The new you won’t have all of your attitudes or actions immediately changed to be like Jesus. However, learning who you are “in Christ” is the real starting point for growth. You already know all about the old you –you have lived with yourself all of your life and no doubt learned to hate that sin-controlled flesh. So there is no point in analyzing it any more.
The law gives power to sin –to your old self. But the new you has no relationship to the law and therefore sin has no control over you. You are free to let the Spirit express Himself –through love– to those around you. It is being free from the law that you are able to begin to experience freedom from all the religious bondage that runs rampant in the Christian realm. Read these Scriptures closely and carefully consider your new identity.
And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)
And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:10)
Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. (Hebrews 10:13-14)
But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation (Colossians 1:22)
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. (Colossians 2:9-10)
Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God. (Romans 15:7)
You have been set apart from the rest of the world. You have been washed, sanctified and justified. From God’s perspective, you are now holy! He created you –that new creation– with a purpose. Here’s that passage once again that describes God’s purpose for you in this world –it’s why you have been set apart.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. 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. (2 Corinthians 5:17-21)
You have a ministry –it’s not a mystery for you to hope to learn about some day. The ministry you have is being God’s ambassador –telling others “in Christ” that they have been set free from the law of sin and death. He doesn’t count men’s sins against them. God has reconciled them to Himself –taken away their debt –removed all the roadblocks. They too, now have the righteousness of God!