Hi there! I am Timothy Moore, and I get to be your professor in Christian spirituality. This is Unit Five, and we're going to be talking about our new identity in Christ.
When we talk about identity as a concept, what we're discussing is a person's sense of self or personal worth. When a person has a sense of self and some idea of their personal worth, we're talking about identity. The sources of identity, the building blocks, per se, of identity, are expressed in terms of our voices, choices, or Christ.
Each of us has voices from our past; even if it's earlier in the day, it's still in our past. As we were raised as children, there are voices—parental voices, the voices of our siblings, the voices of our friends, the voices of our teachers, and our classmates—people we went to school with, college with, and employers. Over time, these voices build up, and we place a certain amount of value or weight in those voices.
We determine our sense of self and our sense of self-worth or personal worth based on voices or choices. The choices that we make, good or bad, and the achievements in our lives—all of those relate to our personal choices. We can develop our sense of self and personal worth from either those voices or the personal choices that we make, or we can allow Christ and the words of the New Testament to give us a new identity, a new sense of self and value based on the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Our personal concept of identity is the single greatest factor in what we choose to avoid in life and what we achieve in life. It is a huge factor in what motivates us or demotivates us as human beings. There's a story I read first in Dr Neil Anderson's book, "Victory Over the Darkness.
" He tells the story of a college freshman who only focused on eating junk food and chasing girls. There was one girl in particular that he was interested in, and whenever he heard she was getting out of class or going to be somewhere, he would sprint all the way across campus just to get a glimpse of her or have a chance of meeting her. If he wasn't chasing after the girl, he was going to Taco Bell, getting ice cream, or eating a banana split—whatever it was, it was all junk food and this girl.
As he was running across campus, the coach of the track team noticed him sprinting and thought, "That young man is really fast. He's so fast that I probably need to recruit him for the track team. " One day, the coach saw him running, cut him off, and the young man was agitated.
The coach said, "Hey, I've noticed that you're really fast. " The young guy responded, "Yeah, yeah, whatever; I'm trying to get to this place or that. " The coach clarified, "I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say.
You have a gift; you are very fast, and I think you could potentially get a scholarship if you come out for the track and field team. This could pave your way; this could take care of your education. You have that kind of gift.
" So, this young man thought about it, and the next day, he went where the coach told him to go. He went down to the track, met with the coach, and long story short, he joined the team. He immediately started winning meets, placing either first, sometimes second, or sometimes third; he was always in the top three.
The coach said, "If you will make just a few adjustments—if you eat food for nourishment instead of living to eat, if you eat to live and get what your body needs, and if you’ll spend a little more time in strength training at the gym, I think you could potentially, in this first year, make it to the national championship. " The young man did just that; he changed his eating habits, spent time in the gym, and eventually made it to the NCAA National Championships in track and field. He ran the 200-meter race, and while warming up for his run at the national championship, guess who came and tried to talk to him?
It was the girl he had chased months ago. She wouldn’t give him the time of day before, but now he had caught her attention, and she was trying to talk to him while he warmed up for his race. This was a bit aggravating for him because he didn't want his attention focused on her while getting ready to run in the national championship.
He said to her, "I've always thought you're beautiful. I used to run across campus just so I could see you coming out of class, but now's not the time. I really have to….
" Focus on this race and, uh, if you'll come and see me after the race, um, I would love to take you out for dinner or a movie. But right now we can't talk about it, okay? You're going to have to just give me some space to focus on the race that I have to run.
That's a very different young man than before. He got on the track team; like, all he could think about was that girl. If she had spoken to him, his heart would probably have melted.
He wouldn't have been able to respond to her, uh, but after he became something—that's identity. When you have a sense of self, when you have a sense of your personal worth, when you become something and you have an "I am" statement connected to that, and so what he was able to say to her when she came to him and approached him is, "I am an athlete. I am getting ready to run this race, and I don't need to be distracted right now.
Please talk to me afterwards. " So, his concept of himself as an athlete—"I am an athlete; I have something to do"—these are identity statements, and they radically change what you do and what you avoid and how you relate to people and relationships and the world. And so, um, we really want to get into our sense of identity, our sense of self, and our sense of personal value and worth.
If we can allow Christ to reshape our identity, then it has the potential to absolutely set us free from things that bind us and blind us and help us achieve what the Lord has planned for our lives. Uh, because a sense of identity that does not lean into what Christ says about us is always going to be our limiting factor. It's going to be the choke point that keeps us from being who God wants us to be and doing what God wants us to do.
That's why I said the personal concept of identity is the single greatest factor in what we avoid and what we achieve. So, what I'd like for us to do right now is take just a few minutes to listen to someone who helped me understand, as a young man, my identity in Christ and grow to maturity in that so that I might avoid the things that hindered me and achieve the things that God had planned for me, and that's Dr Timothy Keller. Let's see what he says about our identity in Christ.
What's identity? It's a sense of self and a sense of worth. What makes you feel significant?
What makes you, uh, confident of your value? If you have a sense of self and a sense of worth, we say you've got a real identity. It's an illusion to say that my identity comes from my inner feelings.
People say it all the time: "This is who I am; you decide who you are. " Benjamin Nent, in an essay in the New York Times, said this: "When good writing was my only goal in life, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. " Then he said, "For this reason, I wasn't able to read my own writing well.
I couldn't tell whether something I had just written was good or bad. I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I would have liked to have seen or what I feared to see.
" In other words, when you make anything your identity—when you make a, uh, career your identity, or a particular body your identity, or a particular love relationship your identity—those things stop being good things and they start to crush you. You, uh, you— in other words, he wanted to write—that's a good thing! He should have written!
But when the writing was his identity, he said, "I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth," and I couldn't—I, to feel sane, I had to look at anything I wrote and say, "This is great. " So, I couldn't actually look at it realistically, and I couldn't certainly hear criticism. It's crushing.
It's absolutely crushing. You know, the place where C. S.
Lewis, in Mere Christianity, says we're not really proud of having money; we're proud of having more money than the next person. We're not really proud of being smart; we're proud of being smarter. If you are the best violinist in your little town in Texas, and then you go to New York City, and you get off at Penn Station and you realize the person who's playing the violin and begging and people are throwing, you know, money in the violin case is better than you, and suddenly that high self-esteem you had—see, you were the best violinist in your town—goes down into the toilet.
Why? Because ultimately any identity that's achieved rather than received has to be excluding. In other words, you feel better because these other people aren't as good as you.
These other people aren't as enlightened as you. These other people aren't as liberal as you. These people aren't as conservative as you.
These people aren't as hardworking as you. These people aren't as insightful as you. That's how you feel good about yourself, by looking at other people and just trashing them.
And that's how it's going to work. So, what kind of identity do we need? Here's what we need: you can't take yourself and bless yourself.
And name yourself; you need recognition. You need somebody from outside to come in and speak to you. I know we say, “No, no, no, we don't need that.
” We’re social beings; we’re relational beings. We have to do that. Even when I see people online say, “I have done this and my family's rejected me, but I know who I am, and this is who I am,” suddenly thousands of people on social media are cheering them.
They just got what they. . .
They didn’t just say, “I have decided who I want to be. ” No, they have a new set of cheerleaders. They just took the old set of cheerleaders and said, “Forget it; I want to be part of this set.
” You have to have a word from outside. Somebody's got to name you. And let me go a little further: What kind of person should this be, or what kind of people should this be?
Well, you need the love, and you need the approval, and you need the esteem of someone you esteem if you're going to have any self-esteem. This person, whoever it is, should not be someone who could ever let you down or disillusion you. If you get your self-worth from the academy or from the art world or from individuals or from a loved one or something like that, what happens when they disillusion you, which they might?
Where does your self-worth go? This also can't be a person who's fickle; somebody who's up and down with you depending on how well you perform. Think about this: If it's really true that the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards, that you only have self-esteem if you have the esteem of someone you esteem, will you have self-esteem?
Only if you have the adoration of someone who adores you, then to know that God loves you, the Lord of the universe loves you, that would have to give you the most powerful basis for a stable identity possible. And secondly, is it based on your performance? No.
If it's not based on your performance, it's not only stable, but you don't need to look down your nose at everybody else around you. In other words, the excluding aspect of your identity goes away. So how do you get that?
You're adopted into God's family; that's a new identity, right? You are a citizen of Heaven (Philippians 3:20); that's a new identity, right? You're united to Christ; that's a new identity, right?
But I’ve got to say, when I just talk to you about it like that—in fact, when I just talk to myself about it like that—it's kind of abstract. But Jesus doesn't name us simply by showing up and giving us a new name or saying, “You're mine. ” He dies for us.
So you lose the excluding aspect of modern identity, so you have something stable, so you have something coherent, so you know who you are, so you have an identity not achieved, which is crushing, but received. How do you do that? You’ve got to believe He died for you.
He says so: “I lay down my life for my sheep. ” He doesn’t just show up and give you a name; He dies for you. It's got to go to your imagination; it's got to be the aesthetic core of your life.
You've got to learn how, when you're struggling with what the culture says about your identity—because you're not good-looking enough, you're not smart enough, you're not having enough transformative sex, you're not this, you're not that—you’ve got to know how to pull out your identity in Christ and push it to the top of the deck. You do that generally through imagination. I had a friend of mine some years ago who realized he was extraordinarily upset about the fact that he went to the kind of schools and had the kind of background, and all of his colleagues had made a tremendous amount of money and had high status.
He was in a missionary ministry job and didn’t have that kind of status. He realized it was getting to him, and he realized he needed to put Jesus’ identity at the top of his deck, as it were. One day, he was reading in Philippians chapter 2, where it says, in the old King James, “Though he was in the form of God, he didn’t count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he made himself of no reputation.
” It went to the man's heart, and he said, “Jesus Christ lost everything; he was crucified outside the gate. He made himself of no reputation. He did that for me.
Why in the world am I worried about my status and my reputation? ” And he was freed. See what he did was take it to the center of his imagination—not just, “Here, I believe it.
” If you don’t get it into your imagination, and if you don’t do it regularly through worship, through thinking, through applying it in the moment, it doesn’t go to the top, and you’re back into where everybody else is: cultural captivity. How are you getting through your imagination what Jesus Christ has done for you down to a naming level in your heart? [Music] I hope you took some notes, and the words of Dr Keller sink deep and inspire you to allow the Scriptures to speak to your heart about your personal identity in Christ.
So, what I want to focus on right now is a key Bible passage: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. The Apostle Paul here says, “So we have stopped evaluating others. .
. ” and so we’re talking about. .
. Value! We're talking about worth.
We've stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time, we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know Him now!
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; and the new life has begun. And all this is a gift from God, who brought us back to Himself through Christ.
God has given us this task of reconciling people to Himself, for God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people's sins against them. He gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ's ambassadors, and God is making His appeal through us.
We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God. ” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. There are two focal verses that I really want to hone in on in this passage of Scripture.
Verse 17 says, "This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. " It's talking about a new identity. That means you're not just a result of the voices from your past.
You're not just a result of the choices that you've made. Your identity is contained in what Christ has achieved for you and what He declares about you. This declaration is: "You have become a new person because you belong to Christ.
" You have to know that you belong to Christ. How do you do that? You give your life to Christ.
"Lord Jesus, You gave Your life for me. I'm believing in You. I'm putting faith in You to the best of my ability; I'm giving my life to You.
" When you give your life to Christ, the Bible teaches you, you get a new identity. You become a new person. It says, "The old life is gone, and a new life has begun.
" You're not just a product of what's been done to you or what you've done. You're not just a product of what's been said about you or even what you have said about yourself. You are who Christ declares that you are.
And this other verse, verse 21, says, "God made Christ, who never sinned"—Jesus was perfect and holy—"He made Him to be the offering for our sin so that we could be made right with God through Christ. " Some of the other translations say, "so that we might become the very righteousness of God. " In fact, most translations say that.
So these verses speak of an identity in Christ that we do not achieve, but rather receive. And that's what I want to flesh out a little bit. Dr Keller said, "Any identity that is achieved, rather than received, excludes others.
" It makes you feel better about yourself because you're better than others. In other words, if you're a great football player and you get your identity and worth in that, you absolutely have to exclude other people—like, "I am better. If I'm a wide receiver, I'm better than all the other wide receivers.
" And so you exclude wide receivers on the football team. If you're a great soccer player and you're a great midfielder, then you have to exclude other midfielders and say, "I am better than those people. I have achieved more; I have more athletic ability.
" If it's business, if it's politics, whatever you get your sense of self, value, and self-worth through, it's exclusionary. It excludes other people. You have to be over them; you have to be better than them; you have to exclude them.
The identity that we have in Christ—this is from a lesser-known professor named Timothy Moore—says, "If we receive our identity from the achievements of Christ and the declarations of God's word, no one is excluded; it's all grace. " This is from something I wrote about our identity in Christ. So, no one is excluded.
If our identity is not something we achieve but receive by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, I don't have to exclude anyone. I don't have to believe that I am better intrinsically than anyone else or put anyone under me at all to have a sense of self-worth, value, and identity. And so that's why it's important.
That's why a kingdom perspective, a Christ-given perspective of identity, creates unity. It creates harmony. It's an expression of love; it doesn't exclude anyone.
We take our concept of identity and our new identity in Christ and allow it to shape our view of the entire New Testament. It's a new way to view the Bible—and what I call this is "Kingdom Identity Establishment. " You're going to see the New Testament, the words of Christ, the explanations of the words of Christ by His apostles.
That's how we got the 27 books in the New Testament. Instead of it being a religious textbook, instead of it being just something to study or to have a spiritual exercise, you actually see it as the tool that God is using to shape Kingdom identity. What I mean by that is the identity of God Himself and your personal identity in Christ.
As you read the Bible and spend time with God in His word devotionally, what happens is the identity of God is going to be shaped, and your identity is going to be shaped according to the kingdom principles in God's word. And you absolutely get free because you see. .
. How much God loves you, the acceptance that you have, uh, in Christ, and how His achievements benefit you. You don't have to strive for them; you receive them as a gift of God's grace.
Then you live in that new identity, and that identity determines what you avoid and what you achieve. Okay, we're going to examine some scriptures that, uh, that deal with that, and, uh, I just call it an identity exercise. This is Kingdom identity establishment with the word of God, seeing the New Testament as the way God's going to establish His identity and reveal Himself to you and your identity in Christ.
We're going to use the Bible to reshape our perceptions of God, and that really is spiritual formation—it's discipleship, it's growth in Christ. The more spiritually mature we are, the more we have allowed God's word to reshape how we think about Him and how we think about ourselves. It gives us that new identity and then shapes the way we interact with the world.
So, we're just going to take a few scriptures and do that exercise. The first one is Ephesians 1:3-8, which says, "All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes.
God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and this is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace He has poured out on us who belong to His dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that He purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave our sins.
He has showered His kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. " Now, what you don't know, and what he doesn't know, is that I have a technical director in this room named Trent Hendricks, and he's videoing this so that you can see it and learn. Instead of just reading that, because I just read through that, it could seem like a religious exercise.
It's always good to read scripture, but unless we personalize it, unless we apply "I am" statements and "I have" statements—those are identity statements. When we're looking at the identity of God, it is "God is" and "God has. " When we're looking at our own identity and letting the scripture shape it, we fill in these blanks: "I am ______," "I have ______," and we fill those in with what the Bible is saying.
So, I'm just going to do this for Trent. You don't see Trent, but, uh, Trent is sitting right there, just to the right of the camera, so I'm going to put Trent's name in here, and we're going to read this again. In Ephesians 1:3, "All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed Trent with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because Trent is united with Christ.
" Okay, so we're personalizing it. If Trent is reading this for himself and he's allowing God's word to do what it is intended—which is to shape our concept of God and shape our concept of self, our new identity—then he can write down the "I am" statements and the "I have" statements. So, just in that verse, Trent can say, "I am blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms; I am united with Christ.
" Those are his "I am" statements in the very first verse. Then, verse four, "Even before He made the world, God loved Trent and chose Trent in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes. " So, Trent can say, "I am loved by God; I am chosen by God in Christ to be holy and without fault in the eyes of God.
" There are a couple more "I am" statements. Verse five: "God decided in advance to adopt Trent into His own family by bringing Trent to Himself through Jesus Christ. " So, Trent can say, "I'm adopted by God because I belong to Christ; I'm adopted by God; I am in God's family, and I have been brought to God through Jesus Christ.
" And this is what He wanted to do, the verse says, and it gave Him great pleasure. Man, God wants to adopt me! This is something that God wanted to do, and God got great pleasure by adopting Trent into His family.
All right, let's continue. "So we praise God for the glorious grace He has poured out on Trent because Trent belongs to His dear Son. " There are the "I am" statements.
He can say, "I have the glorious grace of God poured out on me, and I am a dear son of God; I am a child of God. " Verse seven: "He is so rich in kindness and grace that He purchased Trent's freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave Trent's sins. " Now, at any time, Trent, you say "Hallelujah!
" to any of this because, uh, these are incredible promises. Like, Trent can say, "I am purchased—my freedom is purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ; my sins are forgiven because of Jesus Christ! Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! " Verse eight: "He has showered His kindness on Trent along with all wisdom and understanding. " So, Trent can say, "I have the kindness of God showered on me.
. . " and he.
. . has given me.
I have wisdom and understanding from God. He has wisdom and understanding from God because the Holy Spirit. We're promised the Holy Spirit when we give our lives to Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the empowering presence of God, the directing intelligence of God.
That's in the Holy Spirit's intent. So, these are all identity statements, and they're all over the New Testament. It's either telling us something that fills in the blank about God.
God is this. I mean, if we're looking at this passage, God is gracious, God is kind, God is forgiving. God has purchased our freedom, forgiven our sins.
We see characteristics of God, and the identity of God is being established through His word to our hearts. Not only that, but He's reshaping our view of ourselves, and our identity is something that exists because Christ achieved it and God has declared it. It's a reality now.
It's a reality whether you know it or not, and if we don't know it and embrace it by faith, then we will simply live according to the voices of our past, the choices that we've made, what we've done, what's been done to us, and the world is broken. There was a moment when our identity was intact as human beings, and that was in the Garden of Eden before the serpent, Satan, entered that garden, tempted Adam and Eve, and caused them to question what God had told them about their identity. They fell, and since the Garden of Eden and the fall that is recorded in Genesis chapter 3, we have been born into a world that has an identity crisis.
Human beings have an identity crisis because our identity is shaped by voices and choices and not God. As we've seen in studying the elements of the Gospel, this world is not as God intended it to be; it is broken. One piece of that brokenness is our broken identity, and so we have to let that broken identity be replaced by the declarations of the New Testament, the word of God, the achievements of Jesus Christ.
So, let's keep going with this exercise. It's fascinating—it's absolutely fascinating—because so many Christians talk negatively about themselves. I've heard Christians.
. . I've been in leadership, pastored my first church 34 years ago.
I came into my first pastorate, and for over three decades, I've listened to believers, people who've been in church for many, many years, who received Christ decades prior saying, "I am worthless; I'm a. . .
I. . .
" and they just talk bad about themselves. They spiritualize it by saying, "You know, I don't know why God would even have a positive thought toward me. I'm just a terrible, terrible individual.
" They just go on and on about their negative self-image, their negative broken identity. You start looking at the New Testament in terms of being God's method of shaping our identity, and it's just surprising. It's so surprising to me because it flies in the face of all the negativity in my own life, and I'm sure in yours, because we live in this broken world.
All my identity is voices and choices outside of this, and then I read verses like Ephesians 2:10 that says, "We are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago. " What I see from that, in terms of my identity, is I'm God's masterpiece.
That's true of you, too, if you belong to Christ. The word for "masterpiece" is the Greek word "poema," where we get the word "poetry. " So you are something beautiful that God has created.
"Poema" can be poetry; it can be craftsmanship or masterpiece. This is New Living Translation that rightly translates it "masterpiece. " It's true of you.
If you wake up in the morning and you thank God for the day that He's given, and thank Him that He has made you His masterpiece, this is the word of the Lord. Secondly, from that one verse, I've been made new in Christ. We are God's masterpiece; He created us anew in Christ Jesus.
There's old stuff gone, and there's a new Timothy because of the work of Jesus Christ. The third thing I see in that verse is I have good things that God planned for me to do long ago. That's true of you, too, if you belong to Christ.
God has a plan for you; He has good things that He has planned for you to do. There's an impact in God's world that is assigned to you. You're His masterpiece.
You've been made new in Christ, and He has good things planned for you to do. What if you woke up in the morning and your first thought was, "God, thank you for this day. I'm with you and You're with me"?
Jesus said we abide in Him; He's the vine, we're the branches. "God, thank You. I am with You; You're with me, and I am Your masterpiece.
You've made me new in Christ, and there are good things that You want me to do today. Help me to be attuned to Your Spirit so that I can do the things that You marked out for me that You planned for me to do. " It's another perspective.
It's a better perspective, right, than voices and choices from the world determining your identity and speaking into what you're to. . .
Avoid or achieve in life? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth. " Now, when I read that in terms of an identity statement, it's like I'd never even read it before.
Before, I was looking at the New Testament as the method that God uses to shape our perspective of Him and our sense of self and worth. I just kind of skimmed over the top of that. I had referred to Jesus as the light of the world, but Jesus refers to us as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
He said, "You are the salt of the earth, but what good is salt if it's lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? " So I look at that as an identity statement, and I say, "This rightly, I am the salt of the earth," because that's who Jesus says that I am.
Then, verse 14 says, "You are the light of the world, like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. " So I can rightly say, "I am the light of the earth. " So, do you wake up that way?
Do you wake up in the morning and say, "Thank you, Lord, for this day, and thank you that I'm your masterpiece. I'm totally new in Christ. I know that you have things planned for me to do today, and I am the salt of the earth, and I am the light of the world.
" I'm sure grateful that you made me. Is that how you start your day, or do you wake up thinking about voices and choices? Philippians 3:20 says, "We are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior.
He will take our weak, mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like our own. " If we see this as an identity passage, we can say, "I am a citizen of heaven. " That's our identity declaration.
And I have a new body I will receive from Christ when I see Him. What an incredible promise! Identity statements are "I am" statements or "I have" statements.
Romans 5:1-2 says, "Therefore, since we've been made right in God's sight by faith, we have peace with God because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us. Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God's glory. " If I view this as an identity passage like I should, I see things like, "I am made right with God," and "The reason I'm made right with God is because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us.
" I have peace with God. So I am, or I have: I am right with God, I have peace with God. And remember what we said at the very beginning—it's not what you do; it's not your work that determines your worth in the kingdom.
It is the achievement of Christ alone. So that's an achievement statement right there. We are made right with God, and we have peace with God because of what Christ has done, what He has achieved for us.
And then thirdly, I see I'm in a place of undeserved privilege. It says, "Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege," which is just an expression of the word grace. Grace means an undeserved privilege, and we stand in that; we stand in the place of undeserved privilege.
And in that place, we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God's glory. We will share God's glory. This is a great and precious promise of God.
So contemplate the identity statements; look for the identity statements. Wake up in the morning and thank God for this new identity that you have in Christ. There are lists of identity statements in the New Testament.
You can just do a web search for "my identity in Christ" verses, and there are lists of 50, there are lists of a hundred—there are hundreds of verses in the New Testament that God intends to use to shape your identity in Christ. Start claiming those verses by faith and living out of the achievements of Jesus Christ on your behalf, and make those statements biblically about yourself—the "I am" and the "I have" statements. I'm adopted by God.
I'm a child of God. I am loved by God. I have access to God.
I have peace with God. I've been made right with God. I have freedom in Christ.
I'm a new creature in Christ. Old things have passed away; all things have become new. I'm a citizen of heaven.
Make these declarations because the world, which is in opposition to God, is not going to stop talking. There are always going to be voices that say the opposite. God's voice and God's word—that's the perspective that matters, and we have to embrace it.
That's why it's important for us to spend time with God in His word daily and say, "Lord, shape my view of You and give me Your perspective of my identity that belongs to me—not because I deserve it. I stand in a place of undeserved privilege. I stand in a place of grace, and I am benefiting from the achievements of Jesus Christ.
I'm grateful. I know I don't deserve it, but You declare it, and give me strength, grace, and faith to believe what You say about me so that that can determine what I do and what I don't do. " I avoid and what I achieve so that I can live out the good work that you gave me to do long ago (Ephesians 2:10).
So, this is my prayer for you: Father God, thank you that you have given us a new identity in the Lord Jesus Christ. That identity doesn't do us any good here on a daily basis unless we know what it is, unless we embrace it by faith. That's why we need to spend time with you in your word, letting the words of Christ sink deeply into our lives and be like the oil running down into the gears that drive our lives—our attitude, our action, our words.
So, give us grace for this, Father; give us faith for this; and give us the spiritual discipline to stay in your word and let your word be the source of our new identity in Christ. In Jesus' name, I pray, amen.
