“Living Life Through Your True Identity”

Many believers spend their lives in a cycle of religious performance, striving to earn God’s favor and love. However, the path to true purpose, freedom, and fulfillment is unlocked by embracing and living through your True Identity in Jesus Christ. This “Jesus identity” remains constant and unchanging, regardless of your behavior, past mistakes, or religious expectations.

The message of grace is focused on freeing hearts and renewing minds all over the world. The greatest “sin” many people commit is being out of sync with their true identity, missing out on the privileges of their sonship in Christ. Instead of striving to become righteous, holy, or complete, believers are called to believe they already are.

1. The Foundation of Identity: Alignment, Not Achievement

Your True Identity is the foundational key to unlocking everything God has called you to do, including your purpose.

Identity is Unchanging

Your identity with Jesus will always stay the same regardless of what you do. You may change what you think about yourself based on your behavior, but your behavior will never change how God thinks about you in His heart. Trying to alter this identity is like believing you are “big enough and bad enough” to change what God has already established.

• The Superman Analogy: Believers should shift from thinking like Clark Kent to thinking like Superman. You must get out of the “amnesia of Clark Kent” and step into the reality of your true identity.
• Sin as Misalignment: The greatest sin is not just misbehavior, but being out of sync with your true identity.
• The Danger of Striving: If you let go of this truth, you will go right back to earning, performing, and deserving.

Achieving Alignment

Getting in sync with your True Identity means coming into agreement with what God says about you. It is a matter of aligning yourself with what already is.

• Daily Awareness: This cannot be a religious formality or something you talk about every now and then; it must be an awareness every single day of your life.
• Filtering Emotions: Living through your true identity means every thought and every emotion is filtered through who you really are.
• Self-Correction: When you are ready to get angry, hold unforgiveness, or act out of line, your True Identity should assert, “That’s not you”.
• Daily Reminders: You should remind yourself daily that you are righteous, you are forgiven, you are one with God, and you are seated in heavenly places. This practice is not “works,” but a necessary part of living through the Jesus identity.

Purpose Flows from Identity

Purpose is tied to your true identity. God has custom-built every person to carry a “piece of heaven” on the inside of them to do what needs to be done. Instead of struggling to find out why you are here, purpose should flow naturally from awakening to who you already are.

2. Living Through Grace: How to Deal with Faults and Failures

Living from your true identity radically transforms how you interact with others, especially those who have faults and failures.

Forgive and Make Allowances

Colossians 3:13-16 instructs believers to make allowances for each other’s faults and forgive anyone who offends you, remembering that the Lord forgave you so you can do the same. When you are rooted in your identity, you stop measuring others by their behavior.

• Grace, Not Judgment: God does not measure us by our behavior. We must figure out how to see people through grace and not judgment.
• The Love Uniform: Believers should clothe themselves with love, which binds them together in perfect harmony. This love should be worn every day like a uniform.
• Peace as Umpire: Let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts.

Rejecting Human Definition

To know no man “after the flesh” means not defining people by what they have done, their weaknesses, or their past.

• See Potential: Instead, you must see the new creation potential in them, even if they do not see it yet.
• Deal from Love, Not Law: This does not mean ignoring wrongdoing, but dealing with it from love and not from law.
• The Goal is Awakening: The ministry of reconciliation is about waking people up to their true identity. The only difference between a believer in Bible study and someone in a “strip joint” is that the believer is awake to their identity and the other person is not.

The Forgiving Spirit

We are instructed to restore those overtaken in a fault in the spirit of meekness, considering ourselves, lest we also be tempted.

• No Condemnation: We should avoid condemning people and instead have a desire to wake them up to their true identity.
• Jesus’ Model: Jesus on the cross demonstrated “identity in action” by saying, “Father forgive them they know not what they are doing”.
• Forgive and Set Will: When wronged, you must set your will to forgive. Believers should make sure they pray for their enemies, recognizing they are “only enemies because they don’t know who they are”.

Practical Love and Boundaries

Sometimes, handling offenses requires speaking truth, and other times it requires learning the vocabulary of silence and simply praying or showing love.

• Be the Living Epistle: You cannot force change by shouting scriptures; people are not going to change until they are ready to change. If they are not reading the written Word, they should be able to read your life as the living epistle.
• Reject Unnecessary Relationships: Avoid trying to be everyone’s friend, as this can become overwhelming; simply be nice and walk in love.
• Receive Love: When people show love, even if it’s not the way you want to be loved (like a text or call), you must receive that love rather than rejecting it because you are upset. Your responsibility is to learn how to love yourself like you want to be loved.