God’s hearing of our prayers does not depend upon what we are in ourselves, but what we are in Christ Jesus; both our person and our prayers are acceptable in the Beloved.
Identity in Christ
John G Lake
Many Christians thinks it’s all right if they pattern after Jesus in a sort of way. They imitate Him, and they do the things which He did; that is, they outwardly do them. They perform kind acts, and they do other things which Jesus did. But the secret of Christianity is not in doing, the secret is in being. Real Christianity is in being a possessor of the nature of Jesus Christ. In other words, it is being Christ in character. Christ in demonstration. Christ in agency of transmission. When one gives himself to the Lord and becomes a child of God, a Christian, he is a Christ man. All that he does, and all that he says from that time on, should be the will and the words and the doings of Jesus just as absolutely. just as entirely, as he spoke, and did the will of the Father.
James Bryan Smith
The caterpillar, a worm, goes into the cocoon — a chrysallis, in which the root word, appropriately, is “Christ.” And it emerges a butterfly, completely transformed. The old has passed. The new has arrived. It was once weighed down by gravity; now it can fly. Christians are once under the reign of sin, but now we can live in freedom. And you can also see why it’s so painful to me that so many Christians don’t understand this? When I hear a Christian say, “I’m just a sinner saved by grace,” I want to say, “that makes as much as a butterfly saying, “I’m just a worm with wings.”
Leif Hetland
Somehow when we are with Him, we become greater than we are.
Rolland Allen
Christ our Lord revealing himself by the Holy Ghost is not like a human master impressing his own personality upon another to the other’s annihilation. Only in Christ, only as filled with the Holy Spirit and in completest surrender to him, do men really find themselves.
Eugene H Peterson
God’s affirmation doesn’t condone our sin, and it doesn’t acquiesce in our mediocrity. He calls us to repentance and holiness and discipleship. But he begins with a simple, unconditional affirmation: I love you. You are my daughter. You are my son. With you I am well pleased. When we embrace that affirmation, we make a good start. We don’t start falteringly, hesitantly, guiltily, waiting for rejection, or wondering when we will get cut from the squad. We start on the right foot, embraced and embracing the God who loves us and has an eternal salvation for us.
Francis Chan
When we allow others’ perceptions of us, or even our perceptions of their perceptions, to control how we live, we are enslaved, we become entrenched in the ways of this world and do not live as citizens of heaven, which is another kind of Kingdom altogether.
T.J. Green
Don’t pray like a widow because you are the bride. Don’t live like an orphan when you are a son. Don’t settle for a pauper when you are a princess. God is revealing who you really are, your truest identity that is found only in Him.
Dan McCollam
In terms of your heavenly identity, alignment is simply defined as positioning yourself to agree and ally with what God says about you. It’s taking off anything that doesn’t look like the person heaven describes and putting on the things that do.
Winnie Banov
In union with Christ, we can be consciously aware that the person we used to be – our old man, our former nature, our old sinful self – was co-crucified with Christ so that the tyranny of sin has been broken over us once and for all. We are no longer slaves to sin. One nail pierced two hands!