Paul says that we are a new creation in Christ. We are free to look at things from a perspective outside of ourselves that is in a spacious place and not crouching in the narrow places. I am no longer confined to what you think or say about me. Who I am is determined by what God says of me. He created us by speaking, and he recreated by speaking as well. When God reconciles us to himself by forgiving our sins, he is not employing an accounting trick, but he is giving us a new identity. We are a new creation because he says we are. We show the paucity of our language when as Lutheran preachers we narrow the Gospel down to the forgiveness of sins. The more expansive view is there if we think about and it is spelled out by Luther in the sixth chief part of the Small Catechism: “Where there is forgiveness of sins there is life and salvation”.
Our theology is certain Luther says “And this is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promises and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”[1]
[1] . LW 26:387:
