, eternal kind of life today, right now, in this world, even in circumstances that are less than ideal.

All of us can be judgmental. All of us find it easier to see the sin, sickness, and death in others than we do in ourselves. Paul, who I think was a pretty shrewd person, was familiar with this human propensity. That’s why he begins today’s text with the words, “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16). Paul recognized that, so far as his physical body was concerned, the earthly tent in which he lived was in the process of being destroyed (5:1). Paul understood that a lot of the things we think give our lives meaning and purpose do not do so. Success, money, power, health, beauty, good looks, good social skills, good intelligence, and all the rest are passing away just like our physical bodies.

Into this dying world, Christ came not only to preach the gospel but also to live it. Jesus, who had no sin, allowed himself to be treated as a sinner so that we, who are sinners, might experience new life (2 Cor. 5:21). In 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, Paul puts it this way: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all that those who should not no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (5:14-15). Paul understands that sin, human shortcomings, human limitations, and human laziness do not have the last word. The last word is this: “If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation: the old is gone and the new has come” (5:17). Death does not have the last word for those who are living among the dying. By the power and mercy of God, those who are dying among the living can become the living among the dying.

Repentance and New Life.

In the same sentence where Paul talks about the new life he has in Christ and how he is reconciled to God because of what Jesus did on the cross, Paul continues to say that, because of Jesus’ sacrifice, God gave him (and us) the same ministry Jesus had (5:18). A part of our new life is to share with others the reconciling, forgiving, life-giving, restoring, and renewing life of God as we have already experienced it in Jesus Christ. But first, we must deal with ourselves.

Some members of our family has become Orthodox. Each year at the start of Lent, they confess their sins to one another. Additionally, they practice confessing their sins to their priest. Family members says it’s the most freeing part of the spiritual practices of Orthodoxy. This idea that we have not been the people God calls us to be, that we are truly sorry, and that we are ready to change, is important. Lent is a time when we acknowledge that we need a savior. All Christians need to experience the reality of our need for confession, repentance, and new life, not once but continually during our lives on this earth.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved