Understanding Your Jesus Identity – Episode 2

The fundamental message for Identity in Christ: Embrace Grace and Live in Sweatless Victory

The fundamental message for Christian living is embracing your True Identity—or Jesus Identity—which allows you to stop striving to earn God’s favor and start living from the finished work of grace. This awareness is the bedrock of spiritual growth, leading to radical transformation and empowerment.

1. The Core Principle: You Are Already Complete in Christ

Understanding your true identity is not about learning how to become something; it is about becoming aware of who you already are. God’s grace ensures that all necessary provision and status have been secured in Jesus Christ.

Acceptance Precedes Performance

Jesus perfectly modeled this principle: He lived from the truth of His identity, not for it. At His baptism, before He performed any miracles or teaching, the Father declared Him fully loved and pleasing.

Similarly, you are already pleasing to the Father. God has already settled that you are accepted into His beloved. Trying to earn God’s love, favor, and blessing is unnecessary because they are gifts He has already given.

Rejecting the Performance Trap

The enemy constantly attacks your identity by trying to convince you that you must work for something that has already been done. This reliance on performance or striving is a yoke of bondage, a deep-seated religious mindset that must be overcome.

The message of grace is so profound that some find it “too good to be true”. If you can embrace and receive what has already been done, you can move into the fullness of who God has called you to be and see the manifestation of the finished works of Jesus.

2. Practical Benefits of Alignment: Peace, Boldness, and Freedom

When you are in sync with your true identity, you align yourself with Christ, and this alignment transforms your daily experience.

A. Peace and Assurance

Peace becomes your default, replacing anxiety and worry.

• Righteousness is Key: Knowing you are righteous because of Jesus is essential. The works of righteousness produce peace, quietness, and assurance forever.
• Rest in Confidence: When you know who you are, you are not trying to work to get peace; you possess it because you are in Christ.

B. Boldness and Confidence

Being in sync with your true identity results in boldness.

• Mirroring Christ: Your boldness stems from the truth that as He is, so are we in this world.
• Facing Challenges: When you realize you are just like Jesus in spirit, you approach life’s challenges with confidence instead of fear. You gain liberty and assurance, operating with such confidence that you can face situations and declare, “Not here, not today, you don’t know who you messing with”.

C. Freedom and Sweatless Victory

Alignment brings freedom from entanglement with the yoke of bondage that performance imposes.

• Sweatless Victory: When you realize that the work is already done, you operate in sweatless victory. You do not have to “sweat like sinners” to obtain what you already possess.
• Deliverance from Approval Addiction: Being in sync with Jesus brings freedom from approval addiction. When you are no longer working for the approval of people, you are delivered from the need for validation and can allow God to use you in profound ways.

D. Authentic Love

Your relationship with others improves dramatically because you love from a place of fullness, not need.

• Loving from Fullness: You are not loving people to get something back from them—such as better treatment or appreciation—but rather from the fullness of who you already are in Christ.
• Putting on Christ’s Character: As the elect of God, holy and beloved, you are instructed to put on virtues like mercy, kindness, and meekness. When you are in sync with your identity, this kindness will flow genuinely, avoiding “fake kindness”.

3. Applying Your Identity: Filtering Behavior through Truth

The central challenge is allowing your behavior to determine your identity. Instead, you must allow your identity to transform your behavior.

The Role of Mind Renewal

Everything flows out of you knowing who you are. This requires consistently renewing your mind.

• Alignment is Key: You must align your identity with His identity. When you are preparing to yield to temptation (such as lust or anger), you must pause and remind yourself: “Wait a minute, that’s not me”.
• Constant Vigilance: The enemy will come to your “wilderness” to challenge your identity, saying you are just a sinner saved by grace. You must counter this by knowing and declaring that you are the image and reflection of Jesus, righteous, loved, and complete.
• Personal Revelation: Bible school is valuable, but it should never replace your personal interaction and relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, as God often speaks personally and intimately.

Reflecting Jesus

As Jesus constantly looked to the Father to accurately interpret and repeat what He saw the Father do, believers are called to reveal Jesus.

• Mirror Image: You are designed to be a mirror reflection of Jesus. This means that whatever others see you doing mirrors the Father.
• Casting Off Distraction: This spiritual process requires operating without compromise or distraction.