Cp. 1 Understanding Who We Are in Christ pt.1

To fully understand our relationship with God we must realize that He is the author and creator of our emotions and He has emotions towards us. What are His emotions? Let’s try an experiment! Take out a pen and a piece of paper. Now I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to write down your first response without thinking about it… If you were to meet God in the next ten seconds; how do you think He would feel about your life? If you wrote down sad, mad, disappointed, or any other negative feeling you are not alone. Most of us have a negative opinion about our relationship with God. The reason for this is that many of us see God as emotionally sterile. Oh sure, we intellectually acknowledge His love for us and we easily admit that He can feel negatively about us because of our own feelings of inadequacy and low self worth. We fail to understand that as His children, He loves us better than we love our children, as our heavenly Father, we fail to realize that He loves us better than our parents do. As our eternal friend and companion who sticks closer than a brother, we fail to acknowledge that He can love us better than anyone else we have ever known or will know.
We either picture God as a Zeus-like figure waiting to cast lightning bolts towards us for any infraction or a God who is eternally frustrated with the poor performance of His children, but God is neither. The bible tells us that “He delights in those whose way is blameless”, He “delights in men who are truthful”, “the prayer of the upright pleases Him”, “The Lord rescues us because He delights in us”, “He delights in those who fear Him” and “He delights in those who put their hope in His unfailing love” and finally that He rejoices in His works and we are part of His works. As we are able to show caring, kindness, compassion and patience towards those we love, He also extends those same emotions towards us, but in a more infinite capacity.
As you read the verses above you may have been saying to yourself, “but I’m not blameless, I’m not always upright or truthful so I am deserving of His wrath, aren’t I?” By asking those questions you are already falling into Satan’s trap. You are looking at yourself through your eyes instead of God’s. When God looks at the born again believer, He is seeing you washed white through the blood of the Lamb. Yes, you are guilty but the penalty for your guilt has been “paid in full” through the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross. Don’t forget that in God’s timing, while we may have been Christians for many years we are still growing and maturing and He also knows that while we are new creatures, we still have our sin nature and will always fall short of His glory. If we could attain perfection on our own He never would have had to sacrifice His Son on our behalf. So give yourselves the same kind of break that God is willing to give you and come to the absolute understanding that any negative feelings that you suspect God of having towards you is a lie from the devil. One of Satan’s tactics to bring defeat into our lives is through our relationships, not only our personal ones but the relationship we have with God most of all.
We need to understand how the devil works in our lives to bring us to the point of stagnation. If we are stagnate then we are not going forward and are of no effect. We become incapacitated by focusing on our own problems of feeling lost, helpless and alone or other spiritual hurts which results in being ineffectual in helping others. Our relationship to each other as the Body of Christ is vital towards our ultimate success in defeating Satan in our lives and the effect he has on our loved ones. There is a book out there that can really bring this point home and that is “The Screwtape Letters” by C. S. Lewis. In this book, Lewis shows how demons can work in our lives to make us ineffectual as believers.
The conclusions we come to by understanding all this is that we are at war! There are demons and spirits out there whose job it is to prevent us from being all that we can be as spiritual warriors for God. Every one of us is better then an “army of one” because each of us is an “army of four” ourselves and the Holy Trinity. When each one of us combines in unity as members of His Body with one another then our army grows exponentially. Realizing that we are part of an army with a spiritual battle before us; it behooves us to become familiar with our armor and weapons of warfare. As recent history has proven it doesn’t matter how spiritual you are or whether you’re a famous Christian personality or just a common man, Satan will seek to destroy your efforts to become an effective believer.
One of the ways to understand our relationship to God is to understand who our “old man” was in regards to the “new man” we’ve become. Eph 4:22-24 - “That ye put off concerning the former conversation (life) the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (KJV)
The word conversation here is not speaking of the way we communicate but is talking about our general behavior, how we conduct our life. In close association with this verse is Rom. 12:2 - "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will." (NIV) The word “conform” in this verse, means to “shape or fashion one like another”, in other words, we are not to base our patterns of thought around what the world thinks or believes but on what God’s Word has to say about any particular issue.
Many of us read further on in Eph 4, vs. 25-32...

"Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 26 "In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold. 28 He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need. 29 Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." (NIV)

…and believe that by obeying these actions; our old man will be “put off”, but that is not the case. These are things that our old man did, not how he thought or believed. While we must obey the above verses, they are only the beginning, the cleaning up of our outer laundry, so to speak. The real chore and the problem that most Christians have is in changing and cleansing our inner laundry, the way we think and believe; in fact our whole thought process has to be conformed to the word of God and our previous philosophies and lofty ideas about our earthly lives must be redrafted into the patterns that God desires.