Identity

For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Imagine you receive a letter in the mail one day. As you read it, you realize you’ve been found guilty of tax evasion. Not only that, it’s been going on for years.

Because of back taxes and fines, you now owe the IRS over $500,000! Your entire net worth is pennies compared to the fine. You can barely make a dent in it, and can never, ever pay the complete fine.

In addition, the minimum prison sentence is twenty years.

You show up at the trial and realize there is substantial evidence against you. Financial records, invoices, previous tax returns—it’s all there. You have no case.

You plead with the judge, claiming it was an accident and you honestly had no idea you were doing anything wrong. He sternly reminds you that ignorance is no excuse for criminal behavior. You broke the law and now you must pay the consequence.

The gavel slams against the desk as he sentences you to the maximum prison term in addition to your fine.

As you’re being escorted out of the courtroom, however, the judge speaks up:

“Stop! You may not know this yet, but I love you more than you can fathom. I can’t bear to see you punished like this. I will have my own Son pay your fine. He will serve your sentence for you. I can transfer all of your guilt to Him, allowing you to go free as one who is forgiven and restored to righteousness. You must decide, though, if you trust Him to do this for you. Will you receive this gift of forgiveness?”

You ponder the offer for a moment. It seems too good to be true. But then again, you have no other options. You’re desperate. It’s too late for you to undo what you’ve already done.

“Yes, your Honor. I trust your Son. I need Him to save me since I will never be able to overcome my own guilt.”

Immediately, the handcuffs are taken off you and placed upon the wrists of the Son.

You are now free.

Your debt has been paid.

As the Son is escorted out of the room, you thank him with tears in your eyes. You have never felt such an overwhelming sense of relief—or gratitude.

Friends, this is not just a story. This is the gospel.

This is what Jesus did for you the moment you trusted Him: He took your guilt, trading you His righteousness in return.

For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” (2 Corinthians 5:19-20)

What if I told you God didn’t just save you from something, He saved you to something?

You see, God’s purpose for sending Christ to die for you goes much deeper than merely saving you from death. His plan has always been to recruit this new version of you as a fully-alive, redeemed, hope-filled messenger of reconciliation to those who remain lost.

In other words, God has called you to be His ambassador.

According to dictionary.com, an ambassador is “a diplomatic official of the highest rank, sent by one sovereign or state to another as its resident representative.” In plain english: an ambassador is a messenger sent from one Kingdom to another. And not just any messenger, but one who has been trusted by the highest ranks with the most important and sensitive information. If you’re negotiating on behalf of the President with a foreign dignitary, you probably aren’t going to do it through email. You would send an ambassador to talk with him or her face-to-face.

Furthermore, you would want to make sure the person you sent as your ambassador understood the local customs, spoke the language, and ideally had an established relationship with whomever you were sending them to communicate with. This is why official US Ambassadors typically live within the country they’ve been assigned to. They are not citizens of that country, but they’ve chosen to live their lives there in order to develop relationships and become more effective in their communication.

So, what does this lesson in foreign relations have to do with you and me?

God’s plan is to recruit you (as well as all believers) to represent Him and share the news of His Kingdom with those who remain separated from Him. That’s why He doesn’t just zap us into Heaven the moment we believe, and why it’s probably not the best idea to hide yourself in an underground bunker lest you be tempted by negative influences.

You’re called to enter into the world of those around you (as much as you can without grieving the Holy Spirit), develop friendships with them, and share the love of Christ abundantly. Ideally, through these relationships, opportunities for deeper discussion will arise naturally, allowing you to share the story of how God has reconciled you back to Himself—an offer that is available to all.

Even if you’re only at the beginning of your journey to freedom, you can still tell others of the ways Jesus has already changed your life. Please don’t buy the lie that you need to “arrive” at some point of perfection before your story is worthy of being told. The only thing required of you to be an ambassador of Christ is to simply be in Christ.

This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! (2 Corinthians 5:17)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent countless years of my life trying to make myself into a better person. My biggest struggle was always with pornography, and my typical approach to fixing it was a combination of willpower and filter software—neither of which worked for very long. I’d look at my addiction and think life will only get better if I somehow fix this part of me. Or worse, God will only love me if I change. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I never could change for the better.

Now this may surprise you, but since I’ve found freedom from porn I’ve come to believe that God wasn’t all that interested in changing me during those years of my addiction. Before anyone get’s all spun up about that, let me explain what I mean.

I grew up in the church and trusted Christ very early in life. Which means, according to this verse, God had already changed me into a new person years before I ever got hooked on porn. But if that’s truly the case, why did I struggle so much with sin (and, to be honest, still do at times)?

The answer, I believe, is that I’d never been taught the truth about how I had already been changed. I didn’t realize that I had been given a new heart with new desires (Ezekiel 36:26). I didn’t understand what it meant to have the Holy Spirit living inside of me, empowering me to resist temptation (1 Corinthians 6:18-19). I had no idea that God had given me access to His wisdom and had already set me from the power of sin (1 Corinthians 1:30). I had all the tools and resources of the Kingdom available, but never realized they were mine to use.

The question I should have been asking during the years of my addiction wasn’t “What do I need to do to change myself for the better?” It should have been “How do I get to live my life now that God has already changed me?” Once I began focusing on what God had already done in me rather than what I could do for myself, that’s when I began to experience freedom from my addiction. Life was no longer about becoming someone new, it was about maturing into who God says I already am.

I’ll be honest though, there are still days where it doesn’t feel like I’ve been changed. But I’ve discovered that whenever I wait for something to feel true before I’m willing to trust it, I never experience it. If, however, I choose to believe what God says is true about me regardless of whether it feels true, then the feelings inevitably come. Trusting that God has already changed me, regardless of my feelings, is what allows me to live my life as if He has.

In the same way, if you’ve trusted Christ, you can trust that God has already made you a new person as well.

So remember, God isn’t interested in changing you.

Why?

Because He already has.

It’s done.

[God] has identified us as his own by placing the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the first installment that guarantees everything he has promised us (2 Corinthians 1:22).

One of my first experiences with an installment plan came back in the mid-90s when I purchased my first car: a pistachio-green 1976 AMC Pacer.

Oh man it was a thing of beauty.

Actually, it was probably one of the more hideous cars on the road at the time. But I didn’t care. I had a vision for what it could be.

I had saved up some money from my paper route, but not enough to fully cover the $1500 it would take to make it mine. So, like many kids, I took out a loan from my parents.

We agreed that I would pay them back in installments until the loan was fully satisfied. The cool thing though, was they let me put my name on the title. If I’d taken out a loan from a bank, the bank would have kept the title until it was paid in full. My parents, however, gave me full rights as the owner of my car even though I still owed them money on it.

From the very first installment, the Pacer was legally mine.

Knowing the car belonged to me, regardless of whatever condition it was in, made me love it unconditionally. I invested countless hours into sanding and repainting it, reupholstering the interior, and fixing the myriad of mechanical issues that were inevitable with a 20-year-old engine. If the car had belonged to someone else, there’s no way I would have put the time, money, or effort into transforming it into everything I’d pictured it to be.

In the same way, the moment you trusted Christ, God signed His name on the title of your soul by giving you the Holy Spirit. Your heart is in His name now, and no one will ever repossess it.

Furthermore, because you belong to God, you can be sure that He will fulfill everything He has promised to do in you. You may still feel like an old beater at times—peeling paint, broken transmission, flat tires—but God sees your full potential. He can’t wait to get you into His shop to restore you into the classic car that you are.

Yes, it will take time, and the job will never be fully complete this side of Heaven. But that doesn’t mean God will love you any less in the meantime.

I loved my Pacer when it was pistachio-green just as much as I loved it the day I drove it home from the shop with a fresh coat of gun-metal grey Mercedes paint and shiny new chrome rims.

Why? Because the Pacer was mine.

And you, my friend, are God’s.

 All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it (1 Corinthians 12:27).

I’m convinced the 1980s were the golden decade for cartoons. Feel free to argue with me on that, but you probably won’t change my mind. Now, I can admit, my opinion may be tainted with the bias of personal nostalgia, but you have to admit there were some pretty awesome classics back then.

My personal favorite, hands-down, was Voltron. Five kids, each with their own giant robotic lion, who would combine together to form the massive robot, Voltron. Every episode followed the same basic template—a bad guy shows up, the kids try to battle him as individual lions, realize they’re overmatched, and then finally combine forces as Voltron to save the day.

This same basic template has shown up in multiple cartoon series even to this day. Transformers (a close second to Voltron in my mind) had multiple iterations of these “combiners”: Devastator (formed from the five Constructicons), Defensor (formed from the five Protectobots), and the impressive Predaking (formed from the five Predacons). Even the long-running Power Rangers series with their “Megazord” was clearly inspired by (IE: ripped-off) the Voltron template as well.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years though, it’s that these shows I loved so deeply as a boy spoke to me for a reason. More often than not, it’s because they awakened something inside of me that God had put there for a reason. In the case of Voltron, it’s this idea that we’re all given an important role to play as part of a larger team—God’s team.

The moment you trusted Jesus, you became part of the body of Christ. You may not have received a giant robotic lion, but you were made into the hands and feet of Jesus. In other words, He wants to use you as the instrument through which He does good works in this world, and for you to be His tangible representation to everyone you meet.

Practically speaking, this means that instead of merely praying for peace in the world and wondering why God isn’t answering that prayer, perhaps you should consider whether He’s put that particular desire on your heart because He’s chosen you to do something about it. Maybe He wants to use you as His arms to deliver a loving embrace to your city or family.

I can tell you one thing for sure—God didn’t save you so you could just sit there in your robotic lion and watch 80s cartoons while the body of Christ functions without you. Anytime Voltron went into battle even one lion short, it didn’t end well—at least not until everyone was able to contribute and the body was whole once again.

Luckily, the body of Christ doesn’t have any paralyzed limbs either. As long as you show up, you’ll be given all the power and energy you will need to do whatever He calls you to do. Your life now flows from the same source that’s been empowering countless generations of believers to change the world through His love.

So don’t settle for being a mere spectator. As a member of Christ’s body, you’re now part of the team. You may be the green lion, or perhaps you’re the red one. Either way, the body can’t function as well without you.

So get off the couch and get in the game. We need you.

This post is an excerpt from my new book, 52 Amazing Things That Became True of You the Moment You Trusted Christ. If you enjoyed what you read here, be sure to check out the book for 51 more awesome truths about how God sees you!

God bought you with a high price… (1 Corinthians 6:20)

I’m not typically one to get excited about reality TV, but I’ll admit I can watch Pawn Stars for hours. There’s just something fascinating about seeing the random stuff people bring in, and even more so seeing them haggle about what it’s worth.

For example, one guy brought in a box full of sunken treasure. Full-on rupees that had rusted together after being at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years or so. As it turns out, they were authentic and (supposedly) worth over $700k.

Or, on the other end of the spectrum, one kid brought in a pair of 20-year-old Air Jordan shoes in mint condition expecting to get a few hundred bucks out of them. After a bit of investigation they ended up being rerelease throwbacks from 2009. Final value: $75 – about $50 less than what they retailed for originally.

That’s what makes this show so much fun though, the fact that you never know who’s going to come through the door and what they’re going to have to sell. Even the people bringing things in often have no idea what it’s actually worth.

Now, imagine if someone brought you in as their item to sell at the pawn shop. How would that conversation go? For me, I expect it would go something like this:

Seller: I’ve got a standard issue Oregonian, native, probably made sometime around the early-80s. He’s in decent shape other than starting to show some wear spots on the top of his head.

Buyer: Interesting. What were you hoping to get from him?

Seller: I was thinking $200.

Buyer: I don’t know man. We see a lot of these. Plus, look here: he’s clearly got some issues. I see signs of some messed-up junk in his past so there’s probably some baggage from that. And see that…the guy has some lingering issues with selfishness and pride. You’d think by this age those would have worn off of him but apparently not this guy. The best I can do is $10.

After all, isn’t that what these guys do? They point out every flaw and look for any reason they can find to haggle the price lower. They’re not interested in confirming its value, they only want to reduce how much they need to pay for it.

Aren’t you glad God doesn’t look at us that way? This verse in 1 Corinthians reminds us of how God would respond if someone offered to sell you to Him: He’d buy you without question. Not only that, He’d pay the highest price for you, fully confirming your worth and value.

How can we know that’s what He would do?

Because that’s exactly what He already did.

So the next time you feel flawed, worthless, or wonder if you even matter to God, remember how valuable you are truly are: valuable enough that God bought you from the enemy at the cost of His Son’s life.

This post is an excerpt from my new book, 52 Amazing Things That Became True of You the Moment You Trusted Christ. If you enjoyed what you read here, be sure to check out the book for 51 more awesome truths about how God sees you!

Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11).

The most important thing in life, hands down, is to figure out how to be made right with God. If your life on earth comes to an end before that is taken care of, you will be separated from Him for all eternity.

That, my friend, is bad news.

What are we to do then? Well, step one is to recognize and acknowledge this separation between you and your Creator exists. But after that, then what?

Many people reach this point and conclude they must try harder, do better, buck-up and follow the rules as best they can. Ideally, at the end of their life they will have done more good than bad (or at least more good than most other people), and therefore God will welcome them into Heaven.

This is, in essence, what all religion teaches: Be a good person and you might get to go to a better place when you die. The problem with this though, is we can’t do it. We can’t become good people, at least not on our own.

Sure, you may consider yourself to be a good person, but are you perfect? Are you holy? Because the gap that exists between man and God can only be overcome if man is somehow made holy. And man, left to his own devices, can never become holy.

God knew man couldn’t clean himself up. He knew man couldn’t overcome the separation that existed between them. Yet God loves every single one of us so much He was willing to do whatever it took to remove the separation from us—even if it cost Him the life of His son.

And it did.

When you called on the name of Christ and reached out to Him to save you, Jesus made you clean. It had nothing to do with your ability to clean yourself up, follow the rules, or become a good person.

Jesus made you Holy.

Jesus made you right with God.

It was all because of Jesus.

That, my friend, is good news.

Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Did you know there is a difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the commissions of the New Testament epistles?

The laws of the Old Testament are telling us, “You must do this or else there will be punishment.” The commissions of the New Testament are telling us, “Because of the power of Christ within you, this is how you get to act now.”

See the difference?

The New Testament isn’t a bunch of additional rules and commands telling us how to live a good life for Jesus. It’s telling us who we are now that we are in Christ. The New Testament is telling us what it will look like when we let Jesus live His life through us.

Any time you find what appears to be a command in the New Testament epistles, look for an “in Christ” statement nearby. I’ve found it’s always close by. For example, look at the following verse from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth:

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body (1 Corinthians 6:18).

How many times have you read that as a command telling you to resist sexual temptation by your own power…or else? But look at the two verses immediately following:

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

Paul knew the church in Corinth hadn’t fallen back into sexual immorality because they were too weak to resist temptation. It was because they had forgotten who they were in Christ. They forgot they had the power of the Holy Spirit living within them.

Instead of telling them to shape up and knock off their bad behavior, Paul simply reminds them to remember who they are now that they are in Christ.

Likewise, if you are struggling with sexual immorality, it’s not because you are still a slave to sin, it’s because you have forgotten who you are in Christ. If you can remember that the Holy Spirit now lives within you, you can rely on Him to give you the power to honor God with your body.

But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him (1 Corinthians 6:17).

When I read about being one with the Lord in Spirit, I immediately think back to the earthly example of this that God gives us all the way back in the Garden of Eden:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).

Yes, part of what this verse is talking about is the sexual union between a husband and wife, but it actually goes much, much deeper than that. As we see later when Jesus quotes this verse in his response to the Pharisees, this union is the literal joining together of two individuals by God.

Two separate persons becoming one in spirit.

As I write this, it’s been just over a week since my wedding. Needless to say, this idea of “two becoming one” has been on my mind a lot lately.

For the past year or so, I’ve been falling more and more in love with the woman who has now become my wife. During that time, I desired to learn everything I could about her, discover what makes her happy, and learn to avoid doing anything that might make her question why she keeps hanging out with me. I wanted to be with her as much as I could. Even if we were doing nothing together, at least we were together.

As great as this was, at the end of each day she would go back to her house or I would go back to mine, we deposited our paychecks into separate accounts, and we didn’t even have the same last name.

We were together, but we had not yet become one.

Today, however, thanks to the covenant of marriage, we are one. We now share the same house, the same bank account, and the same last name. Deeper than that though, our souls have been joined together by God. We have become one in spirit.

Yes, we are still two distinct individuals, but from here out, we will always be one entity: “The Kuhn’s.”

The same is true with you and Jesus.

There may have been a period before you trusted Christ when you we’re intersted in finding out more about Him—a time when you wished to discover if He truly was who He said He was.

Or perhaps you spent many years trying to impress Him with behavior and sacrifices in order to feel closer to Him (That was my story).

If you’ve never made the commitment of trusting Him as your savior though, you’ve only been courting Him. You’re still going home to separate houses each night.

If, however, you have trusted Jesus with your life, then you’ve already become one with Him in Spirit.

Your eternity has been fully aligned with His eternity.

Your debts were completely satisfied when He added His signature to your spiritual bank account.

Even your heavenly name has been changed to reflect who you are now that you’re in permanent union with Christ.

Everything changed for me the moment I pledged myself to my wife on our wedding day and the two of us became one in God’s eyes. As wonderful as this has been for us though, it is nothing compared to the eternal union we’ve received with our Lord and Savior.

And being able to know that we’ve been made one in spirit with the Lord, well, that is truly something worth celebrating

God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin (1 Corinthians 1:30).

For the most part, school came fairly easily for me. I don’t recall ever getting a poor grade on a test or paper unless I purposefully chose to blow it off (which is a whole nother story). As long as I paid attention and read my assignments, I could get a decent grade without having to put in too much effort.

For an overly imaginative and creative kid like me, this was both a blessing and a curse. Sure, I could breeze through my homework quicker than most kids, which was a good thing. But then what was I supposed to do with all my free time?

In my younger years, I would typically play with Legos, read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, or draw epic Ninja Turtles vs. Star Wars battles. As I got older though, my decision-making skills seemed to regress.

Instead of building robots, I decided to stink-bomb the school cafeteria.

Instead of reading books, I chose to look at porn.

Instead of battling with action figures, I broke into cars for drug money.

The irony is, no matter how much trouble I got myself into, my grades never dropped. I remained on the honor roll at school despite all my poor decision-making.

I may have had a ton of knowledge, but I clearly didn’t have enough wisdom.

Wisdom is “the knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”(1). You can know true facts about a million different things, but if you don’t know how to apply that information to your life, it’s just knowledge. Knowing facts and information may get you into the final round of Jeopardy, but it won’t help you navigate life unless you pair it with wisdom.

True wisdom, however, isn’t something you generate on your own. As Paul shows us in this verse, the source of true wisdom is Jesus: “God made [Christ] to be wisdom itself.”

Once again, Paul is speaking in the past tense. God made… It’s been done.

Furthermore, God did this for our benefit. He knew that many of the decisions we would be faced with in life would far exceed our pay-grades. Which is why He made Christ to be the embodiment of wisdom, placed Him within us, and granted us full access to everything we will ever need to know.

As Charles Ellicott says in his Commentary for English Readers:

“Christ became to us God’s revelation of Himself, thus giving us a wisdom from the source of all wisdom, which surpasses utterly any wisdom we could have derived from nature or from man” (2).

You can rest assured that God will never bring you to a tough decision only to leave you hanging. If you find yourself in a situation where you need wisdom, remember that Wisdom itself already lives inside of you. All you need to do is ask for it. He will make your path clear or give you the words to say.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that God’s widom far exceeds my own. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I have a feeling my decision to stink-bomb the school cafeteria wouldn’t have seemed like such a great idea if I’d sought the Lord’s wisdom first.

But then again, if I had asked Him, I probably would have missed out on all those fun hours I spent staring at the wall of the detention room.