God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Journals of Kierkegaard
Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other.
2 Corinthians 5:17 (MSG)
You hear it all the time over the pulpit and on the radio, and you read it in hundreds of Christian books: We’re just sinners saved by grace. Forgiven, yes, but at heart still just sinners. That’s the propaganda about our identity.
But is it true? Are you a sinner, or are you a good man who sins? Is the sin you? Or is the sin in you?
All of us have done things we regret, things that weren’t the best representation of us in a particular moment. But as Beloved Sons, we no longer draw our identity from our sins. We draw it from a heart that has been made good in Christ.
We aren’t just forgiven; our heart has been altered, changed— transformed.
You and I still have what the Bible calls “the flesh” and we call the “false self,” and there was a time when it defined who we were. But not anymore.
Our identity now comes from a deeper, holy place—our transformed heart—and sin is now foreign to our true nature. It’s like cancer: a person may have cancer, but the cancer is not the person. For us as Beloved Sons, to sin is not only to act against our Father’s will and plan—it’s also to go against the very grain of who we really are. It is sickness we do not have to suffer from.
How does knowing who you really are—and who you are not—affect the way you deal with your sins and struggles?
An excerpt from The Heart of a Warrior Journal Workbook.
