Understanding My Identity in Christ
Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. — Psalms 51:10
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. — 2 Corinthians 5:17
Author
Faustino de Jesús Zamora Vargas
Summary: The Holy Spirit knows us, sustains us when we fall, and wants to reveal our new identity in Christ to us. Our old nature died with Him on the cross, and we were raised as new creations—children of God, justified and accepted by grace. The enemy seeks to hide this truth in order to keep us enslaved; understanding it sets us free and helps us abide in Christ. If we do not know who we are, we will live as sinners trying to earn God’s favor through works, missing out on the full enjoyment of grace. God values what we now are more than our service. Christ did not come to repair our old life, but to give us His own. He lives in us, and habitual sin contradicts this identity. Our life rests on what Christ has already done for us.
The Holy Spirit never takes a vacation. The Holy Spirit knows us, knows our leanings and crooked ways, and even arranges the circumstances so that our falls do not leave us flat on our faces and we can quickly get back up and continue strengthening our Christian life and encouraging others to follow Christ. For this to happen and have true meaning in your life, the Spirit will need to reveal to you a truth that the enemy has tried to hide from us for centuries and that, therefore, remains a subject yet to be passed in the curriculum of the modern Christian: the Spirit of God has given you a new identity, an incredible identity that frees you from every kind of bondage and allows you to enjoy the delights of the Lord to the fullest. The delight of His grace is an immense blessing.
This truth concerns the definitive death—with no possibility of resurrection—of your old self, your former nature, what you were and no longer are, because on the day you came to know Christ, the day God chose you to be adopted as His child, to be fully approved, justified by His grace, and accepted, He gave you a new identity, took all your sins, and nailed them to the cross of Christ. With your sins, you were crucified with Christ so that your old nature might perish and you might rise with Him, transformed into a new creation. It is not possible to rise without first having died.
In his subtle cunning, the devil never stops trying to make us believe that our former nature before Christ—the old human being who was dead in trespasses and sins—is still alive! and is still capable of governing our actions and enslaving the mind. Our common enemy knows that as long as we remain ignorant of the truth of our new identity—that is, of being children of God—he will be able to toss us about as he pleases. When you understand the meaning of your new identity, you are set free, and your spiritual territory expands, enabling you to remain in Christ.
There are several truths we must understand from this revelation.
- If you are not aware that your former nature died on the cross of Christ so that the new creation you are could be born, then you are not aware of your new identity in Christ.
- If you do not understand what it means to be a child of God—your new identity in Christ—you will miss out on fully enjoying the gift of divine grace.
- If you do not understand the message of God’s divine grace, you will always feel like a sinner striving to perform acts of service for God in order to please Him and thereby obtain His favors. God cares more about what you are now than about what you can do for Him.
- If any of the first three statements is a reality in your life, you are not living consistently with the message of the cross or with the sacrifice the Lord made upon it to give us abundant life.
Christ came to give us life, not to reform and mend ours, but to give us His! In Christ, we dwell together with Him through His own life. He is our life; He is our mind. We are Christians because He lives within the Christian. It is impossible for a Christian to practice a lifestyle in which sin is habitual, for such a person will always feel wretched, indebted, and wicked, which is contrary to our new identity.
To be in Christ is to understand that we are partakers of His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:10); we are a new creation, children of the Most High, and our way of life is not founded on what we do for Him, but on what He has already done on our behalf through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.