The Necessity of Rightly Understanding Christian Identity

The follower of Jesus is a strange person. He does not fit any place. Jesus told him to "be in the world, not of the world." What does that even mean? Christians have been struggling with this concept ever since Jesus said it.


Yesterday I spent some time with a group of men that I affectionately refer to as The Calvinistas. Our conversation turned to the topic of what it means to be in the world, what is our responsibility as an individual Christian? What about the church corporate? These are important questions because they go to the heart of our mission as followers of Jesus.

As a person who is leading a new Jesus movement, these questions take on a whole new meaning. This is because how we answer these questions will determine what we do as a movement and what our focus will be as a movement.

All that context leads me to the reality that we cannot answer this question in one post. However, I think that it primarily leads to this core thought: to answer this questions requires us to have a clear understanding of our identity as a Christians.

A right understanding of our identity is a necessity because it drives our decisions. It gives us clarity to the all important "why" questions of our lives. We cannot answer "why" without first having answered "who". What makes following Jesus a transcendent experience is that when we follow him our "who" is transformed which in turn transforms our "why".

We cannot live out our calling as representatives of Jesus if we don't understand what it means to be a representative of Jesus.

A right understanding of Christian identity is a necessity to living the Christian life. We simply cannot understand the why and how without first getting the who.