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Your Identity in Christ and the Difference it Makes

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose
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Your Identity in Christ and the Difference it Makes

June 8, 2024
Knight & Rose Show
Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss the concept of "identity in Christ". We discuss how your identity in Christ changes your desires, capabilities, priorities and goals. We contrast your identity in Christ with non-Christian ways of viewing yourself. We discuss the ways that a stronger identity in Christ helps you to resist the culture and have an active, productive relationship with God.

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Show notes, outline and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2024/06/08/knight-and-rose-show-50-identity-in-christ

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Music attribution: Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.
Welcome, Rose. So today,
we'll be discussing the concept of identity in Christ. We're going to begin by discussing what that phrase means, and then we're going to talk about how we can apply that concept to our decision-making and priorities.
So I think to start with, we should probably have a definition
of that term. Yeah, good idea. So when we talk about identity in Christ, we're talking about viewing ourselves first and foremost as a Christian, as a child of God, as who God declares us to be.
It says that we are not identifying ourselves by what others think of
us or by what we may do best at work or play or how the culture identifies us, but seeing our primary identity in who God says we are. Okay, so I've had conversations with people who are not Christians, and they have the idea that if there is no God, then who we are is we're a very complex machine made out of meat, just like an animal, but maybe with other capacities. So is that what God says we are? Of course not.
So yeah, I think that's an
important component of finding our identity in Christ is realizing that we are created by an intelligent designer, that we're not the product of blind forces or accidents or time and natural selection. We are the union of a physical body and a non-material mind. We have free will and consciousness, and as such we are morally accountable to the one who created us.
God created us
thoughtfully, purposefully, beautifully, and we are accountable to Him morally in all things as well. Yeah, and that actually buys us a lot of stuff at the practical level. This is clear, especially when you start thinking about trying to form a relationship with someone, how is that going to be different if they think that they're a complex machine made out of meat and all their behavior is biologically determined, then if they believe in something like Darwinism, then they're thinking, oh, relationships are about leaving behind the fittest offspring, so they're going to choose mates based on physical qualities.
They're not going to
care about a spiritual constitution or a spiritual purpose or a moral purpose. They're not going to result in a satisfying, meaningful relationship. Absolutely, and the studies agree with you, of course, on that.
It seems to be what's going on on college campuses and in the young dating scene, but this results in a lot of emotional damage and a lot of mistrustfulness. It really harms a person's ability to have a healthy, successful, happy, long-term, high-quality relationship when they've got that kind of baggage that you're talking about that inevitably comes with making the decision to act like an animal, viewing ourselves just as more evolved animals. This is a huge difference.
If you want to do things right, you want to get a certain outcome,
then you have to care about these things. You can't just go, oh, we have a lot in common. I'll give you an example.
I just blogged about this again. This is something I learned when I
was reading J. Warner Wallace's book, God's Crime Scene. Yeah, good book.
Yeah, it's a great book. Everything by J. Warner Wallace is good, but this one is really good for handing to a non-believer who is an engineer or a tradesman, somebody like that who likes evidence. Anyway, in chapter six of this book, he has a couple of studies, and the studies are about the difference that a rationally grounded belief in free will makes to your ability to be moral.
I'm going to read you a little clip from the book about each study that I
prepared in advance. He writes this, students who were exposed to deterministic literature prior to taking a test were more likely to cheat on the test than students who were not exposed to literature advocating determinism. The researchers concluded those who deny free will are more inclined to believe their efforts to act morally are futile and are therefore less likely to do so.
Makes sense. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that before, but yeah. Yeah, let's look at the second one.
He writes, a study conducted by researchers from Florida State
University and the University of Kentucky found participants who were exposed to deterministic literature were more likely to act aggressively and less likely to be helpful towards others. So you can kind of see the difference it makes. If you have a Christian worldview, then you believe you have free will, then this is going to affect whether you behave morally or not.
And if you don't have a Christian worldview and you think that you're a complex machine made out of meat that doesn't have free will, then your view of morality is going to be completely different. Now, imagine running a long-term relationship with one or the other and what kind of outcome you're going to get. It makes a difference.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think about the situation when an atheist wants to break the moral law, you know, whether it's the legal law or not, they want to do something that's immoral for selfish reasons, and they realize they can escape the social consequences. They know, you know, no one's really going to find out about this.
Why would they do the right thing when it's against their
desires? It's very different for Christians when, you know, because we don't want to harm our relationship with God. We have an ongoing relationship with Him. It's the most important thing to us, and we know that we're accountable to Him, that He knows everything.
Everything's
going to be found out. Everything we say, everything we do is going to be found out. It's not hidden from God.
For atheists, they don't have that, and we in fact do see that
the further away our culture gets from Christianity and from Judeo-Christian beliefs and values, the more we see and hear about people trying to behave immorally every opportunity they get. Mm-hmm. We actually did a whole show on this.
Episode number 13 is entitled
Why Should I Be Moral, and we talked about whether it's rational to adopt the moral point of view against your own self-interest. So everybody can be nice and be good when it's what they want to do, when it's for their benefit. But only one worldview grounds doing the right thing when it goes against your self-interest.
And like I said, this is critical
because when you start out with a relationship like marriage, you really need to get that clear, you know, before you begin. So let's move on to what does it mean to have an identity in Christ? What work does that in Christ do? Well, let me put it this way. So in Christianity—so before we're Christians, we humans start out in the rebel army, right? Because we inherit our attitudes about God from Adam and Adam rebelled against God.
So rebels are surrounded by people
whose only way of thinking about God is rebellion. And that's why the Bible says there's not one righteous, not even one. But in Christianity, for Christians, when we become a Christian, we're united to Christ.
We become in Christ. In Christ is kind of another way of saying united
to Christ through the Holy Spirit who enables us to live the Christian life by His power, by the Holy Spirit's teaching, conviction, encouragement, things like that. Yeah, regarding that rebellion, I would urge everyone to just take another look at Romans chapter one.
For me, when I was growing up, I read that chapter and I looked at the way
people treated big questions in life and whether they were interested in them. And that chapter described what people are like with respect to God so well that it caused me to really get curious about the big questions because I didn't want to be like that. Yep, exactly.
I think that people like to keep God at a safe distance. And so they
deliberately don't make time to investigate the big questions. They deliberately kind of, even if it's subconscious, they'll make sure that they're really busy with other things, whether it's work, entertainment, things like that, to avoid having to sit and be quiet and think about those kind of big questions that you're mentioning.
Yeah, I think that phrase in Christ might also refer to the way that you're in a relationship with Jesus after you become a Christian. And some people looking at that from the outside are going to reject it just because they don't want to be constrained by the preferences, the values of another person. Like when you're in a relationship with someone, you don't just do whatever you want.
You kind of think, how will they perceive what I'm doing?
You know, what's good for the other person? How can I help the other person and things like that? Well, I think that that's one reason why people don't want to be in Christ because they are going to have these kinds of natural obligations. They're going to have to care about somebody other than themselves in the way that they make decisions. Yeah, I think that submitting to the leadership of God probably makes people a bit uncomfortable, to say the least, and especially in a culture like ours that is so independent focused.
You know, it's kind of a turn off to think about having to submit to the leadership of another in all areas of our lives. But actually, God's leadership gives us the discipline and the guidelines and the wisdom and the opportunities to do amazing and adventurous things that matter, that are significant, that are fulfilling and important. Yeah.
Like, you know, whenever you go to the movie theater, a lot of times we watch movies about
secret agents and policemen and soldiers. And we never seem to see movies about someone just saying, hey, I'm going to do whatever I want, and it just feels good, and I'm just going to, you know, try to make myself as happy as possible. And I think the reason for that is because duty and self-sacrifice and self-denial are meaningful and hard.
And so when you become
a Christian, and you have to, you're in a relationship with God, and you have duties, and you have to, you know, you have to be God's ambassador, and you have to act a certain way in keeping with His values. So I think that that's what someone who wants to become a Christian wants to be in Christ. They're kind of looking at the rebel camp and they're thinking, so what do we do in this camp? And the rebels are like, just whatever you want, whatever makes you happy.
So they pursue everything they think will make them happy and then realize that they're miserable, self-centered, bitter people a lot of the times. Yeah, nobody makes movies about, like, narcissism. People make movies about self-sacrifice and duty and honor.
I think when a person becomes a Christian and they become
interested in obeying God, that lifts them out of the kind of shallow self-centeredness that, you know, we start out in and so on. Yeah, so when we talk about finding our identity in Christ and who God says we are, He also says that we are justified. In other words, even though He has found us guilty of sin, He pardons us, He acquits us because He accepts the penalty paid by Jesus on our behalf.
So God isn't just going to let anyone come and work for Him with any sort of attitude, sticking with the whole rebel army theme. Rebels who, let's say, apply for a position in the Kingdom, right? They have to have a perfect record, but none of us does. None of us has a perfect record.
So the only way to switch out of the rebel camp is to admit that you are a
rebel, that you have lived in rebellion and selfishness, and to plead for mercy. The good news is that any sincere pleas for mercy are always accepted. So He's waiting to justify us.
He's waiting to pardon us, to acquit us of the punishment that
we deserve, and welcome us into the awesome army. Yeah, and even for Christians who are not perfect and do make occasional mistakes, they have that forgiveness available to them going forward. So say they get their uniform dirty.
Are they going to be kicked out of the army for that? No, you can just admit that
there's something wrong and they give you a new one every day. I want to say one quick thing. So I think a lot of people today, they look at themselves and they think, I don't need justification by faith.
You know, I'm already a good person.
And I think the easiest way to see that you're in the rebel camp when you are in the rebel camp is to ask yourself how much of your time goes into asking yourself the big questions and investigating these things and how much of your time goes into trying to do things that are good for you and avoiding these big questions. Because a lot of times people, you know, fill their lives with animal shelters and soup kitchens and whatever, and they're saying, I'm being good, I'm being good.
But the question, the first, I think this is what Jesus is asked
one time, what is the most important thing? And the most important thing is to love God with everything you have. And the first step in loving God is to ask whether he's there and maybe look into that in order to get into a relationship. So I think for people who are saying, milk, I'm already good.
I don't need to worry about this. I think that the concept of
goodness that they may be using to make that statement might not be the one that Jesus thinks is the right one. So exactly.
And it's probably not the same one that our culture used
even 10 years ago. The culture is so constantly changing that you really just cannot trust in such a subjective standard as, you know, what you think based on what you've been taught, which is usually highly influenced by what's going on around you. Yeah.
I mean, the cool thing is that we are free to acknowledge our sinfulness,
where we have really failed, where we have rebelled. And that does not destroy Christians. The beginning or the next step of significant missions as ambassadors for Christ.
So, you know,
again, if we sincerely admit our rebellion, if we ask for mercy, we can have a new uniform every day, so to speak. Which is really important. Yeah, exactly.
I think. Yeah. So listen,
have you ever run into a situation where you've been talking to someone who claims to be a Christian and they're feeling that they're not really one because they are still doing bad things? Yeah.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah. Well, I remind them that holiness or, you know, sanctification, to use a big theology word, is a lifelong process. The Holy Spirit is always sanctifying us, which means he's always making us more like Jesus in our attitudes and our actions.
He's always refining us and making us
the kind of person we want to be when, you know, when we join God's team. And so he doesn't just do this automatically, though. I want to make this point because I think a lot of people think if they just, you know, pray a prayer and then wait for the Holy Spirit to take over from there, it's all good.
But if we keep filling our minds with garbage from the culture or with lies from
our enemies or lies from books or media or entertainment, our character and our thinking is going to continue to reflect that. We're going to continue to look like rebels. But if we fill our minds with the truth, the Holy Spirit uses that to transform us into better and more effective soldiers for Christ.
He transforms our character to look more like Christ.
And really, that's what we want. It actually does bring greater happiness, I would say, joy, even though there are hard times in the midst of it.
But we become the people we want
to be. And so it's really important that we play our role to fill our minds with truth. And then the Holy Spirit, Romans 12, says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
So the being
transformed is kind of, you know, that's the Holy Spirit's work. That's a that's kind of a passive verb on our part from our perspective. But the active verb that we need to be doing is by the renewing of our mind.
Okay, so a good illustration for this sanctification as distinct from
justification. Okay, justification is you're a rebel, and then God declares you not a rebel and pays the bill for your past rebellion. So nothing you do is going to contribute to that.
But sanctification is after you become a Christian, you switch sides. And now you find yourself still, you know, you're in a process now, you're in a process of bringing more of your decisions under the leadership of Jesus. So there's a good example for this.
Like,
I'm sure everyone has played a video game before. And there are a lot of these games have the player in control of one character, or maybe a group of characters. And the player has to level up his character or characters by defeating monsters, solving problems, you know, oh, my son has been kidnapped by orcs, you know, you have to find him, he's in the forest.
So, you know, you all
get together and you go out there and do that. And as you accomplish these goals and defeat these monsters and right all these wrongs, your characters increase in their experience points, and then eventually they level up. And I think that people should be aware that making mistakes is part of the Christian life, and you should be leveling up and you do have a role to play in that.
But it's not the end of the world if you don't have the feelings today, or you don't,
you're not acting perfectly today. That's all part of the game. There are going to be times where you get defeated and you have to run away.
But that doesn't mean this is a big surprise,
you know? Yeah, this actually reminds me that when I became a Christian, when I was 21, I actually prayed to receive Christ into my life and asked him to forgive me and accept me onto his team. Like every few days for the first month or so that I was a Christian, because I didn't know that sanctification was a lifelong process. And I was reading through the Sermon on the Mount, and there are some really hard teachings in there, you know? And so I would get to the next paragraph or the next chapter or the next day and go, oh, man, I've been doing this wrong too.
Lord, Lord, today, right now, I'm praying to receive you,
because I had heard, you know, you pray this prayer or whatever. But anyway, I eventually realized probably a month or two into the process. Yeah, the time is a one and done.
And sanctification is what you are doing. Right. Sanctification is a lifelong process.
Exactly. Right. So I'll tell you, one of the most joyful aspects of the Christian life for me is putting in the work to be prepared for action and then being called off the bench to get to participate, to be a part of what God's doing.
Yeah, I think that's a better key about whether,
you know, you're actively involved in your sanctification as God giving you stuff to do, because you're putting in the time to get ready for it. Every apologist I've talked to has had the experience of reading something in a book or listening to a lecture, and then the very next day they get asked that question. Yep, yep, exactly.
Yeah, I remember one time I had just moved to a
new town and I was kind of unsure of what to focus on because I didn't really have any direction at that point. And I talked to my cousin on the phone. I said, I don't know what to read.
I could read theology or apologetics or history or this, this, or that. And if apologetics, then what topic? And I just don't know what to do. I'm feeling a bit paralyzed.
But she said,
all of those are great things. It's not like you're asking me, should I read a romance novel or like, you know, some dumb magazine you're talking about, like, should I read about the evidence for the resurrection or the evidence for intelligent design? Right. They're both good.
And she's like, that's all good. Just pick one that excites you and read it.
Yeah, I think a lot of Christians get tripped up by thinking God's going to tell them what to do at every moment.
It's irresponsibility to, you know, train your guys and train yourself.
I'm sold with the adventurers. To train your adventurers and level them up.
Well,
you're the adventurer. So, you know, do what you need to do to get better and God will give you things to do. And if you don't feel it that day, or if you're concerned that you did something wrong, that's all part of the process.
Yeah. I love how in 2 Corinthians 5,
we're called God's ambassadors. Mm hmm.
Mature Christians get to find so much joy in
preparing, training, equipping to be the best ambassadors for Christ that we can be on this earth. And then we get to be a part of what he's doing. And then we get to look back and see how God has changed us and how he's equipped us and what he's allowed us to be a part of in the kingdom, which is the coolest.
All right. So I've heard this phrase, God adopts you into his family
when you become a Christian. Yes.
This is actually one of my favorite aspects of our identity in
Christ. God, the king of all the kings is our father. He adopts us into his family.
And that is
incredible to me. You know, when I was a teenager, I used to, I had a phase of being slightly obsessed with Princess Diana and I just thought, wow, to be so beautiful and adored and loved by everyone and have such beautiful clothes and all of this. She was the picture of royalty.
But we are not just in the family of the royal family of England. We are in the family of the king over the king of England and the king of every other country on earth. And I love this because probably the primary practical way this has changed my life and my thinking is that we no longer need to care what anyone thinks about us except our father, the king.
Yeah. If you're
Prince Hamlet of Denmark from Shakespeare's Hamlet and some homeless drunk criticizes you, you don't care about that. You're the son of the king and we shouldn't be too concerned about getting approvals from other people either.
Exactly. And it's even better than that for
Christians because unlike the royal family of Denmark or England or any place on earth, they can be ousted if the people all turn on them. It is possible for the monarchy to fall if they don't keep their numbers high enough.
But we cannot lose our place in the kingdom of God
just because too many people disapprove of us, just because the world doesn't like what we're doing or how we're doing or whatever. We have an audience of one. We seek to please our father in heaven and is so incredibly freeing.
Wow. Yeah. And just like earthly princes,
we can look forward to an inheritance.
Yes. Yes. I love this too.
I love to talk about this.
This is why some people call me a theology nerd. So yes, I love imagining the new heavens and the new earth.
Who was it? J.I. Packer said he used to go for a walk 30 minutes a day
and dwell on the new heavens and the new earth because that got his perspective right because we are told to look forward to what is ahead and to be motivated by the joy set before us and like Christ was and those sort of things. So I love Randy Alcorn's work, especially his nonfiction book, Heaven. We don't know exactly what it will be like.
There are a lot of question marks,
obviously, but I'll tell you this. Whatever we can imagine it as, no matter how great we can imagine the new heavens and the new earth, it's going to be better than that. We cannot outthink God in creativity and excellence and beauty.
We're going to have, I think we're going to be able to
travel throughout the universe. We're going to have renewed bodies with no sickness. I'm having my share of sickness throughout my life.
I am so looking forward to my renewed body. We'll have
perfect fellowship with God and with one another. All the relationship garbage that we have to deal with on this earth will be gone, dealt with, non-existent, and our relationships will be perfect and loving and just the best that you can imagine of relationships.
It's going to be awesome.
So knowing that when we pass away, when we go to the next life, we don't cease to exist. We don't go to purgatory and burn off our sins.
We don't cease to experience consciousness. We pass
from this life to the next in an instant, and that's when the best starts. So I think one point I would make on this is that we ought to live as if our biggest problem has been solved or our biggest problems have been solved, because God has solved them.
Our biggest problem is our sin,
and God has taken care of that. He has solved that. And so we ought to live as people who stand to inherit everything imaginable and more, and we need to not live in fear.
We need
to not cower at people disapproving of us or things like that. We need to not walk around grumpy and angry over dumb little things or even over big things, because all that awaits us is excellence and perfection when we pass from this life on. One of the things that I look forward to most, I've had some trouble in the Church trying to bring in apologetics.
You know, I've seen a lot of young people who are not thinking well about
Christian things, not curious about it, and I thought it would be nice if the Church was more serious about bringing in debaters or showing lectures and training up the young people, but it always seemed to be a real big uphill battle. And there's been other things like that in my life where I've just been checkmated while trying to do good things. So one of the things I look forward to is having my relationship with God and the things that I've done as part of that be vindicated by God and be told a well-done, good, and faithful servant for those things that are still shrouded in darkness for now.
Yeah, definitely. All right, so what does it mean to be a new creation? Yeah, well, I guess to put it succinctly, we get a new set of desires, which is referred to as a new heart, I think, in the Bible. We get a new capacity for relating to God, so a new spirit.
We get a new set of beliefs about reality, a new mind, right? And we get a new and different set of priorities, a new commission. Yeah, and that's something you develop as you read the Bible and talk with other Christians. You become aware of all these things.
So I wanted to illustrate the idea that Christians
will develop a new heart, spirit, mind, and commission from a great classical movie, Casablanca. If you haven't seen this, go see it right away. So in the movie, famous actor Humphrey Bogart plays an American expat running a bar in Morocco in Casablanca during World War II.
And he drinks a lot, he seems really depressed and angry,
and it turns out that he's still grieving about a woman he was madly in love with, who just mysteriously left him. And then all of a sudden, she shows up at his bar with her new husband, who happens to be a kind of journalist who is a Czech journalist, the Czech Republic, which has already been conquered by the Germans. And he's exposing all the evils of German aggression to the world, and trying to get them to get serious about the war.
Like, for example,
I don't know that the Americans are in the war at that point that the movie was a man, I don't think they are. So Rick is looking at his ex-girlfriend with this new guy, and he's like, trying to decide whether he should forgive her for leaving him, or whether he should help her and her husband, like they need visas to get out of Morocco, get to the United States so that he can continue his work about exposing the evil of the German aggressors. And initially, he says, listen, I don't stick my neck out for anybody, I don't get involved in politics.
And then gradually, the more he sees the Germans mistreating
people, French people and other people in Morocco, he relents. And just prior to getting on the plane, the new husband tells him, welcome back to the fight. And so all of this is to say that when we start off as rebels, we're all about ourselves.
We're all about, oh, boo-hoo,
this happened to me when I was young, I really want to get married, I really wish I was rich, I wish I was famous, you know, we're all about ourselves. And then all of a sudden, we realize that there's bigger things going on. And that's what that movie is about.
And I think it's a good
illustration for young Christians to sort of understand that what we always say about this, which is the cosmic Butler analogy, you know, when you become a Christian, you don't just keep desiring the things you desire and wanting to be happy. And God's gonna make this happen, you know, he just rings for Jeeves and Jeeves shows up with your, you know, banana split. You know, it's not like that.
It's God's involved in a struggle. There's
people who don't know him, and he wants them to know him. And there's evil in the world, and he's interested in all these things.
And our job is to learn his story and go,
Oh, you know what, that sounds a lot more interesting and meaningful than, you know, watching the latest or listening to the latest Taylor Swift song. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important to remember that in Christianity, the results are not as important as our decisions are we we're not responsible for the results, God takes care of the results, but we are responsible for our decisions.
So like the story of the widow who
gives all she has is singled out by Jesus as praiseworthy, right? So it's important to to watch for opportunities to get into the fight and to respect God's priorities, boss's priorities above our own. Yeah. And don't worry about doing big things.
Just do the little things. What does Wallace say?
One dollar apologist, you know, look for your opportunity to be a one dollar apologist. If you gave someone a book that's about a problem they had, you did the right, that's really significant.
That's actually critical.
Yeah. I love that.
I love giving books to people.
Okay. So also one last thing when we're talking about what God says about us is that we're servants of Christ.
So servants have significant roles and duties, right? We're responsible for
our master for like a servant is responsible to the master for everything they do. Servants, as we've been talking about, you know, don't pursue their own desires first, but they obey the master first and foremost. So any thoughts on that? Yeah.
I want to say that sometimes when you're a servant, you're being faithful to the master.
It can be the case that you not everything goes according to plan. So I like to think, you know, we had that Frank Turek show just last episode and he talked about getting fired by Cisco because he wrote a book disagreeing with same sex marriage.
And that's the kind of thing
that you shouldn't be surprised when that happens to you. If you're being obedient to God, sometimes that causes trouble for you, you know, like William Dempski, you know, getting fired by Baylor or Richard Sternberg losing his job. So part of being a Christian is doing your duty and there are no promises.
Okay. So that's what it means to see ourselves the way God sees us. That's how God sees us.
So
what are some competing identities that people might be tempted to view themselves as first and foremost instead of as what God says us says we are? Yeah, I think a lot of people they have a big focus on where I went to school on what job I have. Yeah. So yeah, definitely.
I think you hang out with somebody for a long time and kind of
everything that they talk about is their accomplishments, their intelligence, their education, their knowledge, that's a good sign they may be finding their identity first and foremost there, you know, spending all their time and money just to look smart to others, not for the sake of learning or growth or development or opportunities, but just to look good to others. Yeah. All these things are good.
It's good to be smart. It's good to have a good job.
It's good to work hard.
It's good to make money, but you don't need to have it as your
identity card, you know, and show it to everybody. Right. Exactly.
Exactly. When people are, you know, if we are constantly feeling the need to
insert our achievements into every conversation so that others will know how much we've achieved, you know, or if we get really upset when we don't know something or if someone else knows something more than we do or something we didn't know, or even if we just, you know, avoid people who know more than we do, these are all bad signs. We might need to question where we're finding our identity first and foremost.
One of the best ways to be humble, which is a Christian virtue, is to promote the work of other Christians when it's appropriate. So if Stephen Meyer goes on the Piers Morgan show, you should share that on social media and maybe don't share some amazing place that you went on vacation, but instead focus on wins for the kingdom and the people who are delivering them are at least trying to. Yeah.
So another competing identity that I think is worth mentioning is finding our
identity and our beauty or our good looks, you know, how handsome or pretty we are. I think some indicators we may be doing this as if we spend a significant amount of time or money or both trying to look good to others, buying lots of creams and makeup and nice clothes in order to impress others. I'm not, again, not saying if you have nice clothes or wear nice clothes or use cream or use makeup, you know, that there's a problem.
But these are just
indicators that we may be finding our identity first and foremost in how we look instead of in who God says we are. If we spend a bunch of time watching videos, learning how to look more beautiful. And again, sometimes the problem is just the motivation.
Why are we, if you want to look nice to have an impact to get a job or something like that, you know, that's a, that's a different thing. But, um, for your spouse, yes, good point. Good point.
Yeah. But if we're just spending all of our money and time just trying to keep up with
the latest styles and, and, you know, we gasp at the thought of ever being seen without makeup and the very best clothes guys do this too, you know, this, the whole Jim bro culture, it's very good to be fit and strong. But, you know, I think, I think that the danger with focusing this much on appearance and displayed wealth is that if you're a single person and you're doing this to impress people and maybe even attract a mate, that trouble is that the kind of mate that you attract is a kind of mate who probably does this themselves.
And now you've attracted someone on the basis of appearance, not character and competence. And you've attracted somebody who, who values you for those things. Right.
And so
you're not going to keep your looks forever for the long haul, you know, every, we're all susceptible to the fall and to gravity, the effects of gravity. And just don't even, don't even think about having a long-term relationship that's fulfilling with someone that you attracted with good looks and you chose them because of their good looks, because there's no morality there. There's no spirituality there.
There's no self denial.
There's no self sacrifice. There's no humility.
There's no forgiveness. You didn't pick for any
of that. So you can't demand that.
I think that's a big problem with, with our, with our culture
today is we're choosing based on the feelings that the other person's appearance make us have and the approval that we get when we walk around with someone who has a nice appearance. And then we realize, oh, relationships are all about humility and forgiveness. Yeah.
Yeah. Let me mention another identity, false identity, I guess you would say that
I was around a lot growing up and experienced myself. And that is finding our identity in our sports achievements or our athleticism.
So I grew up competing at a high level in sports. And
if a loss that you have in a, in some sort of sport, I mean, let's just call it what it is. It's a game.
If a loss results in strained relationships or getting angry at other people
because you lost to them or falling into despair because you didn't perform as well as you thought you should, or caring more about your favorite sports team than about team Christian. These might be indications that we are finding our identity in our sports. So I continue to compete in sports, but I can tell you it's unbelievably freeing to find my identity in Christ and to say, you know what, I'm here to make others better around me.
I'm here to stay
in shape so that I can continue to be active when I'm older. But so I'm just gonna, my objective here is to glorify God and to build up others. It's tremendously freeing.
Yeah. I think what you would do is in your own mind, you'd say, am I more excited about my sports team winning or am I more excited about William Lane Craig going on the Ben Shapiro show or Stephen Meyer going on the Joe Rogan podcast? If you're really inside you, what do you feel? Do you feel like fire and excitement? Do you text all your friends and say, hey, Stephen Meyer was on Joe Rogan or Stephen Meyer was on Piers Morgan? I think that's the thing, right? Your identity is a Christian, so you celebrate Christian victories. You can like a sports team, but that's not how you show off.
You show off with your team.
Yeah, exactly. You and I both watch sports as well.
And yeah, certainly not saying anything's
wrong with that. But again, where we first and foremost find our identity. Definitely.
What about skin color and nationality? Are these other clubs that people are really
proud of and that it changes the way they see the world, it changes their identity? Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, certainly there are Christians all over social media who I would say make it clear to the world that their identity with Christ is less important than their racial or national identity, their ethnicity, that sort of thing. But that's not acceptable.
We are Christians first. Christians, don't pay attention to our skin color. What is skin color? Like you say, skin color is nothing.
It's nothing to me at all. And if people attack
us based on skin color, we need to disregard those personal attacks. We have more important business to be concerned with.
And Boss is going to take care of all that one day. He's
going to make all things right. He's going to make all things, make sure that justice is carried out.
But we cannot just be obsessed with skin color or ethnicity or these sort of silly things. I'm actually, I'm thinking of a guy I know who claims to be a Christian and probably is, but you know, he very clearly views himself as black first and Christian second. Every single thing he posts on social media, everything he teaches, everything he says is all about being black and about how about every incident he's ever read about when a white person has done something unjust to a black person.
I mean, this is a person who has multiple advanced degrees,
bachelor's in philosophy, master's degrees, PhD, sits on boards of very, very fancy graduate schools and ministries, makes a very nice living, sharing his opinion and has a better life than 99% of the people who have ever lived in the history of the world. And yet his black first identity causes him to see himself first and foremost as a victim. And he chooses to use his enormous platform and every opportunity he's given to speak to talk about how bad white people are and how poor life is for black people.
And it's just, it's really distracting from having,
from the opportunities he has to speak the truth and to rally the troops for kingdom purposes. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. I recommend that people listen to our previous episodes about
BLM and that was number nine. And we did a couple on DEI, number 44 and number 48 for a Christian perspective on those topics.
But yeah, I think if you're social media
and every conversation is about victimhood, about your particular group, that's showing that you're not passionate about the things that, you know, God says he cares about. So I think another couple of groups I thought of when we were talking about doing this episode was the feminists and the LGBTQ people. I think that they both, both people kind of, they're saying, well, this is, you know, this is my identity and therefore like it's my biological sex.
This is going to define what my decision making is, what my priorities are, how I vote,
you know, how I see the world basically. And, and for LGBTQ advocates, they're again, they're looking, you know, they have political goals, they have moral views. They think that if Christianity doesn't cater to them, then it's bad.
So what do you think about people
who are forming their identity in these ideologies as well? Yeah. I mean, again, big problem. I know a lot of feminists who, who spend a lot of their time and thought and energy and finances advocating for legalized abortion and for no fault divorce.
And we have to keep these things legal. And, you know, these are counter to God's
priorities. These are not boss priorities.
These are the opposite. A lot of LGBTQ folks
will advocate for transgender surgeries and for kids, cutting off healthy body parts, giving them chemical castration drugs. I mean, just horrific things.
But when a person becomes a Christian,
I think our minds are, our eyes are open to the horrors and the evils of those things. Not that a non-Christian can't see that seems pretty self-evident to me. But nonetheless, you know, whatever is motivating that drive and that desire and even that anger that I see rise up a lot of times when people are talking about how they better have the right to end their baby's lives and they better have the right to, you know, leave their spouse whenever they want to, whenever they're uncomfortable.
When we become a Christian, we can let go of whatever is driving
that and we exchange that to take up for advocating for God's views. Yeah, I think, you know, Christians have experiences where they are, they feel they've been set back or they've been discriminated against or they're at a loss. Just think of every unmarried Christian who has to do without sex until they get married, you know, that could be 20 years, that could be 30 years, that could be a whole lifetime.
And a real Christian is just going to say, my relationship with God is more important than these, you know, advocating for these views that God doesn't agree with. Like when you become a Christian, God's number one, He is your boss. And that means that if you have a different view on this, you need to read about it and discuss it with people until you come around to the point where you not only agree with God, but that you actively defend them.
I know a lot
of people I've heard like sometimes when wives will defend their husband's decisions, even if they privately disagree. And I think that there's a part of being a Christian that's like that, where you say, well, I'm so sad, how could I not have ever found, you know, a husband or a wife and I hurt and I wanted this to happen. And you just have to let go of that.
And I know, I know
it's hard, but it's part of the Christian life that, that you count that loss as less important than the problems that God has solved for you and what He's calling you to. So, yeah, absolutely. Well said.
Yeah. I heard Clay Jones say something on a video the other day and he was
quoting somebody else, but he was saying essentially, you know, today it's so common for us to look at the Bible and say, what was wrong? What is wrong with this God? And when in reality, we need to be reading that. And when something is off putting to us, we need to be saying, what is wrong with my mind that I'm so out of touch, out of line alignment with God and His priorities.
Yeah. Okay. So we can kind of near the end here.
So let's talk about how should it look like when someone, practically speaking now, when someone is taking this idea of identity in Christ seriously in their lives, what should we observe? Yeah. Well, one of my favorite verses is from Matthew 6 33, which says, seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and then all these other things will be added to you. We really need to be focusing on the kingdom first.
When we make decisions, we need to think
about what is the most God-glorifying decision in this, not what will make me most happy right now, today, or most comfortable, or what's the easiest, or what will make me popular, but what will glorify, what will honor God, our boss, our ultimate boss, our audience of one. Another related idea is from 1 Corinthians 10 31 that says, do everything, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. I think also of Galatians chapter 6 and 1 Corinthians 1, I think that says, don't boast in anything except Christ and Him crucified.
Paul says he doesn't boast in anything
except Christ and Him crucified. So we don't need to be trying to show off our beauty or trying to show off our intelligence or our education or our degrees or our skin color or whatever it is. We boast in Christ and what He's done for us and in our need for Him, our sinfulness.
So something else I'll mention, this used to be more significant in my life,
but God has done a great work. And I know this is a challenge for a lot of women, but Matthew 6 talks about, do not be anxious about your life or anything in it. And really, when we are seeing our identity in Christ and we realize what I was talking about earlier about what awaits us when we pass from this life to the next life and the inheritance that awaits us and all of that, we really truly have no reason to be anxious about our life.
And so we can
trust God with that and move forward with whatever we're going through. One that I like is Romans 12, 1-2, which talks about the renewing of your mind for Christians. So two things.
So the first thing is, Christianity is a worldview that touches
on many different topics and it provides coherence for many different big questions in life. So questions like origins, design, meaning, morality, why do we have consciousness, how did life begin, beauty, creativity. And I think that you're never going to understand the depth of Christianity if you're going to just rely on your feelings or what the secular left culture is telling you through their music and their television shows.
So studying about these things and I think reading
the work of great Christians along with the Bible and understanding the Bible is really important. It's amazing how the Holy Spirit recalls verses to memory at the point where you're making decisions. So get that into your head and then when you're making the decision, then you'll have a biblical perspective on it.
And even more so if you've read
a book about forgiveness, you know, or a book about Christian morality. You know, you mentioned worldview. Worldview touches on, I would say, every single issue, every single matter of any significance.
But one example I think of is I used to dislike
science in school because I just thought it was all about memorizing complicated names to things that are too small for me to see or too far away for me to see, or that I had no reason to care about, you know. But ever since becoming a Christian, my mind has definitely been renewed on that issue and I really want to go back and study all of the sciences. I hear that all the time.
Yeah, and really, yeah. But same thing even for history. I have gone back and read more history, but all the subjects, policy, everything is now viewed through the Christian worldview, through a Christian lens.
Yeah, something else that's been significant in my life is that being
a Christian gives us the ability to accept suffering and to persevere well in suffering because there's a purpose in everything and there's justice at the end of all things. In fact, that's a big part of my, it's a big component of the name I chose, Desert Rose. A desert rose thrives in the desert, in the drought, in the hardship, those very, very hard conditions.
And my aim is to, and my result of being a Christian has not been that
suffering stops, that hardship stops, difficulties stop, but rather that instead of falling into despair or hopelessness or seeing everything as meaningless, the hardships actually make me more beautiful. They transform, God uses them to transform my character, they transform my mind. I have hope in the midst of all of them and it's an entirely different way of seeing every hardship.
Yeah, don't forget that Jesus suffered for obeying the Father. And so, if we are in obedience and we suffer, we're literally following the footsteps of our boss. There's a certain honor in that.
So, it's not as bad as it seems. What else? Yeah, and then maybe one I'll just end on because I think this has a lot of application, but viewing our identity in Christ and seeing who God says we are, it gives us the tools and the motivation to be a God pleaser and not a people pleaser. The Apostle Paul talks a lot about this.
One of the places is Galatians 1.10.
He says, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Am I trying to please man? If I were trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. And I first read that when I started seminary years and years ago, I had to choose a character and a competency goal or objective for each semester and work through those with a mentor and through reading and prayer and all sorts of things. And the very first one that I chose was that I wanted God to help me to become a God pleaser and not a people pleaser.
And I found passages
all over throughout the Bible that were relevant. And this has really transformed my entire life, my ministry, my objectives, my happiness, my everything, every aspect, really. And so I would say, think about that, pray about that, learn about that, and become a God pleaser, not a people pleaser.
It will free your entire soul. It will transform your life.
Yeah, my favorite passage on that as quickly as 1 Corinthians 4 versus 1 to 4. Yes, yes, I know what you're talking about, mysteries of God.
The Miss Stewards of the Mysteries of God. Yes. All right.
So I think that's a good place for us to stop for today. So listeners,
if you enjoyed the episode, please consider helping us out by sharing this podcast with your friends, writing a five star review on Apple or Spotify, subscribing and commenting on YouTube and hitting the like button wherever you listen to this podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.

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