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Matt’s third book is now available for purchase. If you struggle to know the importance of your God-given identity, To Identity and Beyond is a must read.
Insights
Holy Spirit Guarantees Your Inheritance
Reading time: 3 minutes
God desires that you feel secure with Him. He accomplishes this through His Holy Spirit, given to you when you are born spiritually. Once you are saved, He accepts responsibility for you and is able to keep you from falling away (Jude 1:24).
Holy Spirit Seals You
God gives the believer His Holy Spirit. As soon as you believe, God seals you with His Holy Spirit so you can feel secure. You become a genuine believer by hearing the word of truth, which is the gospel, and believing the truth.
God personally guarantees your inheritance until you receive it. If God is the guarantor, there be no doubt that He will keep His promise. God is the giver of good gifts. He is not one to revoke His gift (James 1:17, Matthew 7:7-11). This makes sense, doesn’t it? God is not someone who plays games with us. Once He chooses and calls you, He doesn’t change His mind (Romans 11:29).
A genuine believer can know he or she is eternally secure because of Ephesians 1:14.
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
—Ephesians 1:11-14
Holy Spirit Intercedes for You
God is master and we are His followers. As a follower, you don’t need to know as much as God knows. You can’t know as much as God.
Since you are weaker than God, this places you in a position of dependence. Believers relate to God through faith and trust.
You don’t always know what needs to happen or what you should pray for. God makes up the difference by intervening in the best way possible. He knows us completely. Therefore, He cannot miss a necessary detail. He has life figured out. He has you covered.
In certain ways we are weak, but the Spirit is here to help us. For example, when we don’t know what to pray for, the Spirit prays for us in ways that cannot be put into words. All of our thoughts are known to God. He can understand what is in the mind of the Spirit, as the Spirit prays for God’s people.
Romans 8:26-27 CEV
Holy Spirit Guides You
When people are blind, they especially need someone to direct their steps. Chances are, you are not blind, but even so, you cannot see everything.
Since you see less clearly than God, you must depend upon Him. You must walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). This means moving forward in confidence that God is on your side, God is protecting you, and God is preserving you.
In the physical world, salt is a preservative. In the spiritual realm, truth is a preservative. Without the truth, you decay and die. The truth strengthens your resolve to face all that you must endure in this life.
The Spirit shows what is true and will come and guide you into the full truth. The Spirit doesn’t speak on his own. He will tell you only what he has heard from me, and he will let you know what is going to happen.
John 16:13 CEV
Consider all these words and may the peace of God rest upon you now and forever.
This post is part of a series on eternal security. You can read the introductory post: eternal security means full assurance of salvation.
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Eternal Security Means Full Assurance Of Salvation
Reading time: 3 minutes
All born-again Christians have eternal security: a full assurance of their salvation. Jesus guaranteed this when He paid for our sins once for all time (Hebrews 10:12).
A promise of security that is temporary or conditional wouldn’t provide assurance. But worse, it would be fraudulent. The reasons to worship or trust God would be limited. Security is an emotional need that God fulfills through His care for us. Fortunately for us, God is fully capable of meeting our need for assurance:
The name of the Lord is a strong fortress;
Proverbs 18:10 NLT
the godly run to him and are safe.
Even when I walk
Psalm 23:4 NLT
through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
protect and comfort me.
Psalm 23 ends with David’s conviction that he will live forever:
Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me
Psalm 23:6 NLT
all the days of my life,
and I will live in the house of the Lord
forever.
Assurance is Possible Because Salvation is Freedom
When interpreting the Bible, it is important to look broadly (across many scriptures) and narrowly (in the immediate context of a verse). Also, everything written has an intended audience. The Bible has two main audiences: the Christian and the non-Christian.
The question of eternal security is a positional one. The Christian should approach the Bible as someone who is already saved and interpret every verse from this perspective. The true believer has complete freedom and no condemnation (Galatians 5:1,13; Romans 8:1). As a Christian, you can: Interpret The Bible With Your Christian Identity. The non-Christian should feel condemnation for their sin and the need for the Savior.
Can we agree on what is required to become a Christian? All of us should be able to evaluate whether or not we are saved at the present moment. If you can’t assert that you are saved right now, then that is a different problem: you then must consider if you are saved at all.
Assurance is Possible Because Salvation is a Gift
The process of gaining salvation requires putting your faith (actively believing) in Christ’s work on your behalf. You can’t provide any “work.” All that is required is your faithful belief. Salvation is a gift. Gifts are received not earned as Paul makes clear:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV
If someone can lose their salvation, there must be an equally clear procedure of how that happens. I suppose someone could return the gift, but there isn’t any reason why a true believer would want to do that. Only someone who hasn’t already received the gift can refuse the gift.
Assurance is Possible Because Salvation is Rest
If you can lose salvation by not working hard enough at it, then this would make salvation a trap: it’s easy to step in, but once you’re in, you have to work increasingly harder to stay in, otherwise, you’ll be kicked out. But then is it easy or hard to get back in again? Besides being confusing, this seems to go against the Gospel message and many Bible passages that grace, not works, saves you.
Consider Jesus’s words about coming to Him for rest:
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
—Matthew 11:28-30
Salvation is not gained by working harder to avoid sin. That would be self-effort to keep salvation. Jesus is saying that salvation is the process of finding rest for your soul.
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Does God Need Us?
Reading time: 2 minutes
To fully answer this question, we need to have a clear picture of the God who made us. God is almighty—eternally self-sufficient. In this sense, God doesn’t need anyone. But the enemy twists this fact to attempt to make us dull, despondent, and defeated. You don’t really matter to God; you’re on our own. While God is able to carry on and enact His will without us, He chooses not to. He desires to take our shame, self-pity, and self-deprecation and make us His sons and daughters.
Until you see yourself as worthwhile, you’ll underestimate your significance and limit your contribution to God’s kingdom. You must throw off your worthlessness and fully embrace the reality and identity God has for you.
God has a specific purpose for your existence. You’re a unique creation, so your active participation is essential. He chose to make you a vital part of His plans, part of the body of Christ. In the reality that God has created, each of us is irreplaceable. He desires fellowship with us and wants to see us thrive. In this sense, God needs us. If none of us were to rise up to do His bidding, He could make the rocks cry out, but that’s not going to happen. God made us to praise Him and praise Him we will.
God has great plans for you, but you can’t accomplish anything apart from God. We need God’s strength and determination to work in and through us, just as Jesus relied on His Father throughout His life. When we participate by faith, God empowers us. Instead of passively waiting for God to topple the giants in your life, consider that He may be calling you to fight, as David did, with the strength of God’s Spirit within you.
Since God has committed to partnering with us to the very end, don’t hesitate to step out in faith to discover who you are and to seek to advance God’s kingdom. To this end, I invite you To Identity and Beyond (the title of my upcoming book).
Worship God With Genuine Joy
Reading time: 4 minutes
Does God seem distant to you? Does worship feel like an obligation? Maybe you are missing a genuine experience of God.
Are you struggling to believe God cares? Do you like yourself? Wait. What does liking yourself have to do with God? God assumes that you will care for yourself. But He commands that you love others (Him and your neighbor).
Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
Matthew 22:37-40 NLT
How to Worship God Authentically
Loving God with everything you have is the same as worship. Authentic worship will only happen as we understand and experience God.
God is at His fullest potential. He can’t get any better than He already is. Instead of this meaning He is frequently bored, He lives with maximum enjoyment. That’s right. Part of what it means to be God is that He lives with a constant euphoria (a feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness). Because we are made in God’s image, God intends us to reach our full potential and experience euphoria. Enthusiasm is similar to euphoria; it means to be full of God.
When we are full of God, we can’t help but worship Him. We worship because He is worthy. However, there is more to worship than how awesome God is. Consider the scene in heaven from Revelation 4:
Whenever the living beings give glory and honor and thanks to the one sitting on the throne (the one who lives forever and ever), the twenty-four elders fall down and worship the one sitting on the throne (the one who lives forever and ever). And they lay their crowns before the throne and say, “You are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you created all things, and they exist because you created what you pleased.”
Revelation 4:9-11 NLT
Revelation 5 continues with Jesus being the only one worthy to open the scroll and the elders falling down in worship. If we only consider this scene superficially, we might observe that worship seems robotic. Who wants to fall down and worship every few minutes, repeating this for eternity? Wouldn’t that get old? It might if we ignore how we can experience God.
On earth today there are many distractions and distortions which prevent us from seeing God clearly. In heaven, these barriers will be gone. We will see and experience God as He is, at least to the limit of our capacity. God made us to appreciate who He is. Encountering God produces an intense, joyful response. The worship is spontaneous, genuine, never forced. The difference might be compared to seeing electricity power a light bulb and feeling electricity surge through your body.
How to Love Yourself When You Don’t Feel Worthy
God expects that people will care for themselves. Despite this being a simple truth, most people struggle to genuinely feel good about who they are. This is a problem because when you’re negative on what God made, how can you be positive about God? When you can’t see God as positive, you can’t believe He’s got your best interest in mind.
If you want to feel close to God, you must feel positive about yourself. If you don’t like yourself, then the you you don’t like is probably not the real you God has in mind. Your identity is who God says you are, while your self-image is who you think you are. When you get the two mixed up, you can’t like yourself.
Not liking yourself is ultimately the inability to see yourself as God sees you. Putting this all together, if you want to be closer to God, you need to see what He sees. Who does God see when He looks at you? Spend time thanking God for how He made you. Ask Him to help you see yourself through His eyes. Then you will know the joy of genuine worship.
Learn more about identity and self-worth.
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay
Last updated 2024/11/17
Your Purpose Is Always Packed With Potential
Reading time: 4 minutes
You are an individual with your own personality, interests, and abilities. You have an identity. Therefore, you automatically have a built-in purpose.
Your identity is inseparable from your purpose. If God intentionally created you as distinct from others, there must be a reason for your uniqueness. Why would God have made you if He didn’t want someone just like you?
Purpose Implies Many Other Profound Truths
While you can’t expect to discover your purpose overnight, you can be sure you have one at all times. If you always have a purpose, here is what also must be true at all times:
Your life is intentional.
God made you with intention. You are who you are because of His purpose. There are no coincidences. You aren’t like a random fish in a vast ocean that contains an uncountable number of fish. You aren’t an interchangeable part—one of many other identical fish. God knows you by your name.
What is the price of two sparrows—one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.
Matthew 10:29-31 NLT
He knows you so completely that He placed you with your character, skills, and abilities in the time and place for you to live (Act 17:26).
You are a work of art.
You are a planned, deliberate, creative design. You’re not an accident. Your personality isn’t a mistake. You’re not lame or inferior. You’re not a reject. You’re not God’s failed experiment.
While we all need to admit that we have flaws, we have a real need to see ourselves apart from our flaws. One day (in the next life) you will no longer have these flaws. So they can’t be so significant today. The wrong you do today isn’t really a part of who you are.
Flaws can also be misrepresented. What might seem like a weakness–a personal defect–could actually be a misplaced strength. A fish is weak on dry land but strong in the water.
Just existing is meaningful.
What you feel, think, and do is significant. Even when seems like you are accomplishing nothing, you’re doing something. No matter how you feel about your deeds—whether they feel significant or not, in God’s eyes, they are important. To be alive means you are productive. God wired you to thrive by pursuing a relationship with Him.
You have significant work to do.
The more you understand life, the more you will know what to do. Not only can you make an important contribution in this life, but you were intentionally designed to do so.
You have a destiny to fulfill.
You will not only make a contribution, but you will be completing the work God planned for you when He made you.
For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
Ephesians 2:10 NLT
You are wanted and needed.
All of this means that you, in all of your uniqueness, are needed. Without your participation, the outcome of any given relationship or task will play out in a different way than if you were involved. This doesn’t mean that God’s plans are limited by your refusal to participate. God will fulfill His purposes. Nothing can prevent or delay His will. But He chose you to participate. You are a masterpiece; you are one-of-a-kind.
Purpose Will Be Elusive Until You Know Who You Are
Having and understanding your identity provides numerous benefits. Can you imagine how knowing you have a purpose at all times helps you live each day? Now then, are you able to wake up excited about your day?
What’s your purpose? If knowing your purpose or even believing you have one is still difficult, then you first need to focus on learning who you are.
When you know your identity, you will know your purpose. When you are unsure of your purpose, then it is a signal to grow by digging deeper into understanding your identity. Because of your God-given identity, you have a purpose, and knowing this purpose allows you to claim your destiny.
Read more about purpose.
Image by René Schaubhut from Pixabay
Updated on August 22, 2022
