Level: 1, Lesson: 9
IDENTITY IN CHRIST I
OUTLINE

II Corinthians 5:17-18: "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 18 And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation."

The phrase "in Christ" is used over 300 times in the New Testament and refers to a union and relationship with Christ that results in you being a new creature. This new identity occurs in your spirit.

According to I Thessalonians 5:23, you are a three-part being, "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

1. BODY: The part you see - your flesh.
2. SOUL: Your mind, will and emotions.
3. SPIRIT: The life giving part of your being. James 2:26 says,
   " . . . the body without the spirit is dead."

Prior to salvation your spirit was dead. Ephesians 2:1: "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins." Death in the Bible means separation from God. Before you’re born again, your spirit is separated from God.

When you’re born again you receive the spirit of Christ. John 3:3-8: "Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. 4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? 5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. 8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

Galatians 4:6: "And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." God places His spirit on the inside of you. This spirit of God on the inside of you gives you a new identity. You have the same quality of life that God has in your spirit, with all the same power, faith, love, and wisdom. I Peter 1:3: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

God’s Word is spirit and it is His Word that shows you what has taken place and who you are in your spirit. John 6:63, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

Victory in your Christian life comes when you’re able to look into the Word of God, see who you are, begin to believe it and then change your thinking and actions to line up with what the Word of God says about you. Proverbs 23:7, "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee."

IDENTITY IN CHRIST I
Lesson Text

We’ve talked about how the Lord didn’t just want to forgive our sins, but that He really wanted intimate relationship with us. We’ve talked about the only way to achieve that is to have salvation by grace and not by our own efforts. If we had to produce it through our own goodness, we would never qualify for it. So, it is the grace of God that has provided salvation. Once we are saved, we become righteous in the sight of God.

I want to share with you what takes place in the life of a believer. Let me start with a scripture from II Corinthians 5:17. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." This verse says that if we are in Christ we become a new creature. "In Christ" is a term that is used over 300 times in the New Testament and it’s always referring to a union or relationship with God. Some translations will actually say "a new creation." Another says a "new species of being that never existed before."

When a person becomes born again, he receives the spirit of Christ. Galatians 4:6 says, "God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father." God literally places His Spirit on the inside of us and we now have a new quality of life - a new identity. We are a totally brand-new person in our spirit. The rest of the Christian life is learning in our soulish mental realm what has taken place in our spirits. Our spirits have already has love, joy and peace and all the presence of God in them. The spirit part of you according to II Corinthians 5:17 was completely changed. Old things passed away. Everything in it is brand-new.

The victory in the Christian life comes when you are able to start looking into the Word which is spirit and life and see who you are and what God has done. When you believe, you’ll change your thinking - change your actions - and begin to plan for success instead of failure.

If you begin to see yourself in Christ - if you recognize your new identity in Christ - then the love, the joy, the peace, and the power that has been deposited on the inside of you will begin to manifest. I pray that this will help you and that God will open up your heart to let you recognize what you have on the inside of you through Christ Jesus.

IDENTITY IN CHRIST I
(Additional Information)

There are actually two yous: The new, born-again you, and the old unregenerate you - the new man and the old man. You should feel good about the new man. As you begin to see who you are in Christ, that revelation should give you joy, peace, confidence, and security. But at the same time, you must recognize that the old man is not godly and cannot be trusted. It should not be propped up and improved.

See Yourself as Jesus Sees You

"Strip yourselves of your former nature - put off and discard your old unrenewed self which characterized your previous manner of life and becomes corrupt through lusts and desires that spring from delusion; 23 And be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind, having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude; 24 And put on the new nature (the regenerate self) created in God’s image, (Godlike) in true righteousness and holiness." Ephesians 4:22-24 Amplified.

You can’t be a thief if you don’t see yourself as a thief. You can’t commit adultery if you don’t see yourself as an adulterer. You can’t be a liar if you don’t see yourself as a liar.

If we really were able to see who we are in Christ, we could see how holy and pure we have become through Jesus. Then this new image of ourselves would be reflected in our emotions and in our actions. That is powerful!

Imagine a woman who was a prostitute before she got born again. Suppose she really asked the Lord to save her. She truly put her faith in Him and believed she was forgiven. But imagine that she didn’t change her image of herself. If she saw herself as just a forgiven prostitute, eventually she would go back into prostitution, or at least into a promiscuous lifestyle. Why? Because it would be impossible for her to consistently operate differently from the way she saw herself.

On the other hand, suppose that same woman was not only born again, but renewed in her mind. Suppose she could see herself as a new person - righteous, holy, pure, and clean. If she could get a vision of that, I guarantee, it would be reflected in her life. She would no longer stoop to that old lifestyle, because she would not want to take the great gift God had given her and put it back into that kind of situation.

Christians are failing in the area of controlling their actions and emotions because they don’t know who they are in Christ. They are looking at their physical circumstances and listening to what others are saying about their old person. They aren’t listening to what God says about the new, born-again part of them. They see themselves as failures, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy Psychology and our society call this low self-esteem.

Who Are You?

We have established a basic outline of the truth - there is the new you and the old you. The new you has the mind of Christ, and all the abilities of Christ. We have the picture of ourselves in Christ; now we need to finish coloring it. It’s not enough to know that there is a new you. You have to have more details before you can actually see what has happened to you in your spirit man.

To get an accurate mental image of your physical features, you look in a mirror or take a photograph or video of yourself. Did you know that when you do that you are using faith? It takes faith to look at a mirror, a photo, or a video and say, "That’s me." How do you know for sure that the image you are seeing is really you?

Many people think that’s a ridiculous question. Yet, I remember a professor I had in my first year of college who asked that very question. He was trying to get us to drop all of our preconceived ideas and come into the class with an open mind. So he took a chair, set it in front of us, and systematically tried to prove to us that the chair wasn’t there.

Of course, on the surface everyone said, "Well, that’s stupid; I can see it." But then he started reasoning.

"How do you know that what you’re seeing is true?" he asked. "How do you know your eyes are accurately interpreting to your brain the things you’re seeing? How do you know you don’t have some kind of a problem that causes you to see things that aren’t really there?"

He was challenging things that most people never really think about. By the time we left his class, if we had followed his line of reasoning, we couldn’t prove that the chair was there after all.

That kind of reasoning is prevalent in our society today. We have challenged basic foundational principles that we should accept by faith. God’s Word is truth and we ought to accept it as such. (See John 17:17).

When it comes to looking in a mirror, most of us have never challenged the validity of what we see. We are seeing a reflection that we, by faith, believe to be us, but it only represents us. For instance, we don’t know for sure that we have hair on the top of our head.

Now you may say, "Oh, yes I do. I’ve seen it in the mirror."

No, what you’ve seen is a reflection of the hair on your head.

"Well, I can feel it with my physical hands."

Maybe so, but you still haven’t seen it. How do you know that what you feel is accurate?

One way or the other, you are taking something by faith. The same thing happens when we look at our spirit. We can’t see our spirit in a mirror, so how can we accurately view our spirit?

There are some people who depend upon their senses so much, that they can’t accept there is any realm of reality except what they can see, taste, hear, smell, or feel. Because they can’t physically sense their spirit, they give up trying. "It’s hopeless," they say. "I don’t really understand spiritual things." It’s because they are looking in the wrong place.

God’s Mirror
"The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." -- John 6:63

If the words Jesus spoke are spirit and life, then the Word of God is not just a book, it’s a look into the spiritual realm. It’s like a spiritual mirror we use to see spiritual truth.

It’s the same thing with the spirit man. You may have read in the Bible, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me" (Philippians 4:13). You may know this intellectually, but you don’t feel it. So when you come up against a problem you feel like, "Oh, man, I don’t have any power." But it doesn’t matter what you feel if you are going by what God’s Word says. The truth is that whatever God’s Word says about you is spirit and it is life - it is spiritual truth.

"Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. 23 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: 24 For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. 25 But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed."

James 1:22-25

James talks about a man who looks in a mirror and sees his natural face, then goes his way and immediately forgets what he looks like. But James also says that anyone who looks into the perfect law of liberty (God’s Word), and continues in it will be blessed.

Just as we look in a mirror to see our physical self, we look into God’s Word to see our spiritual self.

When a person makes Jesus Christ the Lord of his life, there is a transformation that takes place on the inside. Most Christians know this in their minds, but very few of them have ever had an accurate mental picture or perception of who they really are in the spirit. Because they don’t have the correct information about who they are in Christ, they can only operate in the information they do have, and they naturally act out of their old selves. They act out of their old abilities instead of their newfound abilities in Christ. This is where so many Christians miss God’s best for them.

Most Christians have the desire to do the right things, but they feel unequipped. They feel that they don’t have the ability. I know of many Christians who are praying for faith, power, and all kinds of spiritual gifts. The truth is, according to God’s Word they already have them - all believers have them.

Now you may say, "But wait a minute, I don’t have these things. I know because I don’t feel them." It doesn’t have anything to do with what you feel, it has to do with what you believe.

You Are a New Spirit

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." II Corinthians 5:17

Identifying who you really are in Christ and living in accordance with that identity is the key to the Christian life. The key to understanding who you are in Christ is recognizing that it is your spirit that got born again. It is your spirit that changed.

" . . . I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." I Thessalonians 5:23

According to this Scripture, we have three parts - a spirit, a soul, and a body. Paul prayed that God would keep and preserve the Thessalonians wholly, or completely, in spirit, soul, and body.

The body is very easy to identify; it is the physical part of us. The soul is the emotional part, or what most people consider to be their real personalities. It includes our thinking processes, our feelings and our will. Then there’s another part of us the Bible calls the spirit, and this is actually the most important part.

In James 2:26 the Bible tells us that as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. The spirit is the dynamo of our whole being. It is the life-giving force within us.

Here are some questions to think about for this lesson

Level 1 Lesson 9 Questions
IDENTITY IN CHRIST I

1. Read and explain Acts 2:22-23, 36.
2. What question is being asked in Acts 2:37?
3. What is the answer to that question according to Acts 2:38?
4. How many people, according to Acts 2:38, were to repent (turn to God for forgiveness), and be baptized?
5. According to Acts 2:38, into whose name were people baptized?
6. What was the result of people repenting and coming into a union with Jesus Christ? (Acts 2:38)
7. Then what does God promise you? (Acts 2:38).
8. Forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit is promised to whom? (Acts 2:39).
9. Is He calling you now? Is He drawing you? According to Acts 8:22 what should you do?
10. Then what should you do according to Acts 22:16?
11. God will give you what according to 1 Peter 3:21?
12. What should you do according to Luke 11:13?

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