The New You

Living Free and Confident Through the Exodus

Our new identity cannot simply be built out of Bible verses and wise sayings. It is given by God, and then it has to be assumed and nurtured, forged through a God-guided process of change.

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No Linear Path to Awesomeness

Many people expect the Christian life to follow a clean upward trajectory: accept Christ, grow in faith, become a better person, repeat. But that is rarely how it works.

When we absorb the cultural obsession with progress, optimisation and ‘life hacking,’ we map those expectations onto our spiritual lives. The result is a crushing theology of performance.

So when we hit a dry season, a time of doubt or a moral failure, we assume that God has abandoned us or that our faith is a sham.

Whether you have followed Christ for three months or thirty years, you may have felt this too: the tension between the life you were supposed to be living and the one that you were actually experiencing.

A winding trail,
not a straight highway

The Christian life is not about our upward climb; it is about God’s constant presence through every twist and turn of the journey. It is on the winding parts of the trail that grace becomes most visible.

Your new identity is not your building project.
It is God’s.
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NAME: ********

The good news for us is that the Bible contains a vision of the life of freedom: the Exodus.

It is not simply a useful picture of the Christian life. It is our own story.

Rescue is only the beginning

All of us are on a journey of redemption. Redemption begins with a rescue, but it does not end there. Nor does it shelve the past.

It is the whole process by which God puts our past right, makes sense of all that has happened to us, and makes us into who he created us to be. He works it out through the ordinary material of our lives: the people he gives us, the things that happen to us and the lessons that take years to learn.

The more accurately we understand that journey, the more clearly we can see what God is doing in us and the better able we are to walk in freedom and confidence.

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Chapter by chapter, we will follow the story from the burning bush, through the Red Sea and into the wilderness, and at each stage understand more about the life we have inherited through Christ and what he has accomplished in us.

Coming 2028

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About the author

Brett McLean is the author of Confessions and Reflections of a Traveler. He holds a Master of Divinity from Regent College (Vancouver, BC), a Bachelor of Theology from Charles Sturt University (NSW), and a Bachelor of Arts in Ancient Languages from Macquarie University (Sydney). Written from thirty years inside the Protestant church, The New You is less a manual than a companion for the walk out of an old identity and into a true one.