New Identity - Part 2

I remember seeing a slogan circulated by unbelievers that really made me laugh.  It said something like, “Christians are not perfect, they just wish they were.”

You know what?  That slogan is funny because it holds some real truth.  God’s Holy Spirit within those who know and love Him gives them (us) a desire to be righteous as He is righteous, and holy as He is holy.

Christian believers want so much to be like Jesus.

Remember how the Spirit of God first called you to follow Jesus, to trust in Him, to “get right” with God?  The holy calling of God within does not stop when we first surrender to Jesus Christ.  Paul mentions this in a letter to Timothy, speaking of the gospel and the power of God “who has saved us and called us with a holy calling…” (2 Tim 1:9)

God’s Spirit inside believers continually calls us, drawing us ever closer to God, making us want to be holy and righteous.  That’s the hunger and thirst for righteousness that Jesus Himself mentions in chapter 5 of Matthew’s gospel:

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.  (Matthew 5:6, KJV)

We really want to be pure in heart, and right in all the things we say, do, think and feel.  We want to be good, kind, loving, caring, forgiving, patient, and humble.

Appearances can fool you.

We in the USA live in a superficial society, and that superficiality has a tendency to rub off on believers.  A lesson that many believers could stand to learn is that the clothes do not make the man, the woman, the person.  They’re just an outer decoration (or possibly even a distraction).  A man in shabby clothes may turn out to be a millionaire.  A girl that’s dressed to the hilt may not own cab fare home.

How does this apply spiritually?

Stop and think about how often believers get bogged down & discouraged by the quagmire of day-to-day struggles with sin.   We see our own foolishness, our failings, our lapsed promises to God and to ourselves.  And we may wonder if we’ll ever really change.  While such thinking is foolish it’s also perfectly normal.
I know a hardworking man who really loves the Lord and who is kind and generous with the people all around him.  Yet he smokes a pipe, and he lets slip some rough language when working sometimes.  These things in his life made him feel like a second-class Christian, unworthy to even associate with other Christian believers.

I reminded him that we are all of us unworthy.  None of us are good enough to win God’s attention or acceptance.  That’s why Jesus had to die for our sins, so that we could all enter into God’s perfect grace.

Here’s the truth of the matter: if anyone be in Christ he/she really is a totally new creation.  The old record of things that counted against us has passed away, and all things have become new.  And all things are of God who makes us totally new creations — new creatures — in Jesus Christ.  That truth is an eternal reality that can never be altered by anything.  (See, for example, 2 Corinthians 5:17, 18, and Colossians 2:10-14.)

To repeat this fact, whoever knows and loves the Lord Jesus has already been transformed into a child of God, a change of status and identity that remains forever.

To know the Lord is to receive His life forever (that’s what eternal life is all about).  We cannot ever be again whatever we were before.  It is impossible to see God, and know Him and then go back to being whatever we were before.

But what about the believer who is not yet perfect?

What about those cigarettes, or lapses into alcohol or drug abuse, the use of bad language, a bad temper, the resorting again to lies and/or cheating?  What about those things?

How can we be truly different if we still see some of the same old things in our lives?  If the grace of God is really at work in us, won’t all these things vanish forever?

If look in the mirror and I still see my old face, am I really a new person?  Absolutely.  Whoever is in Christ is a new creation, a new being.

I knew a young man, a high school student who came to faith in Jesus Christ from a life of slavery to sin.  He had been a mess before the Lord Jesus changed his heart.  And he was still a bit of a mess right after.  He slipped back into drug and alcohol abuse and other sins that had owned him before he met the Lord.  He would be fine for a week or so, and then fall back for a week or so.

I was the youth pastor at that time.  Elders in our church warned me to chase him off, away from our church youth.  But we had very strong young people, who were spiritual leaders within the youth group.  And this young man needed the love and acceptance of God’s people.  I knew in my soul that he would soon be alright.

You see, the Lord Jesus owned this young man’s heart and soul, and while the boy himself was weak, Christ is not weak at all.  Soon this young man began to settle down, becoming more stable, growing in faith and understanding.  His life stopped the wild rollercoaster routine.  And for many years now, he has been a dedicated and sincere believer.  He later served as respected elder of that very church, and is now a family man and elder in the church he attends near his home.  He’s also a successful businessman and respected by the entire community.

It may take a little while for the truth to reveal itself, but God’s reality will outshine all confusion in the end.  Once our hearts belong to Jesus Christ, we’re simply not the same.  That is a fact of eternal significance.  It remains true as long as God is true to His Word.
And that’s forever.