6 Lies Stopping You From Embracing Your Identity in Christ

When we accept Christ into our lives, we are no longer identified by past mistakes, current shortcomings, or the opinions of others. Instead, we are known as children of God, Beloved, forgiven, and so much more. Still, our identity in Christ can be challenging to embrace and live. In today’s video, I’m sharing why that is and how to overcome the major lies stopping you from living out your new identity in Christ. Enjoy!

Embracing who you are in Christ means knowing who you are not. Now this is not as easy as you may think. Every day, through media, conversations, and worldly trends, we are fed lies about who we ought to be. It can all be quite confusing. But our God is not a God of confusion. His word makes it clear we are new in Christ, we are children of God, and forever Beloved. Our greatest challenge will be to believe the truths about ourselves that are revealed in the pages of our Bibles. To overcome those challenges, we must know who we are not, to release the lies the world and enemy would love for us to believe so that we can truly embrace our true and powerful identity in Christ.

So in today’s video, I’m revealing 6 lies you may have unknowingly believed about your identity and the truth to combat each of those lies.

1. You are not your mistakes.

First, you are not your mistakes. We all make mistakes, but they do not in turn permeate into our being and define who we are.

Jesus never addressed anyone by their mistakes. Think of the sinful woman in Luke 7. She was known by her misdeeds, but Jesus addressed her as a daughter, Beloved of God. 

God sees you the same way. You may have done wrong,but when you place your faith in Christ, God doesn’t see that wrong, He sees the righteousness of Christ that covers you. He sees His child. He sees His beloved. 

When we forget we are not our mistakes, we also forget the grace that God gave us through the sacrifice of His son Jesus Christ. This isn’t just about feeling good about ourselves. It’s about embracing the truth of what God already did for you, washing you clean of your sins, and covering you in His grace. 

2. You are not your achievements.

On one hand, we have to accept that we are not our mistakes, but equally important, is to accept that we are not our achievements. The thought that our identity is wrapped in what we do or how much success or accomplishments we can achieve is sure to set us up for failure.

The truth is we are not what we do good or bad,and no matter how good our deeds or impressive our accomplishments, there is always more to be achieved and someone going further. If our identity is in our achievements, we are sent on an endless race for more that will never satisfy us because we were never meant to find our identity in our work, but in Christ alone. 

Awards, degrees, and recognition all have their place and should be celebrated, but if we can’t love ourselves without those things and still feel fulfilled, satisfied, and enough, we’ve fallen into the trap of placing our value in what we do and not in Christ.

3. You are not what others think of you.

Much of the success that we mistakenly believe makes us valuable is usually defined by what others say about it, but you are not what others think of you. However, if our value is in what others think of us, we’ll constantly be on a roller coaster ride of low and high self-esteem.

If others praise us, we feel good about ourselves. When we’re criticized, it’s the end of the world. This sets us in a prison of people pleasing and performance. To be set free, we must hold God’s words about us higher than anyone else's opinion of us, even our own. 

4. You are not what happened to you.

Sometimes we allow others' treatment of us to dictate how we view ourselves, but you are not what happened to you. We think that if someone, especially someone close mistreats us, we must in some way deserve it. Not true. The actions of others are their responsibility and is a reference of who they are and not who you are. This can become challenging to believe if someone is blaming you for their misbehavior, but just because someone does not want to take responsibility for their actions doesn’t mean you should. Honestly, you can’t and trying to only sets you in a prison of people-pleasing. What happened to you is not your fault and you did not deserve any mistreatment you have experienced. Finding freedom and embracing our identity in Christ often starts with releasing what we can’t control and creating healthy boundaries that cultivate an environment where God’s truth about us is superior to any other thought.

5. You are not of the world.

One of the greatest obstacles in our way of accepting our new identity in Christ is our location here in the fallen world, but do not be mistaken, you are not of the world. We’re constantly surrounded by a society ready to tell us who we should be and shape us into its liking. The truth is although we live in the world, we are not of the world as Jesus tells us in John 15:19. But how do we prevent the prevailing environment from infiltrating our identity? Romans 12:2 gives us the answer:

We can go along with the natural rhythms of this world to become more and more like it, or we can choose another way, Jesus’ way of living starting with our minds. When we allow God’s truth to form our thoughts and beliefs over the ideas of this world, we will move against the current of this world pushing us to be someone God never called us to be.

6. You are not your past

Finally, you are not your past. As humans, we love patterns because they help us to make predictions. Weather is predicted based on weather patterns. A traffic pattern controls the flow of traffic to make predictions to avoid accidents. Patterns are good when it comes to some things, but not when it comes to our identity. This is because we are always being formed and molded and hopefully for the believer that change and transformation is making us more like Christ. This means we need to release the lie that we are our past because what happened in the past is not prediction of what’s to come for believers. Why? Because we serve a God of new beginnings, who makes ways out of no ways and new patterns where there once weren’t any. Your family history doesn’t have to dictate your future hope when God is writing your story. But to embrace that truth, we must believe what God says about us.

Now I get that it’s not always easy to do that, but the first step is to know who God says you are in the first place, so I invite you to watch this video where I share what the Bible says about your new identity in Christ. 

For more encouragement, download my free Bible Study, “Worry-Free,” to learn the 3 lies feeding your worry and the truth to set you free at belovedwomen.org. Thanks for watching, and until next time, be beautiful, blessed, and beloved.