I wrote this a week ago after a conversation with a friend. Funny how you always think  more clearly after conversation is over....

2 Corinthins 5:16-21

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

1 Samuel 16:7

For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

As Christians we are often ashamed of the things we did before we became Christians, and are scared to tell people about it because of what they might think. But I was recently reminded of the fact that God looks at our heart, and not at our outward appearance, or our works. So when we are saved, God is always looking at our heart, and our works are just a symptom of the state of our heart.

In the same way, before we were Christians, God looked at our hearts. Our hearts were hard and turned away from him. It doesn’t matter what we did during that time, good or bad, because it didn’t change the state of our hearts, or the way God saw us (Mark 7: 21-23, Luke 6:45).

So when we become Christians, we can let go of the things that we did before we were saved. We don’t need to be ashamed of them anymore, because God has forgiven us. We also don’t need to compare our sins to other people’s, and be ashamed because we did worse things, or more things wrong than they did. This is because we all had hard hearts that were turned away from God, we were all unrighteous and we were all sinners. God saw our hearts, and they were all sinful. So, whether we were jumping through moral hoops and religious rituals, clinging to some sense of moral self-justification, or whether we were throwing ourselves into the pits of moral compromise and doing whatever we could to hurt ourselves or God or others, it doesn’t matter. When you are saved, you are saved. You cannot be more or less saved than others, and therefore you cannot be more or less unsaved than others. What you did may have been terrible, but you were no worse a person than any one else who isn’t saved.

So as Christians we need to remember that we don’t need to hide our past from our friends, our church and our leaders. And we also can’t judge others on the things they did before they were saved. We were all in the same place once, and we are all justified by grace.