Ah summer! With the warm weather and longer daylight hours, this time of year brings thoughts and plans for various kinds of outdoor recreation. With such thoughts of taking time to relax and enjoy ourselves is also an opportunity to bask in the reality that we may not only enjoy some recreation, but that we also are a re-creation.

From the time of our conception God’s creative hand worked to make us who we are. Even as King David writes in Psalm 139:13-14: “For your created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb, I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Yet even with God’s creative work sin has been at work in us even from that very moment disrupting God’s work. We are so influenced by our sinful nature that we cannot chose to do anything that is pleasing to God. Without help we would be trapped forever in our sins and their consequences. Hear the Good News as God’s Word tells us: “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the craving of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved.” (Ephesians 2: 3-5)

There is our re-creation! By Jesus Christ’s help we have been made new. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) Scripture even declares how Jesus Christ accomplished that re-creating work and what that means for us: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Galations 2:20) And if you want more details about Jesus and how He recreated us and all people the Bible gives many clear accounts of all that God accomplished for us through His Son Jesus Christ.

Believing that God has re-created us gives us that great reality of not only who we are, but what we have become, and how it affects our lives. “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22-24)

Come, celebrate, and grow in your re-created life. Please visit or contact St. Paul Lutheran Church, Fredonia (672-6731), Immanuel Lutheran Church, Gowanda (532-4342), or Trinity Lutheran Church, Silver Creek (934-2002).