Remembering Our Identity In & With Christ
With whom do you identify with the most in your life? Do you look up to a person or persons with great respect and admiration. Are they the object of your adulation more than you think of Christ?
We as fallen broken humans are always tempted to take the easy way out and that often makes us worshippers of men or a tribe perhaps.
How often we forget that what we have and do in life is a result of Christ's works done for us and not done by us. We are not as smart as we think we are. Knowing people and having visible impact, having influence never leads to satisfaction, only to more loneliness and despair. This is a fact we see over and over in the culture around us.
Worldly measures of success and affirmation is not what we need or crave. We crave Christ!
Not only do we find identity in Christ but also we find identify with him. How?
Our Lord, the Man of Sorrows was despised and rejected by men, with no beauty or majesty that any should desire him, perceived as cursed by God and thus afflicted.
So when we experience suffering and adversity (which we all will) do we run from it or do we consider it to be an incredible privilege and the cost of following him? It is no secret the American Dream & Secular Culture and not the suffering of Christ, shapes our view of life. Often like a band aid we cling to our identity in Christ only in the times we don’t succeed. We can and sometimes do find our identity in Christ but we still would rather not have identify with him.
The immediate comfort of “identity in” comes easy but embracing the discomfort of “identify with” is something we avoid.
We are not Christ yet we are called to embrace a life of the cross. How often do you consider the very act of love that was on exhibition in the horrific suffering he experienced on the cross for ALL of us! The cross does not just show us that Christ has died, but the Cross teaches us how to live. Our daily discipleship is one of the cross, resurrection, sacrificial love and life. Those of us who yet live are given over to daily death for Jesus’s sake so that his life may be manifested in our mortal bodies.
2 Corinthians 4:11-12
11 For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.
We must keep at the forefront of our minds that imitating Christ is the greatest honor of our lives. We must do so while praying, confessing and repenting of our sins as we walk and talk daily with our Lord!!