Category: Faith is …

Let’s look at some more ideas of how we put God’s promise of a new identity into action.

Promise in the unseen world:  God’s Spirit now lives inside you (Rom 8:11).  Application to the seen world:  Because you believe the promise by faith, you act like His Spirit is living inside you.  You can’t see it, you probably can’t feel it, but you know God lives in you.  So you begin to live as if it were true.  What does “living as if it were true” look like?

For starters, you believe that your body is God’s dwelling place (I Cor. 6:19).  So you change some habits that you know God would not do dwelling inside you.  In the face of temptation, you literally ask yourself, “How would God act or react to this situation if He was living here inside me?  O wait, HE IS!”

You also begin to understand that God is not only dwelling inside you, but is speaking to you as well.  So you start to seek God’s voice.  You develop an ear to hear His guidance and direction.  Is the direction always clear?  No, there are often loud and competing voices.  But we believe by faith that He is speaking, so we keep listening…and following.

Another promise in the unseen world:  You have joined God’s family; God’s seed dwells in you (I Jn 3:9).  Application to the seen world:  You now have a family resemblance to God and His Son, Jesus.  It is not a physical resemblance, it is a moral resemblance; a likeness in righteousness and character (I Jn 2:29).

Think about how resemblance works in your physical family.  When our daughter Elizabeth and I were working in the same downtown building, I got on the elevator one day with her and her co-workers.  She immediately introduced me around, but before she got very far, her friends exclaimed, “Of course, we know that is your dad.  You can see the family resemblance.”

God intends it to work the same in the moral world.  As a new creation, He has created me to look like Christ in character and righteousness.  So I check myself.  How am I doing at living into the resemblance; at looking like Christ?  In the small town where I grew up, I was known as Adrian’s son.  And a desire to keep my father’s reputation intact was one element of my effort to stay on the straight and narrow.  Likewise, one of my motivations to resist temptation and to imitate Christ is to keep my Father’s reputation intact.  People will judge what God’s character is like by how His family members conduct themselves.

The important thing to remember is that this is not a family resemblance that we earn through some probationary period of good works.  The resemblance is already planted by God’s seed.  It is now up to us to live, in the seen and temporal world, as if it were true; which, of course, in the unseen and eternal world, IT IS!

“We walk by faith, not by sight” (II Cor 5:7) is a short verse with incredible depth.  Set against sight as its opposite, walking by faith is walking in the principles of the unseen world of the spirit.  It helps me to think of our lives as living in two worlds at the same time.  In the unseen and eternal world, you became a brand new person when you received Christ.  All the provisions and promises of the New Covenant came true for you in an instant.  It may sound mysterious, but the unseen and eternal world is just as real as the black letters on this screen or page.

But what about that other world, the seen and temporal world that we are more familiar with?  In this world, you may not have noticed much change at your point of salvation.  In the initial before and after Christ, you may look the same, you may feel the same, your personality may be unchanged, your challenges did not immediately  go away, etc.  In short, the immediate change in your temporal world before and after Christ varies greatly among believers.

So growing and maturing in the Christian life boils down to this.  It is the process, sometimes slow and gradual, sometimes rapid, of taking all you know to be true about the new you – things you know are true by faith – and bringing its application into your every day experience.  Let me put it this way.

Promise in the unseen world:  You have a new identity (II Cor 5:17).  Your new self is “created in the likeness of God; in righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24).  Application to the seen world:  As you begin your life in Christ, you may not feel like righteousness defines who you are.  In fact, you may feel like sin is still your propensity.  You have a conscious choice to make.  Are you going to live by faith – believing you have a completely new and righteous nature – or live by sight?  The apostle Paul calls living by faith “putting on the new self”.  You now have the ability to make large and small choices to live as if the “new self” is who you really are.

When you are tempted to anger and want to blow up at your children, you can literally say to yourself, “Hey, anger is not who I am in my new identity”, and choose patience.  When that ad for a suggestive website scrolls across your monitor, you can literally say to yourself, “Hey, lust is not who I am in my new identity”, and choose to pass on going there.  When you desire to use a power play to gain a leg up on a co-worker in your competitive work environment, you can literally say to yourself, “Hey, seeking their good is who I am in my new identity”, and work to aid their success.

Now this may all sound theoretical and impractical in the heat of the moment, in the throes of temptation, but this is literally what we must learn to do.  We talk back to temptation by reminding ourselves of who we are in Christ.  We talk back to temptation by reminding ourselves of God’s promise of a new power over sin.  And when we do this, we find that what started out as basically a practice in willpower to not sin becomes an experience of His power to overcome sin. We begin to learn, embrace by faith, and experience that sin is no longer my master.

Do I ever stumble?  Of course.  Do I ever sin?  Of course.  The maturing process is just that:  a process.  But what I can guarantee is that as you practice living into your new identity, you will more and more experience God’s resurrection power in the everyday path of real life.

Several times on this website, I have written about the two parts of the gospel.  The first part of the good news is the gospel for unbelievers.  It centers around the transaction; the move from death to life (Rom 6:23); the transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col 1:13); joining God’s family (Gal 3:26); all brought about by believing in Jesus Christ for eternal life (Jn 6:40).  The second part of the gospel – equally good news – is the gospel for believers.  It is all about how we live the life; how we live the Christian life; how we live the supernatural Christian life.

Both parts of the gospel, the transaction and living the life, are grasped by faith.  The gospel is believed, embraced, attained, and laid hold of by faith.  The initial move from “wages of sin is death” to “free gift of God is eternal life” is by faith.  “For by grace you have been saved though faith” (Eph 2:8).  This universal verse applies to all people who believe; to all who exercise faith in Christ for their salvation.

But Jesus also highlighted the need for faith in His individual encounters as well.  In the last section of Luke chapter 7, Jesus visits the home of Simon, a Pharisee.  While reclining at the table, a woman known to be a sinner crashes the party and begins to anoint Jesus’ feet.  After engaging Simon in a parable about two debtors, Jesus turns to the woman and says, “Your sins have been forgiven…your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Lk 7:48,50).

Just as faith is required to enter the kingdom, faith is also a necessity for kingdom living; the life we live after the transaction.  This is the theme of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  He keeps asking his readers, “Having been justified by faith rather than by works of the Law, why are you now returning to the Law to live the life?  It doesn’t make sense.  Just as your initial salvation was by faith, even so your new life is lived by faith.”

The first step to living by faith is to believe that your old man, the man with the sin propensity, has been crucified with Christ.  “For I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal 2:20).  The experience of living the exchanged life, that is, Christ living His life through me is embraced by faith.

So living by faith essentially comes down to this.  Faith is how we take the promises of the unseen world – Christ living in me by His Spirit and all the newness that entails – and bring them to pass in the seen world where we live each day.  We will start exploring the “how to’s” next post.

I have a suspicion that my road to becoming a geophysicist was paved by a childhood fascination with finding things; specifically, with finding treasures.  When I was a child, my bedroom was filled with collections of baseball cards, matchbooks, shiny stones, and all kinds of interesting stuff.  I liked finding things.  And my day job shows that I still do.

So you can imagine my attachment to this quote from Dan Stone in his book, The Rest of the Gospel.  “But I have discovered that through union with Christ, I am no longer a seeker.  I am a finder.  Jesus said the kingdom of God is where?  In us.  Every kingdom has a king.  And the King lives in us.  The basic definition of the kingdom of God is the rule and reign of God.  That is exactly what has taken place in our heart.  So we are no longer seeking the kingdom.  We’re finders.  Whatever the kingdom of God may look like in the future in the external, it has already begun internally for us.”

We are finders.  Jesus said in Luke chapter 11, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened” (Lk 11:9-10).  Jesus’ promise is the if we seek, we will find.  It is very easy to get stuck in the seeking…the striving, the laboring, the working to somehow achieve what God has already given us.  The reward for the seeking is not a carrot that keeps moving ahead of us, always just out of our reach.  No, Jesus’ promise is that you will find it.

And what is it that we will find?  Christ in you the hope of glory (Col 1:27).  God’s kingdom in you (Lk 17:21).  God’s Spirit in you (I Cor 6:19); guiding you, energizing you, empowering you.  You will find Christ literally living His life through you (Gal 2:20).

Now, you may be thinking that all these discoveries sound swell in theory.  You may be convinced that somewhere in the unseen world all these things are true about us.  But when you look down into the world where we live each day, faced with sometimes challenging and with sometimes outright terrifying choices, how do we put these eternal principles into every day action?  How do we put the promise – our new life hidden in Christ, wrapped up inside and out with His presence – together with the reality of our experience each day?

The short answer is to live by faith.  The word faith appears about 240 times in the New Testament alone.  And it is vital to experiencing the supernatural in the world we inhabit.  The long answer is to live by faith and we will take the next several weeks exploring its implications.

For now, let’s celebrate our new life in Christ; a life filled with resurrection power that is yours for keeps.  It truly is “finders keepers.”