What do you think about when you think about lent? Is it going 40 days without your favourite chocolate bar or sugar in your tea?  Is it a time of self-reflection and preparation for Easter?

It’s easy to begin a time of self-reflection by compiling a list – I do x, y and z wrong, I need to be better at this and I need to stop doing that. While the things on our list may be true, and certainly may need addressing, they don’t define us and I don’t think they’re the best place to begin self-reflection. And sometimes, when the list is the starting point, it can lead us into a mindset of  – If I succeed, I must be a “good Christian” or perhaps even “righteous”. If I fail, am I a “bad Christian” or worse “am I even really a Christian at all?”

In our reading Paul reflects upon the hardships that he has endured and how he has endured them, he reflects upon the ways that he has acted righteously throughout real hardship.  To be honest, the list is enough to make anybody feel inferior – he explains how even through beatings, imprisonment and riots he acted with purity, understanding, patience and kindness- he sets the bar pretty high! But before he can even start to set the bar high  we see that something else comes first and it’s nothing that he does because Paul’s righteous deeds are not done to earn his reconciliation with God but actually are a response to it.  If we look at verses to 5:20 and 21, Paul says this, We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.  In fact, if we look back even earlier in chapter five he take this further and says, If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ…  It is the act of Christs death and resurrection that allows us to be forgiven for our sins if we want it and brings us back into the Fathers arms. Before we do anything, before we even begin to consider what we need to work on or what we need to repent of, we are first and foremost, people who have been given this glorious gift from Christ. He took the first step.

In fact, so wonderful is forgiveness offered to us in Christ, that we are a new creation. Our very being has changed from one that was defined by our sin, but now is defined by Christ. For Paul, because he has been reconciled with God through Christ, because he is a new creation, he does everything he can to show people what that looks like in practice. His acts of righteousness are a display of his forgiven nature, and not a condition for it. So it is with us, that our actions should be an extension of this wonderful gift of forgiveness and reconciliation that we have been given from Christ

If we want to enter into any kind of realistic self-reflection, before compiling a to-do list, we need to consider the question of who we are, and who we are is in Christ. Forgiven in Christ, saved by Christ, and created a-new in Christ.

As we reflect upon our own lives during lent, we start in a position whereby Christ has already reconciled us to God and so anything that comes next, isn’t working towards reconciliation but flowing out of it. We start in a position whereby in Christ we have been made righteous in the eyes of the Father and so rather than striving to become righteous, we can consider how we might grow into the righteousness given to us. We are not defined by whether we succeed or fail at acting righteously or by our sins but instead we are defined by our salvation in Jesus Christ.

Yes there are things we need to repent of, things we need to work on, things we  need to change, but let’s do that knowing that our identity is Christ and our salvation is in him alone.

My prayer this lent is that each one of us would know who we are and that is, that we are in Christ. That we would rejoice in the forgiveness we have in him and that we would come to grow as people who are a new creation, through prayer and repentance, into the righteousness given to us by Christ.