Showing posts with label Identity in Christ. Show all posts

One Prevailing Reason Why Bitterness Destroys Your Identity in Christ

You know what the Bible has to say about our identity in Christ and how to leave your past behind you to walk in freedom.

You can meditate on Bible verses that speak about your identity in Christ and learn how the book of Ephesians can help us build that identity in our hearts.

You can even looked at failure in a whole new way and redefine it so that it is a momentary event and not an overshadowing production that takes over our whole lives.

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But if you don't understand how bitterness can destroy your identity in Christ, all that you've learned is useless.

It is possible to walk in your identity in Christ, only to regress to a life of insecurity, hurt, and under a weight of failure and bitterness.

This is the strategy that the enemy will use to cause you to walk away from a life of freedom and grace back into bondage.

This is why Paul said, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage."

One Prevailing Reason Why Bitterness Destroys Your Identity in Christ

Woman sitting holding cell phone head resting in hand sad

The Bible is clear about the importance of forgiveness in the life of the believer.

In fact, Jesus said that if we refuse to forgive those who have offended us, we will not forgive us. "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Matthew 6:14-15

Bitterness will destroy your identity in Christ because it shuts off the fountain of grace from flowing into our lives.

Without the continual receiving and giving of grace, our identity in Christ begins to wither and die.

For our identity in Christ to grow and give life, both to our spirit and to those around us, we must have a constant flow of grace in and through us.

Unforgiveness stops that flow every single time.

Unforgivness is literally a rejection of that grace!

Embracing our identity in Christ requires we first embrace God's grace

Recently Dr. Hackett from the Foundational blog (and who also happens to be my dad), illustrated this for us in a 3-day conference he taught in Zagreb, Croatia.

He had a married couple come to the front. The husband represented God's grace and the wife represented a person who would decide to embrace or reject grace.

Whenever we are faced with a painful situation: a loss, rejection, offense, failure - whatever it may be, God's grace is right behind us waiting for us to embrace it.

Sermon: The Missing Part

We can turn around and embrace His grace, and when we do it will embrace us back!

Or we can choose to reject His grace and walk in bitterness, disappointment, and disillusionment.

This is why Jesus said in Matthew 6 that if we do not forgive our offenders, He cannot forgive us our offenses.

We encounter an enormous problem when we refuse to forgive. Harboring unforgiveness actually prevents our own sins from being forgiven.

As the weight of our own sins continual to pile up between us and God, the life of the spirit - the free grace of God - is shut off.

Without the flow of grace into our lives, our identity in Christ experiences crisis and we slowly begin to sink back into the bondage we lived in before He set us free.

The only solution is to embrace God's grace

Did you know that you can go back and apply God's grace to those times when you rejected God's grace?

Once you've realized how your refusal to embrace God's grace has led you down a dark path of bitterness, negativity, cynicism, disillusionment, and frustration, you can choose to take the grace available to you now and apply it to those past situations!

This doesn't just set us free, but it will set our offender free as well.

You see, in Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant, the master didn't just forgive the servant a large amount of money, he set him free.

Had the master not forgiven the servant, he'd have gone to debtors prison until he'd paid back the debt. And given the size of debt he owed, he'd have been in prison for the rest of his life.

Grace doesn't just set us free, it sets our offender free as well.

It has been said that forgiveness isn't something we do for others, but something we do for ourselves.

I disagree.

Forgiveness is something we do for others as well as for ourselves. Forgiveness is a spiritual act. It has to be, because it requires the grace of God to forgive.

And I am convinced that when we embrace God's grace and choose to extend that grace in a supernatural act of forgiveness, a miraculous freedom takes place in the other person's heart as well as in ours.

Perhaps they are not immediately aware of that freedom, but I do believe that our choice to forgive causes a spiritual release to happen inside of them.

If we want to daily strengthen your identity in Christ, we must daily make a choice to forgive anyone who offends us.

We must daily choose not to hold their offense against them, thereby releasing to them the miraculous freedom that Christ extends to us continually.

This choice, and our decision to follow through with it, ensures that grace is daily flowing in and through us in abundant measure.

We were created in the image of God. He has called us to be Kingdom ambassadors here on earth. Our purpose is to reflect Him and glorify Him in all we do.

When we live and walk in this, we are living and walking in our identity as sons and daughters of God.

And we can only fulfill this when grace is flowing freely as we daily walk in forgiveness.

If you'd like to learn more about your identity in Christ, please consider purchasing these three books by F. Dean Hackett: Discovering True Identity, Agape, and Charis - the Power of Grace

3 Things the Bible Says About Our Identity in Christ

Do you feel like you've lost your joy?

Do you feel like you're flailing in the wind as life yanks you along at warp speed, like you've lost all control?

Do you feel a frustration and emptiness inside that you can't seem to define?

So much of the disappointment and depression, loss of joy and control we experience as believers boils down to one simple truth.

We don't recognize our identity in Christ.

Woman on porch in the snow holding coffee thermos

I know that a lot is said today about who we are in Christ and recognizing our identity in Him, but I believe that many don't know how to identify with Christ. They don't know how to discover who they are in Him.

It is so easy for Christians today to suffer an identity crisis!

We're told how we should look, how much we should weigh, what we should wear, what kind of hair and makeup we should have.

The media has established an ideal look for men and women and if you don't fit that ideal you're marginalized.

Women should be 5'7", a size 2, have thigh gap, wear skinny jeans, and have long straight hair.

If you fit that ideal, you're accepted.

But if you're 5'2", are a size 14 or more, find that yoga pants tell too much truth about your cellulite, and even your mom-do isn't attractive anymore, you're invisible and unacceptable.

But how does our identity in Christ square up with this ideal?

Media in general plays a central role in how we feel about ourselves!

Including social media.

Studies have shown time and again that while social media has done good things, such as connecting long-lost friends and loved ones, too much of it leaves us feeling depressed and empty.

Partly because it is so one-dimensional.

We see what our friends let us see.

We see a filtered view of their life, but we see our own life in 3-D....in all of it's messy glory and then compare our messy 3-D image with their filtered, edited, one-dimensional image.

Just like the ideal that Hollywood has created!

Starved, operated on, drugged, filtered, edited, and photshopped!

If we're not careful, we start to allow things other than God's Word to define us:

Blogs
Magazines
Social Media
Movies and TV

And we begin to define ourselves by our career, ethnicity, economic class, or our appearance.

Even worse, our past mistakes, disappointments, hurts, rejection, and abandonment begin to define us. The fact that we were raped, had an abortion, grew up in a single-parent home, or grew up in foster care or an orphanage; we are an abuse victim, used drugs, were an alcoholic, or were homeless for a season...

these things and more begin to form an identity for us until all of life is lived from that prism.

3 Things the Bible Says About Our Identity in Christ

1. God has no ideal.

"For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them." Psalm 139:13-16

The whole idea that there is an ideal physical image is not only a lie, it is a strategy of Satan to keep us in a cycle of striving for what God never intended and depressed because we cannot attain it.

God created you the way you are for a purpose and a part of recognizing your identity in Him is learning to love and accept yourself as He created you.

2. Your past is an event, not your identity.

"Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God." 2 Corinthians 5:16-20

When Christ forgives our sin, a miraculous thing takes place.

There is a theological term for it: Justification. Justification is a 5-syllable word that literally means just as if you've never sinned.

That is what Jesus' work on the cross did for us. It completely did away with our past so that it is like it never happened. And this work of grace needs to be extended to those who hurt us as well!

Just as Christ forgave us to such a degree, so His grace can enable us to forgive others in this same way.

3. Your ethnicity, economic status and career describe your birth and situation, they don't define you.

"For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:26-28

Now that we are in Christ, our heritage can no longer be an excuse for certain behaviors.

Sure, you may be of Irish descent, but that doesn't mean that you have no control over your temper.

You are now a daughter of God! That is now your heritage, and the fruit of the Spirit should be growing in your life!

Maybe you live on food stamps right now, that doesn't have to define you because you are a daughter of the King of all kings who owns the cattle on a thousand hills!

You are the richest woman in the world! Rich in all things that money cannot buy.

Your career is something you do, its not who you are.

Who you are is an ambassador of Christ, regardless of whether you clean toilets or have a corner office. He sent you here to do one thing alone, extend the kingdom of God on earth.

Plunder hell to populate heaven!

Now do you see why recognizing our identity in Christ is so vital?

Our identity, whether properly recognized as being in Christ or not, clearly becomes the prism through which we live out our everyday life.

And if we are to live a life that glorifies Christ and fulfills the purpose for which He created us, we must recognize and embrace our identity in Jesus Christ.

4 Reasons Why You Should Remember the Past

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

We see that Moses understood this when we read Deuteronomy. The word Deuteronomy literally means "second law", and while it isn't actually a second law, it is a repeat of the law God gave Moses and the Israelites in the desert. Moses is repeating that law to a generation that probably didn't experience some of the earlier events, because the generation that left Egypt died in the desert as a consequence of their rebellion toward God.

Deuteronomy is a warning to the people to fulfill God's law.

While we follow Paul's words, "forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead", there are times when we must remember the past.

It is not good to live in the past, but we must learn from it so we don't repeat it.

Here are 4 reasons why you should remember the past. It's not good to live in the past, but if we don't remember the past, we're doomed to repeat it! #alittlerandr #past #onlineBiblestudy #womensBiblestudy #deuteronomy

This is why Moses called the people. They stood on the shores of the river Jordan - a river that separated them from the land God has promised them - and told them how God had freed the Israelite people, how they were rebellious and stubborn, and how they died int he desert.

How God's punishment had been that a journey that should have lasted only a week and a half turned into 40 years.

Deuteronomy is a lesson for a new generation, not just so they hear God's law but so they understand the consequences of rebellion and the blessings of obedience.

There are 4 reasons why we should remember the past

1. To see how far we've come. I don't know about you but I am sometimes disappointed in myself. I fall, I get up, and I fall again. Like Paul, those things I should do I don't seem to do, but those things I shouldn't do are the very things I do. I look at myself and cry out, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Then I look at where I was 10, 15, 20 years ago and see how far I've come. I am not the same person i was, I actually am becoming more like Jesus. Praise God!

2. To remember God's goodness. When I remember how rebellious and stubborn I used to be, I am amazed at God's goodness to me! I would have given up on me a long time ago! But God didn't give up on me, He saw what I could be if I would just surrender to Him!

3. To recognize God's grace. I can get really frustrated with myself and others when we don't live this Christian life as we should. I forget to pray about things, I react in ways I shouldn't, I get mad and say things I don't mean, I fail to fulfill certain responsibilities. But when I look back, I see His grace to me, and to others as well, and I take comfort in that! Of course, we need to be holy as God is holy, but we can't only be holy by His grace!

4. To remember God's discipline. How do we raise our kids? Yes - we are good parents, we have forgiven a lot, we are sometimes merciful to them and give them desert even when they haven't eaten their lunch. But how do children remember best not to do certain things? By discipline. When they have to sit in time out or experience other unpleasant circumstances, they remember very well not to do what resulted in undesirable consequence. God disciplines the ones He loves. That is what God's Word tells us. And we must remember the past so we don't forget those times when God had to discipline us. God's discipline is one way He shows us His love, because He wants to protect us from evil.

While we read Deuteronomy, we should remember those things that God has spoken to us and done for us personally, so we don't forget how far we've come; so we don't forget his goodness and grace...and yes, even His discipline.

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