Mentoring Minutes

Identity in Christ

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

Ephesians 2:10

We spent nearly 6 months recently getting to know the Names of God…and even more, I pray, His character and love for us so that we could know and love Him more fully. God back and check out the videos, podcasts and/or articles at www.loveandlordship.com that cover all His Names and how they are all manifested in Christ! We then began this focus on Love and again, I pray, that it is a bridge between Who He Is and His Love for us and drawing us to fulfill the first and greatest command to worship Him alone and Love Him with all we are.

Hopefully, and in line with God’s Word, we will continue to make our first love a wholehearted growing love and devotion to Him. Only then can we begin to show His Love by loving ourselves and then dying to self to love others just as He did.

With this in mind we recently began focusing on loving who we are in Christ. This is our present focus and I want to look at what God’s Word tells us about who we are as we are recreated in Christ to do all that He has purposed for us to do.

In order to truly love ourselves we must know that our identity is fully in Christ and not in our own flesh, the broken world or the lies and deceptions of the enemy.

Who I Am In Christ is what He wants me to know and only as I get to know and love Him and love who I am can I then love others to show them who Christ is and His Love for them.

Over the next several weeks we’re going to focus on three areas that His Word proclaims over each and every one of us in Christ…1) I Am Accepted and therefore never alone; 2) I Am Secure and therefore need never fear, and; 3) I Am Significant and have a tremendous purpose in this life and in God’s Kingdom!

Please be praying as we go through this that all those who read and share this will be growing in his/her love for God and, as they mature continually in that love, to know and love who they are in Christ!

For starters…You are complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10). It may not always feel like it in this world or in your flesh but that never changes that you have been made perfect, whole and complete in Him and He is the Authority over all things!

The only way you will ever truly love God, yourself and others is according to His Word of Truth, by His Love and knowing your identity in Christ. Let’s look deeper at the Truth that we (you and I) are complete in Christ and what that means for us.

This concept of complete or whole in Christ comes from the Hebrew word “shalom,” most often interpreted as “peace.” But it is much more and the only way to know that peace is to accept and be complete in Him…every part of your life integrally aligned with His Truth!

We continue with that overarching Truth that we are accepted in Christ as we look at the reality that in Him we are sons and daughters of God (John 1:12-13).

Listen carefully and let this change your life…You and I, and all who believe in their hearts and by their lives in Christ, are adopted into His family and God receives us as His children (2 Corinthians 6:18; Galatians 4:4-7). We can literally call God our “Daddy” as that is what “Abba” means in Galatians 4:6. He desires to be that close to us, to know us that intimately and for us to know Him.

Even more, He literally chose you, me…all those who choose to put their faith in Christ to adopt us as sons and daughters (Ephesians 1:5-6) into His Family and Kingdom. Not just sons and daughters of the Most High God…we are joint heirs with our Brother, Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ (Romans 8:14-17). How awesome is that!?!

Do you know Jesus as your Savior and Lord and know that you are a child of God, that He is your loving intimate Daddy? Christ paid the ultimate price so you could be? Do you know that if you are then you are an heir with Christ of the Kingdom of God as His child? I pray that you do.

We can only love others with the love we have received from God and by faith can love who we are in Christ. You are the only person that you take into every other relationship…so how’s that working for you?

Learning to love our self begins with loving God and listening to Him and who He has said that you are in Christ. Backing up a bit in Romans 8 we see just how far God would go to show us our acceptance in Christ that even while we (you and I) were still sinners, God loved me and sent Christ to die for me (Romans 5:8).

This is absolutely crucial because it means that you and I can now be in God’s presence because we have been rescued, redeemed and forgiven…whole and holy (Colossians 1:13-14) by what Christ has done for us! Nothing impure, imperfect or sinful can stand in His presence…but that is not any longer who or what we are in Christ.

Not only does this mean that we can be in His presence but because of His Grace through Christ’s sacrifice and our forgiveness and redemption we can be in a relationship with Him. That’s why we are now sons and daughters all because of what He has done and we receive by faith through Grace. Look at the 2 previous verses in Ephesians 2 to our focus verse that tells us we are His Masterpiece, literally in Greek, His “poemia.” Christ has made it so! (Ephesians 2:8-9)!

Love and Lordship…Food for Thought – Are you beginning to see how God values and loves you? Are you beginning to love yourself even more…or maybe for the first time? You can because of what Christ has done for you! Don’t miss it!

Love and Lordship…Action Items

  1. Read the Scriptures in this article and ask The Holy Spirit to teach you.
  2. Journal what you’ve learned about your identity in Christ in this post. 
  3. Spend time in God’s Word and prayer and ask The Holy Spirit to show you what it means to be all the Christ has made you based on the texts in this post.

Contact us at loveandlordship@gmail.com to find out more about how you can know God the Father, Christ His Son and The Holy Spirit.

REAL LOVE – PT 2

“Jesus answered, “The first and greatest command is, Worship God alone; love the Lord your God with all your being.’ The second is: ‘love who you are in Christ so you can love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31 (my paraphrase)

Jesus’ answer regarding the greatest commandments should not only inform us but direct us as to how we are to love. By proclaiming that there is a first and greatest and then a second which is like it…but second…this should guide us in everything we do when it comes to loving God and others.

The beauty of the Greek language in which the New Testament was written is that, unlike the English language, it is very precise. Why wouldn’t God choose to send Jesus in today’s time in history when His message could spread like wildfire through the digital world? God’s Word tells us that He came at just the perfect time (Ephesians 1:9-10). You think God knew of the extremely relativistic culture and language that dominates the globe today. Of course He did.

All of this to simply magnify the relevance and priority of how we are to love…

1) We can only love because of His love first given to us (1 John 4:19);

2) Even though we are to show God’s love by the way we love others, this does not dismiss that the first command is to learn to know and love God and this is a continual growing in love for Him throughout our lifetime (Mark 12:29-30);

3) Know and love who we are in Christ (Mark 12:31) and now we are equipped and maturing in Christ so we can;

4) Love others as we love ourselves (Mark 12:31) and as He loved us (John 13:34-35)…ultimately His love that we are to model is giving of yourself for the sake of others.

Why do I continue to press this issue? For two reasons…the first is that we practically ignore the first and greatest command and fail to disciple new, young believers in helping them mature and grow to know and love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength. In so doing, the second reason follows that we constantly send new believers out to love others as “nearly empty infants” trying to love all others…ultimately in their flesh.

I pray that Christ’s Church, His true disciples and followers, will take to heart the priority of His commands so we will be able to show the world what His Love looks like because we have loved according to His Word and Covenant Order.

Do you know Christ and what it means in Him to even be able to love God with all you are? Are you trying to love others without spending time to know and love God in order to love from the True Source of Love in Christ?

How are you making the time to know and love God? Time in His Word? Prayer? Listening to His Spirit? Take to heart God’s Word for the preciseness and priority that His Truth is expressing to us and you’ll find that it is His Love that makes all of this possible.

We continue with a simple but profound Truth building on yesterday’s priority of commands in God’s Covenant Order.

If we’re not spending time daily to know and Love The Creator of the world and every one of us as well, then what is your source of Love for yourself and others (John 7:38)?

As you spend time in God’s Word, prayer and listening to Him you can’t help but soak in His Love, love Him more…and know and love who you are in Christ.

Remember, Love’s not a feeling but a commitment, a choosing and act of the will over and over because those who love Him obey His commands (John 14:15). Love is obedience, keeping His commands because they are what is best for us as The Loving God is The One who has given them to us. Remember, from last week’s post, everything He does is Truthful and Loving! He can do no other!

There are hundreds of commands in Scripture from this Loving God, for our good. There are no demands because love must be a deliberate choice of your free will by faith, expressing your love for Him (1 John 5:2-4). This carries over into knowing and loving who you are in Christ (more on this in future posts).

I share this message with churchgoers, prisoners, addicts, and on and on, and I ask the question, “As you grew up and went to church did it feel like constant demands?” Nearly every single person replies, “Yes!”

Demanded or forced obedience is never love. Only willing submission is love.

This impacts who you are in Christ and how you build, nurture and live out every other relationship in Him. If He is Lord of your life then it must show by your willing submission to Him (Love for Him) in every other relationship. True Love willingly gives itself away for the sake of the other.

Remember if we do not spend time to learn to love Him then we are empty and cannot truly love ourselves and others.

Where are you when it comes to knowing and loving God? Christ has made a way for you to be in that loving relationship (John 3:16; John 15:13). Have you received Him as Savior and Lord so you can know His Love and love him in return? Only then can you love yourself…and others…as He has loved us.

Loving self seems contradictory to Godly Love and unfortunately as we’ve allowed the culture to define and dictate what love is that is correct. When it’s based on natural, fleshly feelings and emotions, it becomes loving self for the sake of self and that is actually selfishness and lust.

This is why we can’t love apart from God and Christ in us. We must know His Love and learn to love Him before we can truly love at all…ourselves or others. His Love (agape) literally means that we prefer Him above all else because He is Love. As we grow in this real Love then we find that it has very little to do with what we get from it because we are assured of all we need from Him.

His model in creation and in Christ is a Love that is sacrificial, unconditional and self-giving. He loves us even when we don’t love in return and is always waiting with open arms for us to turn to Him no matter what we’ve done. It is always for the sake and good of the other.

When we learn to know and love who we are in Christ (Ephesians 2:10) then we can love ourselves to the point that we can freely give ourselves sacrificially for the sake of and good or others.

The key is to know and Love Him so that your identity is in who you are in Him and not let the world and those of the world rate, rank and compare you, giving you a false identity in a fallen world.

By His grace and through the faith we’ve been given, you can know Him as Savior and Lord and that makes all the difference in knowing His Love, knowing and loving who you are (Romans 12:3) so you can love others…but it is a choice of loving obedience that you make. Do you want to know Him so you can truly know and love who you are?

Love God and love yourself—the self that Christ recreated you to be—God desires that you do this so you can show others His Love through you.

Love and Lordship…Food for Thought – Christ left all the glories of Heaven, became flesh by becoming us as a human being, faced all that we face and gave His life as the perfect sacrifice…that’s what your worth and He defines who you are! Have you accepted that no matter what the world says… or are you still trying to prove who you are by the world’s broken and deceived standards?   

Love and Lordship…Action Items

  1. Read the Scriptures in this article and ask The Holy Spirit to teach you.
  2. Journal what you’ve learned about love in this post. 
  3. Spend time in God’s Word and prayer and ask The Holy Spirit to show you who you are in Christ and all He has in store for you.
  4. Spend time in God’s Word and prayer and ask The Holy Spirit to show you how to love who you are in Christ

REAL LOVE

“We love, (only) because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 (parentheses mine and added)

We’ve been talking about Love…God’s love for us and ours for Him as His Word tells us that all Love and relationships are to begin. We love only because He first loved us (1 John 4:19) and our love must begin with wholehearted, sold-out devotion and love of Him with all we are so we can truly love ourselves and others (Mark 12:29-31). His Truth and Love is the only way we can do this.

There’s a reason for this and I think in our culture, and even in many of our churches, today, there’s a lot of activity and service in the Name of The Lord but much of it is based on the world’s concept of love…which is anything but love. We fail to build and deal with real Truth in Love relationships.

Many of our church leaders (be sure to read this entire devo) have been crammed full of theology so they can “do ministry” which is basically preaching and teaching The Word of the Gospel which is so needed…but as Jesus said, much of it is being done without a real relationship with Him (Matthew 7:21-23) and others. We know that Jesus said, in the latter times, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:12).

Paul David Tripp in “New Morning Mercies,” as a pastor, author and teacher himself, states it this way in a response to a theology student(s) and future pastor(s) as he tells stories of pastoral counseling in preparing pastors and leaders to know how to serve in loving relationships…

“In the middle of one of these stories, a student raised his hand and said, ‘All right, Professor Tripp, we know we’re going to have these projects in our churches; tell us what to do with them so we can get back to the work of ministry.’ I was both stunned by what he said and thankful for what it allowed me to say. Here was a man heading for ministry who clearly loved ideas more than he loved people.”

Folks, it’s not just pastors and leaders…it’s so many who attend and give and serve in our churches without truly building loving relationships. As one pastor said to me, “Greg, relationships are messy, nasty stuff.” To which I replied, “What part of ‘messy, nasty stuff’ changes God’s Truth.

How is it that we’ve missed the reality that, as I say in our book, The Authority of Love, Second Edition, loving relationships is the currency of Christ’s Kingdom?

Tripp goes on to say, “I cannot forsake truth for relationships, and I cannot forsake relationships for truth.” These are inseparable and absolutely necessary for us to grow as individual disciples of Christ and sons and daughters of God, as well as maturing in accountable, loving relationships and community as families and as Christ’s Family, The Church (Ephesians 4:1-16).

He closes his devotional with this, “It is in a community of humble love that we are best positioned to understand all that God has said to us in His Word.”

May it be so in our lives, marriages, families and churches so the world will TRULY know His LOVE!

Think about it for a moment…God never wastes words! He has a purpose…a perfect purpose in every Word He gives. Why is that important? Because we so often skim over His Words, rearrange His Words and/or dilute or even ignore His Words to fit what we’re going through and how we feel.

He is always Truthful, always Loving in everything that He does because that is Who He Is…regardless of how it impacts us, what we think or how we feel.

His Truth is always Loving and His Love is always Truthful. That’s a great thing to keep in mind as you make your way through this day…and every day.

One simple truth as we continue with Love according to God the Author…He gives His commands in a Covenant Order with us so that if we choose to lovingly obey Him, because of Christ is us, then we are able to fulfill them. When we try to rearrange the order we struggle because we do not have His Truth and Love in us according to who we are in Christ but attempt to live out His Truth and Love in our flesh…it looks good for a while but ultimately fails.

When He tells us to Worship Him alone and Love Him with all we are as the priority command above all others, we need to take Him seriously and obey. Only then can we follow through with the second command to love ourselves (who we are in Christ) and then love others as we now love ourselves and as He has loved us.

Let’s quit putting the cart before the horse and begin to disciple people to first Love God as that is His greatest command. This then gives us the capacity to follow through with all other commands, namely loving self and others…and this allows us to fulfill all the law and the prophets…The Word of God!

Mark 12:29-31; Matthew 22:37-40; John 13:34-35; 14:15. These tell us clearly how to Love. How are you doing first and foremost with growing in your Love for God? Everything else depends on this.

This reality of Love is profound, yet simple. As we’ve been talking about His Love that we have only because He first loved us, learning and growing in our whole-being love for Him, let’s simply look at what that Love looks like according to His Word of Truth…Let me just share it with you directly from God’s Word…

John 3:16For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

1 John 4:7-10Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

1 John 3:16We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us.

Romans 8:37-39No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 5:7-8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Psalm 136:26Give thanks to the God of heaven. His love endures forever.

Ephesians 2:4-5But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-it is by grace you have been saved.

1 John 3:1See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

John 15:13Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8aLove is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.  It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered,  it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails;

Love and Lordship…Food for Thought – I could go on and on just as His Love does for us. Do you know Him and His Love? Don’t you want to know this kind of Love? Why would anyone not want to know this kind of Love and the God Who Is Love from which it comes? I pray that you do. You can…in Christ!   

Love and Lordship…Action Item

  1. Read the Scriptures in this article and ask The Holy Spirit to teach you.
  2. Journal what you’ve learned about love in this post. 
  3. Spend time in God’s Word and prayer and ask The Holy Spirit to show you His Love.
  4. Spend time in God’s Word and prayer and ask The Holy Spirit to show you how to love God with all you are.

Contact us at loveandlordship@gmail.com to find out more about how you can know God the Father, Christ His Son and The Holy Spirit.