LENT DAY 5: Dressed in Someone New

Day 5 Monday - Feb 27, 2023; Feb 19, 2024; Mar 10, 2025

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. -Galatians 3:27

Before I got married, I had one undershirt that I had been wearing for some 10 years. It was a ratty, torn mess of a shirt. My soon-to-be wife hated it. Any time she noticed I was wearing it or she saw it in my laundry she would threaten to throw it out. My insistence to keep on wearing it seemed an affront to all fashion decency. Finally, at our wedding, as a sign of our new life together, I wore it under my tux for the last time. I said to her that day we would tear it up and throw it out.

In Colossians, Paul says that “you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” (Col 3:9-10). Some of the old self he describes as “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness” as well as “anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk” (v5, 8). Then he tells them to “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other…And above all these put on love” (v12-14). That’s quite the wardrobe change.

In Colossians, Paul is speaking descriptively of the change between the old self compared to one adorned in the new self. In Galatians, Paul puts this wardrobe change in the language of its source: “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” The new life is described not according to the new ways one lives by but the source by which this new way finds life in us: Jesus. And baptism is particularly named as the act upon which God rips off the old ratty sin that tatters our image before God in this world and puts on something different. If we only hear the description of the new and old self, we might think our closet only has that old life to wear because it is sometimes easier to see things like our immorality or our obscene talk in the closet of our past than it is to see things like humility and kindness. It helps to know how this new self gets in our closet. It gets there by baptism. From the moment we are baptized, we are dressed in Jesus. From that moment on, whatever ratty, sin-stained shirts we put in our closet, there is another wardrobe we can put on each day. 

In our life together with God, it is the only garment worth wearing.

Clothe me, O Christ, in your very self. Help me, Holy Spirit, to put off the old sin-stained clothes. See me, Heavenly Father, through your Son Jesus. Let me never dare stand before you without Him who you dressed me in at my baptism. And grant that the world may see him too, for the honor and glory of His holy name. Amen.

This post is a part of my daily Lenten devotional on Baptism. You can read more about it here.