This Is Who We Are
I have been preaching this week at spiritual emphasis week for one of our local Christian schools. I have been doing a series about our identity and discovering exactly who we are in Christ. It is truly amazing to study the steps that God has taken to bring us to Himself and I pray that these students are seeing the greatness of God each and every morning that we open His word together. I know that each morning as I have shared God’s word with them my own heart has exploded with an admiration for the greatness of God and the lengths that He has gone to bring good to us and to reveal His glory.
God has taken a group of people who were in absolute rebellion and hatred towards Him and has reached out in love to them through Jesus. Romans 3 and Ephesians 2:1-3 are clear descriptions of our depravity upon entering this world. God reached through those bleak images and through our sin and offered His Son to bring us to Himself. That one work of God is amazing but God didn’t stop there. He also made it so that we are no longer foreigners and aliens, but citizens of heaven. We are actually given a place in His presence (Eph. 2:16), but God didn’t stop there either. God also has adopted us into His own family and has made us an heir (Eph 1:5, Gal. 4:7). God took us, a group of people who hated and rebelled against Him at every turn, forgave us, gave us a place in His presence for eternity, adopted us into His family, and made us an heir. Paul explains in Romans 8:17 that we are even fellow heirs with Jesus. That is the identity that we have in Christ, that is who we are! It is at this very point that I am blown away by the greatness of God. He could have simply forgiven us and it would have been far more than we deserved, yet He desired to bring us closer to Him with each amazing step.
If we as Christians could only keep those things in the forefront of our minds, our lives would be lived quite differently. To make decisions based on being a citizen of heaven and not of this world, to see people through the filter of being an adopted son of God, and to have an attitude based upon the foundation of being a fellow heir with Jesus would not only bring change to our own lives, but also to the lives of those we come into contact with. I pray that we will be a people who display the greatness of God through the way we live and through our words as we share the amazing steps He has taken to make us who we are.
