While I was in Indiana last week, Jim Dorn told me this story. I thought you would like it.
There was a family that lived out “in the sticks”, far from civilization. One day the family made their first trip to the “big city” and visited a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and back together again. The boy asked his father, “What is this, father?” The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, “Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don’t know what it is.”
While the boy and his father were watching wide-eyed, an old lady in a wheel chair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them and into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched small circles of light with numbers above the wall light up. They continued to watch the circles light up in the reverse direction. The walls opened up again and a beautiful 24-year-old woman stepped out.
The father turned and said, “Son, go get your mother.”
The Bible says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Yes, we can be changed from the old into the new person! The Gospel is God’s power to make you different than you were. How else do you explain the radical change in Paul? He was transformed from a persecutor to a preacher, becoming an advocate of that which he once abhorred.
What about the conversion of the Corinthians? In 1 Cor 6:9-10 Paul said some of them had been sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexuals, thieves, greedy, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers
What happened? He says in verse 11, “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. What a drastic change! What a wonderful change! Have you seen that change in others? Or maybe yourself?
Yes, thank God through the Jesus Christl we can step into “God’s elevator”, the Gospel, as the old, ugly and sinful self, and step out as a new, beautiful, saved soul.
ThePreachersWord 