Daily Encouragement: Day 308

Adapted from Handbook to Spiritual Growth

KNOWING WHO YOU ARE

Christians often suffer from spiritual ignorance and amnesia; many believers either do not know or have forgotten who they are in Christ. As a result, their self-image is derived from the wrong source. Using a variation of Luke 9:18–20, there are three fundamental questions we can ask of ourselves:

Who do you say that you are?
Who do people say that you are?
Who does God say that you are?

All too often, our sense of identity is based on our answers to the first two questions rather than the third. When this happens, we will unavoidably arrive at unbiblical conclusions and base our sense of personal worth on the wrong things. As believers in Christ, our identity must not be based on what people say, but on what God says of us. He says that He unconditionally loves and accepts us regardless of how we feel or perform (Romans 5:8). He tells us that we have become “united with Christ in the likeness of His death,” and that we will also be united with Him “in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans 6:5).