not that praying and reading the Bible are bad; it’s just that I wanted to do them less and less the more and more he talked.
It wasn’t so much what he was saying as it was the place he was coming from. The beginning premise seemed that we are bad and don’t do enough, and if we are made to feel guilty enough about it, then we will change our behavior.
I don’t think this is what Jesus had in mind.
His greatest anger was reserved for religious leaders who weighed people down with guilt and shame. He says to a group of Bible scholars and teachers, “You experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”1
A little while later he calls them “sons of hell.”
He goes on to say that it is possible for religious leaders to actually get in the way of people entering into the life of God.2
So what is the message? How should people feel about themselves?
Have you ever heard a Christian say, “I’m just a sinner”? I can’t find one place in the teachings of Jesus, or the Bible for that matter, where we are to identity ourselves first and foremost as sinners. Now this doesn’t mean that we don’t sin; that’s obvious. In the book of James it’s written like this: “We all stumble in many ways.”3 Once again, the greatest truth of the story of Adam and Eve isn’t that it happened, but that it happens. We all make choices to live outside of how God created us to live. We have all come up short.4
Who We Are Now
The first Christians insisted that when we become Christians, a profound change occurs in our fundamental identity. In who we are at the core of our being. In who we are first and foremost, before we are anything else. In our awareness of ourselves. The first Christians were convinced that in identifying with Jesus’s death on the cross, something within us dies. They called this person who died the “old man” or the “old woman.” The person we were before we had a spiritual birth.5
Now this idea of death and rebirth is not a new idea—it has been around in almost every religious tradition since people first started talking about these things. But the first Christians believed that this idea had been lived out in a new and unique way in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Paul put it like this in the book of Colossians: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”6
So this old nature of mine—the one that was constantly pulling me down and causing me to live in ways I wasn’t created to live—has died. And no matter how many times that old nature raises its ugly head and pretends to be alive, it is dead.
And not only did that old person die, but I have been given a new nature.
Again, Paul writes in Colossians, “You have been raised with Christ.”7 I have this new life, this new identity that has been given to me. I have taken on the identity of Christ.
Paul continues, “You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived.” These first Christians kept insisting that something so transformational was happening in the lives of followers of Jesus that they could refer to their old lives as “the life [we] once lived.”8
It is not that we are perfect now or that we will never have to struggle. Or that the old person won’t come back from time to time. It’s that this new way of life involves a constant, conscious decision to keeping dying to the old so that we can live in the new. Paul describes it as Christ being our lives.
Paul goes so far as to insist in another letter that if we are having this new kind of transforming experience with Christ in which we are taking on a new identity, we are literally now a “new creation.”9
I am being remade.
I am not who I was.
I am a new creation.
I am “in Christ.”
When God looks at me, God sees Christ, because I’m “in” him.
God’s view of me is Christ.
And Christ is perfect.10
This is why Paul goes on to say, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved . . . ”11
Did you catch that word in the middle?
Holy.
Not “going to be holy someday.” Not “wouldn’t it be nice if you were holy, but instead you’re a mess.” But “holy.”
Holy means pure, without blemish, unstained.
In these passages we’re being told who we are, now.
The issue then isn’t my beating myself up over all of the things I am not doing or the things I am doing poorly; the issue is my learning who this person is who God keeps insisting I already am.
Notice these words from the letter to the Philippians: “Let us live up to what we have already attained.”12
There is this person who we already are in God’s eyes. And we are learning to live like it is true.
This is an issue of identity. It is letting what God says about us shape what we believe about ourselves. This is why shame has no place whatsoever in the Christian experience. It is simply against all that Jesus is for. As the writer to the Romans put it, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”13
None.
No shame.
No list of what is being held against us.
No record of wrongs.
It has simply been done away with.
It is no longer an issue.
Bringing it up is pointless.
Beating myself up is pointless.
Beating others up about who and what they are not is going the wrong direction. It is working against the purposes of God. God is not interested in shaming people; God wants people to see who they really are.
“Let us live up to what we have already attained.”
I am not who I was.
You are not who you were.
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