The Brand New You!

Ever wish you could wake up free from your past mistakes, shame, and guilt? The good news is—you can! In Christ, you’re not just a slightly improved version of yourself—you’re an entirely new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). In this first episode of a special series on identity, Michele unpacks the revolutionary truth of your new creation identity, diving into the Greek word kainos to reveal why this transformation is more than a mere spiritual makeover. This week, we’ll explore personality types, spiritual gifts, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence—all through the lens of who you truly are in Christ. So, if you’re tired of striving for some distant sense of worthiness, let Romans 6:11 remind you: your old self is dead and buried. Spiritual growth isn’t about earning a new identity—it’s about aligning with the one that’s already yours. That’s real freedom! 

Check out Dr. Lila Cook's new book here!

Chapters

• 0:00 Happy Monday!
• 2:41 You Are a New Creation
• 8:32 Living From Your True Identity
• 10:05 Today's Kus Word

Transcript

Michele: 0:00

It's Monday, March 31st, and this is Today's Kus Word. Welcome to Today's Kus Word, your five minutes a day, five days a week, inspiration blast. Join me, Michele Kus, your spiritual growth coach, every Monday through Friday, as I drop on you some piping hot freedom bombs. Yeah, you see what I did there. Hello, hello, did you miss me? I missed you. It's been a couple weeks.

Michele: 0:32

I had to take a couple of weeks off because I needed to help my friend, Lila, get her book up on Amazon. I was helping her format it and get it proofread and laid out all nicely and then get it published on Amazon, which happened over the weekend. So if you want to grab that book, I'm going to link it down in the show notes. Congratulations, Lila. Dr Lila, she just got her Doctor of Ministry degree not too long ago and her book is A Layman's Guide to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM, of mental health disorders. So it makes it very accessible for people who aren't familiar with that terminology to get familiar with that. So if you have someone in your life or maybe it's you struggling with mental health issues, this is a great book. That just breaks it down and it's all through the lens of grace and God's love. There's helplines and hotlines in the back, case studies. Some of the case studies made me cry. I'm not going to lie. So it's a fantastic book. Make sure you pick it up and leave Lila a nice review while you're at it. That always helps push the book up in the algorithms, cool, cool.

Michele: 1:52

So this week I am going to be doing a series, Monday through Friday, all about your new creation identity, who you are in Christ and what makes you you. So we're going to talk about personality types. We're going to talk about spiritual gifts, self-awareness, emotional intelligence. It's going to be good. Well, hopefully it'll be good. And this is good practice for me, because I'm actually creating a course with that same material in it for the seminary where I'm getting my doctorate. So a lot of this will be also fleshed out in that course, and when the course releases, of course, I will let you know about it.

Michele: 2:41

So how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow morning totally free from all of your past mistakes, free from all of your past shame, free from all of your past feelings of guilt? How would that feel when you woke up in the morning and none of that was a part of you anymore. So I have good news that actually happened to you. You have been completely recreated in Christ. If you are in Christ, you are a new creation, not a renovated you, a completely recreated you created you. So we are going to take a look at 2 Corinthians 5, verse 17, where it says if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here. This is your theological reality. The Greek word here for new is the word kainos, and that means something that is new in kind. So we're not just talking about a fresh coat of paint or a nice makeover. We are talking about a total transformation. You were not just fixed up or repaired, you were reborn in Christ. You were not just forgiven, you were entirely recreated. So if you think of a butterfly, a butterfly is not like a new and improved caterpillar, is not like a new and improved caterpillar. Right, a butterfly is an entirely different creation. That's the kind of transformation that we're talking about when Paul says the old is gone, the new is here. We're not talking about an upgrade, it's a total transformation, and I love this topic.

Michele: 4:57

I know earlier in the podcast, in the life of this podcast, when it was called New Creation Meditations. It was actually named after this verse and I did a whole episode called You Are a Kainos Creation, because it's fascinating to me that God has made us, divinely, regenerated us, into something qualitatively brand new that the world has never seen before. So you are no longer who you were, you are spiritually reborn. The old self is not rehabilitated, it has been terminated. In other words, you dead, the old self, he dead Dead, he dead dead.

Michele: 6:00

So if you take a look at Romans 6, verse 11, I'm going to read this out of the Passion Translation because it's such a good translation Listen to this. So let it be the same way with you. Since you are now joined with him. You must continually view yourselves as dead and unresponsive to sin's appeal, while living daily for God's pleasure, in union with Jesus, the anointed one. Wow, you are dead and unresponsive to sin's appeal. That's the real you, my friend. You are now joined and in union with Jesus with Jesus, not based on your behavior. This is not about your self-effort. This is all about Jesus's finished work on the cross. You are entirely new. It's not something you earn. It is a reality that you just embrace with gratitude and wonder, actually, and transformation.

Michele: 7:25

Spiritual growth happens when we start to live from our true self, when we are daily aligned with the truth of who we are. That's when transformation really starts to happen in our lives. It's a process of understanding what is already true about ourselves. So you are becoming outwardly what you already are on the inside. So you're not an improved version of you, you are a new creation. Your old self is dead and unresponsive to sin's appeal, and spiritual growth is about aligning your experience with your true identity in Him. Why is this so important, like, why am I talking about this now for the second time on this podcast? Because if we don't understand that we're a new creation, we will continue to live under the shadow of our old, dead self. We'll struggle with guilt, with shame, with unworthiness, with feeling like an orphan an orphan all of those things if we don't understand who we truly are in Christ, and we need to step into that true reality.

Michele: 9:02

Scripture says you're no longer a slave to sin Romans 6.6. It says you are seated with Christ in heavenly places, in Ephesians 2.6. You've been adopted as a child of God in Romans 8.15. And I'll give you more as we go on this week, but this is the foundation, learning to live from our new identity, our kainos, creation identity. Living from the place of being fully loved, fully accepted in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, embraced, celebrated. This is who you are. That's what I got for you today, and today's Kus Word is going to be a very simple declaration about your new identity in him, and it goes like this I am a new creation in Christ. I am a new creation in Christ. So remember you are not defined by your past. You are a new creation. That is the truth that will set you free.

Michele: 10:26

My friend, thanks for joining me today on this foundational episode, the first of I don't know how many I'm going to do Could be a long series. You'll have to tune in and find out. Remember you can send me a text message. Just click the link in the show notes that says Text Michele, and let me know how this is hitting you. Is this hard to believe? Easy to believe? Fun to believe? Crazy to believe. Easy to believe, fun to believe, crazy to believe. And remember to share this episode with a friend who might be encouraged by this message. I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a great day.