Picking up the threads where I left them before Christmas. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. And I also hope you had some time to contemplate and reflect on the awesome miracle that took place at the birth of Jesus. The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, actually came to dwell within the human body of baby Jesus. This is not just symbolic language. We are talking about realities here. How could the God who created the universe become a human being and not cease to be God? As a human being He was limited by time and space. As eternal God He is unlimited. How did that work? The Apostle Paul gives us a clue in his letter to the Philippians 2:6-8 "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross!" (NIV)
The Spiritual Identity of Jesus
All four Gospels in the New Testament depict Jesus as fully human. When he was growing up as a baby, he had to go through the same process that we all went through. He had to learn how to speak Aramaic and later possibly Greek, he had to crawl, then walk and grow... He was fully human, yet in His spirit He was the eternal, almighty Son of God. When did Jesus become aware of His spiritual identity? We don't really know. The Bible doesn't tell us. We only know that by the time he was ready to receive his Bar Mitzva at the age of 12 He was already aware of His divine identity. Luke tells us the story towards the end of the second chapter of his Gospel.
But the Bible also insists that Jesus did not use any of His divine powers as the Son of God while He was here on earth. Some apocryphal Gospels (like the Gospel of Thomas) depict Him as some sort of a "superhuman", making doves out of clay as a toddler and then breathing on them and they became alive... This is not the way the Word of God portrays Jesus. Jesus was fully human. He emptied himself of his divine attributes and powers and chose to operate as a human being. As the second Adam (see Romans 5:12-21) He was living as a representative of the human race. That's why it is safe to say that He knew about His divine identity by faith. When God the Father revealed it to Him, He had to believe it. Against the physical appearance and the physical reality that suggested to Him that He was only human, Jesus had to exercise faith and believe that in the spirit He was the Son of God.
Satan challenged Him on that one and tempted Him to disbelieve God. "If you are the son of God... " he said three times, trying to get Jesus to act in violation of His mission and calling (Matthew 4:1-11). All the miracles that Jesus performed He performed as the son of man, through faith and the mediation of the Holy Spirit. This is very important for us to note - because we tend to think that Jesus was absolutely out of reach for us as a role model. But He wasn't. He actually expected His disciples to do the same works and even greater works than He did. (John 14:12). Why? Because He demonstrated to them what every human being can do if He or She is connected to God in the Spirit and exercises faith. (Mark 11:22-25) And in the book of Acts the Bible shows how the first Christians actually took Him by His word and did exactly the same miraculous deeds by faith, even to the point that Peter's shadow would heal people and cloths taken from Paul's body would heal people and drive out demons. (Acts 5:15/Acts 19:12)
Our Spiritual Identity as Believers
Where am I going with this, you may ask. Surely we cannot compare ourselves with Jesus, can we? We don't have a divine nature in our spirit as He had. We are not God. We are fallen human beings, sinners, separated from God, weak and feeble and prone to fall easily. - Well, that is describing our flesh and the carnal reality. But the Bible actually teaches that something dramatic happens in the moment a person puts their trust in Jesus and is born again. I have touched on that in my last post. In our spirit a dramatic change takes place the moment we are born again. This change has very far reaching consequences and is meant to completely revolutionize and change our lives - if we can believe it and exercise faith.
Remember - spiritual realities are not directly accessible to us via our 5 senses. We have to access them through our sixths sense of faith. Most Christians do have some sort of an emotional reaction when they experience the new birth and are first touched by the Holy Spirit. My personal testimony is like that. When I was 12 years of age I had my first encounter with the Holy Spirit and was born again. That was a very powerful emotional experience for me. I really felt that something profound had happened to me and a real change had taken place. But the emotions didn't last long. After a few weeks or months they pretty much went back to normal. That's when my problems started, because I hadn't been taught how to walk by faith. So I deduced from the lack of emotional closeness to God that I have actually moved away from God or that I had in some way lost it. A life of spiritual struggle began...
Some Christians never experience an emotional high at conversion. Does that mean that they didn't really "get it"? - No. Spiritual realities have to be accessed by faith, not by our senses. You can be born again and connected to God in your spirit and yet feel perfectly normal most of the time... Only as you exercise faith and implement what you believe the spiritual reality starts to dominate and penetrate the physical reality.
So what does the bible teach about our spiritual identity?
A New Creation
Something brand new enters our personality and changes our identity the moment we put our trust in Jesus. Paul puts it like this in 2. Corinthians 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come." Where does this change take place? It is obviously not in the physical body. Our physical features do not change when we get born again. The body looks pretty much the same. It is also not in our soul realm, in our psyche. If we struggled with emotional problems before we became born again, usually the problems don't immediately disappear after we get born again. The change happens in our spirit, in the deepest part of our soul that connects with God. Whereas before we were separated from God in our spirits and therefore spiritually dead, by putting our faith in Christ we allow God to come in by His Holy Spirit and recreate our Spirit in a way that it is connected with God and can now have fellowship with Him. We now can worship Him in Spirit and in truth.
From Sinner to Saint
In Romans 5:8 Paul writes "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us". We were sinners before the new birth. That was our identity. We were spiritually dead, disconnected from God and we couldn't help but sin and live in unbelief. Now, after the new birth, who are we? The New Testament refers to Believers as "saints". That is a complete change of identity. As soon as you are born again, you are no longer a sinner by default. You are a saint. A holy one. You are righteous, cleansed and made new.
It is very important to note again that the bible is talking about realities here. Spiritual realities. We are not only forgiven and left unchanged. The core of our identity changes the moment we are born again. We actually become "the righteousness of God". 2 Corinthians 5:21 "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." You are completely righteous in Christ.
Partakers of the Divine Nature
The New Testament goes even further. It actually talks about us being partakers of the divine nature. 2. Peter 1:4 "Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires." That means that in the spirit we are connected to God in a very real way. We are no longer "only human", weak, feeble and shaky. We can walk in total victory over Satan, over sin and evil. We have the fullness of God dwelling in us through Christ (Colossians 2:10). Our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1. Corinthians 6:19), we are one spirit with God (1. Corinthians 6:17). All these statements sound just too good to be true, right? And often enough they contradict our experience. In our experience we sometimes give in to sin, we fall, we make bad choices and do stupid stuff. So most of us come to doubt the truth of what the bible says. We think this must be just figurative language... Maybe some day in heaven we will be all that. But here on earth? Well, it is for the here and now. But it only becomes effectual and real when we renew our minds and exercise faith.
Renewing the Mind to the Truth of God's Word
In Romans 12:2 Paul exhorts the Christians "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Our mind is the key to accessing this spiritual reality. Every single Christian who has been born again is a new creation in his or her spirit and is connected to God in a very real way. This is true regardless of our theology or our understanding because the Bible says so. In the Spirit you are AWESOME, if you have put your faith in Christ. You are not a sinner, you are a saint, connected to God in the Spirit. You are a loved, cherished and accepted Son of God. - But whether you actually get to experience the fruit of this your new identity in your daily life or not depends on the way you think. If you think that you are still a sinner, only forgiven, but not really changed inside, you will live like that. You will struggle with sin and feel that you are not really able to change. You will feel condemned and discouraged and weak. The key is faith - you have to choose to believe that what the bible says about you is true. And then act on it. And you will find that it is actually true. This is the victory that overcomes the world - even our faith (1 John 5:5)
Becoming like Jesus
The goal for every Christian is to actually become like Jesus. Jesus made it very clear that He expected His followers to become like him. "A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40) Now I hope you can see how this is actually possible. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our spirit we can by faith learn to live from the spiritual reality of our new identity. We will never be like Jesus in the sense that we become incarnate deities. He was the only SON OF GOD in the Flesh, the second person of the Trinity. But we have become His brothers and sisters, coheirs with Christ, little replicas of our brother. We can learn by faith to do the works that He did and even greater works. He is in us, the Father is in us, the Spirit is in us, we are in Him, we are in the Father, we are in the Spirit. These are awesome spiritual realities.
I don't know what that means to you. But I am absolutely thrilled and blown away by the prospect of it. God is much more real than I ever thought He could be. And He is much better than I thought He was. He is awesome - I just had to start to believe it and then I began to experience it. Changing this paradigm about my identity in Christ made a HUGE difference in my life. And it can do the same in yours. It is the truth of the Bible, waiting for you to believe it.
Until next week!
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