What did Jesus purchase for us through the cross? More than most of us realize. And most of us don’t live up to it. I think the most common reason is that we don’t know who we are.

   The greatest crisis in the American church may well be an identity crisis.

   If you’ve genuinely put your faith in Jesus for salvation, He’s set you free from sin, and He calls you to be His child, His brother, His friend, His dwelling place. Think about that—He lives in you!

   Sin isn’t the biggest problem in the church, because the Bible clearly says believers are set free from sin. John the Baptist saw Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” If Jesus took our sin away, where is it?

   Many of us say, “Well, I’m a sinner.” No. The Bible calls us saints. The real problem is that we don’t know who we are. We tend to think that what we do defines who we are. But it’s what He did that defines who we are.

   The Bible says that when Jesus returns to earth, everyone will see Him at the same time. That means He could probably live anywhere He wants because He’s God. He could have a beautiful gold palace floating right above your church. Everybody on the planet would say, “That’s where God lives!”

   But He doesn’t do that. Instead He chooses to live inside us. But look at us! We are a beaten-down-bad-part-of-town-dilapidated piece of property. And Jesus looks at us and says, “I want to buy them out and renovate them and move right into them. I want to live inside them.”

   This was His idea. We didn’t coerce Him. We didn’t get a million signatures on a petition saying, “Please come down and live inside us.” It was His idea from eternity past.

   And yet so many of us Christians act as if God doesn’t know what we’re going through. We forget who we really are, and we forget whose we really are and who lives inside us.

   If you are a born-again believer in Jesus Christ, His Spirit lives inside you, and that makes you the highest priced, most valued “real estate” in your whole town. And your property will not go down in value. In fact, it appreciates every day because Jesus and His kingdom are expanding and increasing without end every day. There is no end to His kingdom. That’s who is living right inside you. That’s who you really are because of Jesus.

   John 13:3–4 describes how Jesus, knowing exactly who He is, takes a towel, gets down on a dirty floor, and washes his disciples’ feet. That’s twelve pair of dirty feet. How can He do that? Because He knows He is from the Father and that He is going back to the Father. His whole identity is wrapped up in who the Father and He are together.

   He never forgets or doubts His true identity in the Father’s eyes and heart. This allows Him to never base His ministry or His identity on what can be seen with the human eye. He never measures His success by the standards so many of us foolishly and erroneously assume and use to measure ourselves.

   This allows Him to humble Himself and obey what the Father tells Him to do every moment of every day through His incredible life. This causes Him to be bold, fearless, and successful in the Father’s eyes.

   Too many of us base our life and ministry on what we think will get the best bang for our time and effort, but if we really knew who we are in Jesus, we would base everything we do on what He says to do next.

   Because we forget who we are in Christ, we get discouraged or fight with each other, and we don’t change the world we live in.

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Not Believing Who We Are

   The enemy is our not believing who we are.

   The enemy is not the devil. Satan is defeated. His effort now is to get us to forget who we are in Christ. If we are conscious of our true identity in Jesus, Satan cannot stop or limit us. Satan knows that, which is why he works so hard to cause us to forget our identity in Jesus.

   I’m almost to the point that I want to thank Satan because everything he’s tried to do to me has only made me more like Jesus. That would mean Satan inadvertently serves God, and he doesn’t seem to know it. That’s how deceived he is.

   And he sure deceives people. People who truly love God can lose sight of their identity very fast, even in a moment of time. If we’re not intimate with God, circumstances will speak louder than truth.