Bud & Bloom - Helen Parry

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, a new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here.
2 Corinthians 5:17

The gospel offers us a new life. 
But first we have to face up to our dissatisfaction with the old one. It is this dissatisfaction that leads to repentance and faith in Christ. As we seek to understand the implications of that, we may hold on to 2 Corinthians 5:17. The difficulty with this verse, however, lies in its translation. The Greek text says simply: ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation.’ Many translations render this: ‘he (or she) is a new creation.’ But this, for me, reactivates my old dissatisfaction. I am still prone to the same tendencies and weaknesses that led me to Christ in the first place. So in what sense can I believe that I have a new life?

New creation has biblical resonances far beyond the individual.
The wonderful promises in Isaiah of deliverance from exile find their climax in the vision of chapter 65: ‘See, I will create new heavens and a new earth’ (65:17). And in a difference context, in his letter to the Galatians (6:15), Paul declares that ‘what counts is new creation’.

Christ’s redemptive work
Has inaugurated the new creation that will, of course, be consummated on his return (Revelation 21:1-5). So, as we put our faith in Christ, we step, so to speak, into that new creation, and become a part of it. Yes, the creation still groans (Romans 8:22) and so do we (2 Corinthians 5:2), but it is the groaning of eager expectation, confidence and faith.

I am not perfect, but nor am I ‘just the same old me’. 
The dissatisfaction I now experience is not the dissatisfaction of futility and hopelessness
but of aspiration and of possibility.