085 – Finding Your Identity in Christ The Bible Speaks to You: Embracing the Mindset of Christ

085– Why is your identity in Christ so important?

First, let me ask you: How do you see yourself? Usually we start with what we see in the mirror. How tall we are, how old, how much we weigh, what color of eyes, hair, and skin.  

But is that who you really are, the unique combination of all these material parts and conditions?  No! There's so much more to who you are.

How else do you see yourself? Do you identify your self by your nationality, your ethnic background and culture, where you were born and where you live now, where your parents and ancestors came from, where you went to school, your job and salary, etc.? 

And then, of course, we identify ourselves by our past, good or bad. We let the trauma and the drama of circumstances define us with certain emotions and feelings. We accept the labels the world puts on us and begin to identify with what others say about us.

We cling to all these ways of identifying ourselves because we think the condition of our body, our culture and heritage, the emotional events, failures, and achievements of our past, our bank account, our job, etc. define us.  
But they don’t define us. They are more like a story board of what has happened to us. But they are not our identity. Sometimes they hint at who we are but other times they’re more like a counterfeit of who we really are as God’s children.
As a kid, I was very conscious of my body, especially my very blond hair. I thought that was my identity.

But when I was about 16, I got serious about my faith and started reading the Bible. I started learning about the way God originally created me in His image and likeness, and how God saw me. This was a very different view from what I saw in the mirror and how I saw myself in my mind.

I found a lot of hope in something Paul wrote in one of his letters to the Corinthians: He’s talking about what happens when you accept Christ into your life. 
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.  (2 Corinthian 5:16, 17  ESV)

You are a new creation

This is Paul's promise. Why then do we hold onto the things that are not who we are in Christ? We can let go of them. Christ washes them away. When we discover our identity in Christ, we realize our identity in the past is not who we really are. In Christ, we are so much more.

So, how do you see yourself? 

It’s really not the
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and podcaster. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by embracing the mindset of Christ in daily life.


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