The Day Everything Changed

The Day Everything Changed

— By M.T. Clark — P-2009, 07/07/2026 — Today’s Audio Podcast

Today’s Message on YouTube:

Today’s photo of a sandy riverbank, a wooden dock reaching out over calm water with a white motorboat moored alongside, a pair of kayaks resting on the sand, and a wide blue summer sky stretched over the pine-lined far bank of the Schroon River comes to us from yours truly as I captured this tranquil summer view on July 3rd, 2026. 

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I am writing to you still carrying the rest of a good holiday weekend. This past weekend I was up on the Schroon River for a graduation party for my nephew Patrick and my niece Maddie, and since it was mostly my wife’s side of the family, I happily took up my role as the in-law who suns himself on the beach, slips into the river to cool off, and disappears into a good book between the conversations. 

The book in my hands this time was on the baptism of the Holy Spirit, by Willard Cantelon, which struck me as a fitting thing to be reading with my feet in the sand and the water moving by. Even on a restful vacation holiday weekend, my soul keeps reaching for God. 

God doesn’t clock out when we go on vacation, and the same Holy Spirit who helps us on our hardest working days is just as present and just as available on a lazy afternoon by the river. The question is whether or not we will seek His company during our “me time” or not.  A moment in God’s presence can change everything, so we should seek Him when we have the time.

Our series, “Freedom Stories,” continues today with the moment that sits at the center of every freedom story — the day everything changed.

The Day Everything Changed

When a person comes to Christ, something far greater happens than a decision to behave better, to attend church, or to clean up an area of life that had gotten out of hand.

Paul reaches for the strongest language he can find to describe it. He writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV), “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” 

He does not say the person in Christ is reformed, or improved, or handed a better set of rules to try harder to keep. He says the person in Christ is a new creation, and that the old has passed away and the new has come.

That word matters. Paul is pointing to a fresh act of creation — the same power that once spoke light into the darkness is now at work inside of us when we put our faith in Jesus. 

Coming to Christ is not the old self signing up for a renovation. It is a new self being brought into existence by God.

I know the difference firsthand. When the Lord first laid hold of me, one of the earliest things that changed was not my behavior, but my allegiance, and it showed up in a way that surprised me. 

For years, I had given myself to eastern mysticism and Buddhist meditation, searching for a peace I could never seem to keep, and I had a shelf of books I had studied almost like scripture. 

Not long after I came to Christ, I gathered those books up and burned them. I do not say that to boast about a bonfire. I tell it because it was the outward sign of an inward reality I could not deny — the old things really had passed away, and I no longer belonged to what used to own me.

There was some real spiritual warfare happening in the decision to burn all my Buddhist books.  I felt compelled to do it by the Holy Spirit’s prompting and God’s word in Acts 19:19. And there seemed to be some angry resistance as I stoked that fire. As I decided to only go the Lord’s way and to follow the truth of His word only, the demoniac spiritual forces of darkness seemed to protest in angry but powerless defeat. 

My case may be a bit extreme, but this is where many of us get stuck, because we come to faith still believing that the gospel is mainly an offer to help us become a better version of the person we already were. 

In my case, I had to reject all of the teachings of my former “philosophy” because it was not only tied to demonic spirits of an occult religion but because they also taught a self-sufficiency that denied the depth of my sins and the truth of the Sovereign and Holy Creator God.  

Similarly, all of us have to reject the idea that we just needed a little bit of improvement when we come to Christ. 

In this uninformed view, we picture Jesus remodeling the house we had been living in — fresh paint on the same walls, the same cracks patched over. 

But Paul is describing something far more radical than a remodel. The old house has been condemned, and God is building something entirely new on the ground He has claimed for Himself.

The old self — the one defined by its failures, its appetites, its grief, and its shame — is not put on probation when you come to Christ. 

According to Paul, that old self is reckoned dead, and a new creation stands up in its place, made alive in Christ and given an identity that was never available under the old arrangement.

Here is what most people miss, and missing it costs years of needless discouragement. 

The change is real before it is complete. 

The moment a person is in Christ, the new creation is a finished fact in the sight of God — and at the very same time, the working of it out in daily experience takes time.

That is not a contradiction. It is the whole shape of the Christian life. Scripture can call us new creations and, in the same breath, call us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. 

The newness is settled at the root the instant we belong to Christ. The “living out of it” or the “living into it” is the patient, lifelong work of learning to agree with what God has already declared to be true of us.

So, when the old patterns still knock on the door — and they will — do not read the knock as proof that nothing really happened. A knock at the door is not the same as a resident inside. 

I burned my Buddhist books because the old thoughts of my former beliefs still came knocking after I was born again and a part of me was tempted to try to reconcile my former mystical beliefs with my new life in Christ.  Even though I made this extreme act of renunciation and continually confirm my decision to follow Christ alone, the old thoughts and temptations to be a “Buddhist Christian” still come from time to time.  

As ridiculous as that might sound, many believers have similar contradictory temptations (like beer-drinking Christians or porn watching Christian’s) that stop them from being free. 

 Of course, temptation isn’t sin, and we have to recognize when temptations and condemnation come from without rather than from within. 

The difference in temptations that come after we are in Christ is that they no longer have a home in us, because the One who makes all things new has already moved in. 

The old things have passed away in the eyes of God, the verdict has been handed down, and your task now is not to manufacture a new self by sheer effort but to keep learning to live as the person He has already made you to be.

This is deeply freeing for anyone who has ever wondered whether their conversion truly took. 

You do not stay a new creation by performing well enough to keep the title. 

You are a new creation because of what Christ has done, and your worst day does not revoke it any more than your best day earned it.

If today feels less like a dramatic turning and more like a slow, unglamorous becoming, take heart. 

The God who declared you new is faithful to complete the work that is to be done in you.

Old things have passed away. All things have become new. And the day everything changed for you is still unfolding into all that He said it would be.

Keep on walking and talking with God.

— M.T.

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“The views, opinions, and commentary of this publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries, or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the author may represent.”

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