A New You for the New Year
Author: Stan Guthrie
January 26, 2024
After the Second World War, Corrie ten Boom was speaking to a church audience about the need to forgive after her experience of being imprisoned for her efforts in protecting Jewish people from the Nazis. After her remarks, as the church was emptying, Corrie was stunned when a man who had been a prison guard in one of the camps came forward and thrust out his hand.
“How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” He had been there, leering, when some of the women prisoners were ordered naked into the showers.
Corrie found that she was unable to raise her arm to shake the man’s hand. The pain she had experienced in the concentration camp as the guard ogled the women prisoners was just too real. Besides all that, her father and sister had died while imprisoned by the Nazis. Thoughts of vengeance filled her mind.
But Corrie knew that because God had forgiven her, she was required to forgive others—even the people who had hurt her and those she loved the most. But she also knew that forgiveness is impossible without God’s help.
So she prayed silently, asking Jesus to forgive her, and to help her forgive him. Then she tried to smile at the man and raise her hand. Again, her right arm hung lifelessly at her side. So Corrie said another silent and honest prayer: Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness.
Suddenly, her arm began moving. In her book The Hiding Place, Corrie told what happened next:
"As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me."
God can do the same for us and begin replacing our old, unforgiving ways.
Like Corrie, everyone has bad attitudes and unforgiving thoughts. God, who is near each of us, isn’t surprised in the least. Rather, He loves us and invites us to put our trust in Him and receive His forgiveness because of Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection. Then, as we grow in Christ, He wants us to give Him these bitter thoughts and replace them with good ones, including the power to love those who have hurt us.
How does this happen? The Apostle Paul, who was in prison for sharing his Christian faith, starts Ephesians 4 by saying, “I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”
Paul tells us that we are to “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
By the power of the Spirit who lives inside every true Christian, we are to put off the dreadful things from our old life and put on the good things of our new life—like putting on a new set of clothes. In everything, we are to let Jesus Christ renew our attitudes. That’s what Corrie ten Boom did, and what we can do, too.
With the New Year upon us, this is a great time to make a fresh start with God. We can be reinvented from the inside out—not by our own efforts to improve, but by His power. When you are reborn and renewed in Jesus, the old, beat-up, and bruised you is gone. God makes you new.
So if you just can’t seem to break a bad habit or attitude, don’t try to reinvent yourself. Remember Corrie ten Boom, and ask God to give you His power to be reborn and “put on the new self” every day.
Stan Guthrie is NCC’s minister of communications and author of Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and The Hiding Place (Paraclete Press, 2019).
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.
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