32: Identity: Part 2, Beliefs (Compilation Series)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. In this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting part two of the identity series with an emphasis on belief. So will you segue us from attachment based identity to beliefs based identity in terms of their role, and how we should approach them and such?

[00:17] Marcus: When I think of identity and the formation of identity, I think ABC, and attachment is at the basis of this. I’ve got a fully formed identity before I’m verbal, before I can use words and have fully formed beliefs, I’ve got an identity already shaped in my head so that’s the attachment.

“B” is the beliefs. What happens is that if I have a fear based attachment identity it’s going to be much easier for me to believe lies about myself. It predisposes me, in a sense, to believe the worst about myself. Whereas if I have a joy based identity already at the attachment level, it is easier to believe that good things are true about me. And so there is that segue. When we get into the beliefs we’re going to be talking really about two things, what does the Bible say is true, and how do wounds, lies, vows, sabotage that? What is the enemy trying to do in order to rob us of our correct beliefs about ourselves? So we’re going to be focusing on that.

And then the “C” is community. And the job of the community is to help each other remember who we are and to act like ourselves. And so when all three of those things are working we are moving from a fear based to a joy based attachment. When we are getting the truth, Biblical truth about our beliefs, and we are taking thoughts captive that are coming from the enemy about our beliefs, about ourselves. And when we are in a community that is also on that same journey and committed to it, then you’ve got three things all working together in harmony to create the best possible scenario for a strong, healthy, identity.

[02:04] Stephanie: Perfect. So for beliefs based identity we’re going to start with a broader view at what you like to call, Kingdom versus Kosmos. And I love that title. Give us a pitch for what you mean by that. And then we’re going to start unpacking Kosmos first.

[02:21] Marcus: Yeah, Kingdom versus Kosmos. So I remember teaching a group of fifth graders one time and said, “Do you know that Jesus is an alien?” That kind of got their attention. One of my favorite texts on this is in John I think, it’s chapter eight, where he says, “I am not of this world.” I believe it is John 8:12. He says, “I am not of this world. You are from below, I am from above.” And it’s this idea that Jesus is an alien in the sense that he is not of this world. So this world, the Greek word is Kosmos, which in Greek is with a K.

So you got Kosmos with a K. And then he said instead he is from a world from above called the Kingdom. So we’ve got the two K words Kingdom and Kosmos. Jesus in a sense, came from a culture that had a different worldview and a different value system. So there’s a different worldview and value system in the kingdom than there is in the Kosmos. And one of the things why Jesus came was to be light to the Kosmos, to bring light into this world, so that we could know the truth about what God really thinks about things. And so this Kingdom/Kosmos dualism is really played up the most in the Gospel of John, but we see it throughout the Bible.

[03:36] Stephanie: I love it, and I think it’s really funny. And also I understand it, but just to be extra clear, you don’t actually think that Jesus is an alien?

[03:44] Marcus:. No, he’s not a lizard man.

[03:48] Stephanie: There is a lot of alien talk going out around the Internet right now and in the world. I just wanted to clarify.

[03:56] Marcus: No, Jesus is not returning someday in his UFO. That’s not the kind of alien we’re talking about.

[04:05] Stephanie: Cool. Do you want to cast a vision for where we’re going to go later? We’re tackling the Kosmos side of things first, but do you want to just give a quick window into the kingdom?

[04:16] Marcus: I use the word PACT to summarize the essence of our covenant identity. And our covenant identity is our kingdom identity. And PACT stands for pardon, adoption, citizenship, title. And so we’re going to be taking an episode on every one of those. So I can dig into the Bible a little bit more deeply, and we can unpack what the Bible actually says about our identity in Christ using those categories.

[04:42] Stephanie:  Yay. All right. Kosmos, the world, the flesh, and the devil work together to give us an identity and affect what we believe. So do you want to introduce the Kosmos anymore, or do you want to dive right into the world?

[04:55] Marcus: I mean, the world is the Kosmos. So it’s like, how does this work? I picture it this way. The devil is, I want to get the right analogy here, but the devil is a deceiver. But the reason he’s deceiving us is that he’s a hunter. Just like a hunter lays out traps and you have to trick the animal into going into your trap, there’s a deceptive element to it. So the purpose of the devil’s deception is to ensnare us. He wants to make us slaves. And he kind of gets a kick out of being able to play with our emotions and play with our heads, and turn us into his little toy and his little slave. The way he does this is through deception. So I look at it this way. If the devil’s the hunter, then the world is the megaphone that he uses to broadcast his propaganda, to broadcast his deception, and to get his message out there.

In 1st John 2:15, where it says, “Do not love the Kosmos, do not love the world or anything of the world”. I picture it this way, that the Kosmos is sort of like the devil’s girlfriend. And that’s putting it too politely. In a sense what John is saying there is, don’t flirt. You’re married to Christ, don’t go flirting with the world. The world is actually the devil’s mistress. She can make herself enticing and she can make you think that she’s got something that you want, and something you don’t want to do without. But it’s all a trap, right? It is all a deception, all a snare.

And that’s why John is like, do not fall in love with the world. Do not let yourself do that. You’ve already got Christ, you’ve already got the kingdom. You’ve got the good thing already. This is all smoke and mirrors. So that’s kind of the idea behind what’s going on with the kingdom, the devil is behind it. He’s called the prince of the Kosmos, the prince of this world, and he uses it to deceive us and to ensnare us. And what he appeals to is our flesh.

So our flesh is fundamentally proud. What I mean by proud, is self reliant. I don’t want to trust in the Lord with all my heart. I want to rely on my own understanding, that’s the flesh. And so he deceives us with the world by appealing to our flesh. And that can go in one of two directions. You can think it like, related to peacock and skunk narcissism. He appeals to our peacock flesh and says, oh, aren’t you special? Aren’t you amazing? Or he can appeal to our skunk flesh like, aren’t you the worst person ever? Aren’t you just of no value at all? But either way, he’s going after this part of yourself that the Bible would call the flesh. So the devil lies to us using the world, appealing to our flesh and all of that together creates slavery. And that’s what we’re trying to do, to help people stay out of slavery and live in freedom.

[08:08] Stephanie:  Huzzah!. So what would be one of the primary tactics that the world utilizes?

[08:16] Marcus: The world uses a pecking order. So Jesus talks about this in Matthew 18. And he uses two Greek words that probably everybody’s familiar with it’s Mega and Micro. I was just reading this a couple of weeks ago and it’s fresh in my mind. They went to Caesarea Philippi and Jesus is talking to Peter, but Peter is still called Simon at that point. And then he says, “But you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. Flesh and blood hasn’t revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. From now on I’m calling you Petros, and on this Petra, I’m going to build my church.” And he calls him Peter.

And from that point on then there’s a transfiguration where only three of them get to go up and see it. And they come down and some of the disciples can’t cast out a demon. And what do you see? The next chapter they’re having an argument about who is the greatest. I’m thinking there’s a connection here. Peter has just been singled out for some praise and Peter, James and John just got singled out for up here.

And these guys over here couldn’t cast out a demon. And they’re talking about which of us is Mega. That’s the Greek word. Which of us is the Mega apostle? Right. I am Mega apostle. And Jesus pulls up a Micro child, a little child, and says to the apostles, you are not in the kingdom. The kingdom doesn’t operate on the same pecking order as the cosmos. The world says, the greatest among you will lord it over those who don’t. And it’s really about power and love. The world system is based on power and the powerful people stay on top.

And Jesus is like, in the kingdom it’s the loving people who are at the top. And so you must be the servant of all. So that was a long involved answer. Simple answer is the world system is about this pecking order. And in the world system, the pecking order is based on our flesh. So the prettier I am, the more intelligent I am, the more athletic I am, the more achievements I have, the greater status I have. All of these things feed off of comparison.

[10:35] Marcus:  Feeds off of comparison and puts me on the pecking order. So the pecking order system is based on comparison. How do I stack up against other people in the categories that the world says are important?

[10:46] Stephanie:  Probably one of my most impactful stories that Grandpa Warner told you and then you told me, and you’ve shared it before. But the idea of, are you walking around life with a mirror in front of your face? You’re comparing yourself to everybody around you, or even to different versions of yourself. But it’s all about fleshly comparison. But what does God say? How does God see you? How does God see the situation? Do you want to walk people through that chart? I think we’ve talked about this before in our FISH series, but it’s just so impactful.

[11:27] Marcus: The context here is that I was a senior in high school. I just came home from winning a whole bunch of awards, but I was feeling empty. I was feeling defeated because the girl that I like paid no attention to me. So I’m sitting here going, what are all the awards in the world? So I go to my dad and he is studying attachment pain.

[11:53] Stephanie: You’re going to turn into a poet here.

[11:55] Marcus: My dad is in his office working on something. I knock on the door and say, can I talk to you? And I lay this out. And I’m having kind of this inner battle between feeling super important because I’ve won all these awards, and feeling inferior because I’m not loved the way I want to be loved. And I’m ping ponging back internally between these feelings. So my dad said, okay, I think I can help with this. And at the time, he was doing a radio broadcast called Keeping Your Balance. And he drew a line across the page and said, the Christian life is the exciting process of learning to keep your balance.

The devil always introduces his lies in pairs and his goal is to get you to go to an extreme, and he doesn’t care which one it is. One example of this is inferiority and conceit. So at the end of the line that he drew on the piece of paper, on one end he wrote the word inferiority. On the other end he wrote the word conceit. And he said, the devil doesn’t care if you have an inferiority complex or if you’re conceited.

They seem like opposites to us. But he said, actually, they’re just the twin sides of the same problem. And he kind of triangulated down from those two things at the bottom and wrote the word self. He said, when your eyes are on yourself and you’re living with a mirror in front of your face and you’re comparing yourself to other people, you can only go one of two directions. I either compare favorably which says conceit, I’m better than you. Or I compare unfavorably in which case I go to inferiority, I’m not as good as you.

And so the devil has created a system in the world that takes advantage of this and says, your value and your worth depends on how you compare to other people and it defines the categories that matter. So he said, the solution to this is to throw out that mirror. And at the top of the page, he wrote the word God. He said, if I look at God and then I come back to these ideas of conceit and inferiority, these two counterfeits of the devil are the counterfeits of the true virtues.

So conceit is a counterfeit of confidence.. And inferiority is the counterfeit of humility. He said, now, humility and confidence are actually twin virtues that go together. They both come from the same source, and that’s from seeing myself the way God sees me and defining myself the way God defined me. So on the one side God says, you’re just dust, okay? I came down to Earth, I formed you out of dust and I breathed life  into you. You have nothing to be conceited about. And that teaches us humility. Like, hey, tomorrow I could lose everything. Maybe I have a good intellect today, but tomorrow I may not, it’s a gift from God.

The other side of it is that even though you’re just dust you have value. You want to know how valuable you are, he signed the check in the blood of his son Jesus, saying, this is how valuable you are to me. Well, that creates confidence. So he said, humility is really just not even thinking about yourself because your focus is on God. You’re going, I’m just dust, I’m not the star of this show.

Let’s just move forward and see what God wants to do. And I live my life as a servant of God knowing that he loves me, and that gives me confidence. So that’s the long story. It was very helpful at the time. And I do remember the next day going to school with this fresh in my mind and intentionally thinking, I’ve got to throw out the mirror. And right away this pretty girl stepped up to the locker next to me and all of my flesh things kicked in. And all of a sudden I remember, wait a second. What if instead of comparing myself to other people and trying to figure that out, what if I actually threw that away? What would God want me to do? And the thought hit me, and I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a Holy Spirit thought. What if you treated her like a person?

[16:14] Stephanie: Sage advice.

[16:15] Marcus: Sage advice. I realize now that’s the Holy Spirit, but what if you just treated her like a regular person? I actually had a conversation with her for the first time in the school year and found out she was going through some hard things. All these things work together. So God wants us walking in the flesh. The devil wants us walking….. I’m sorry. God wants us walking in the Spirit. The devil wants us walking in the flesh. Can we edit that out? God wants us walking in the Spirit. The devil wants us walking in the flesh. And he uses this pecking order and comparison system in the world to trap us and enslave us.

[17:00] Stephanie: Probably in the next episode, I want to get to how the world wounds us and how to deal with those wounds and such. Let’s move on to flesh because it segues really well out of what we’ve been talking about here. And I just have to say I was delighted this summer. We were brainstorming through identity and you created a new acrostic. Admittedly, you just rearranged items that you’ve been teaching for years, but I just giggle every time. So remember, friends, don’t let your flesh identity “SLAP” you.

[17:38] Marcus:  Exactly. Do not let your flesh identity “SLAP” you in the face. So SLAP is our new acrostic. And what these letters stand for are the four core areas in which we compare ourselves to other people. So the world, the Kosmos, wants us to compare ourselves to other people in these four areas. So the first one is status. And I think of this immediately like Royal Family Aristocrats on down. There are some people who just have status that has nothing to do with anything but the fact that they were born to a certain privilege. So there is status.

The world wants us to define ourselves according to our status, or lack of privilege or lack of status that comes from that, through comparing ourselves to other people. There are some people when they walk into the room just because of who they are, they are immediately accepted because they’ve got status. So we call this all of this sort of performance based acceptance versus grace based acceptance. That’s the first one.

The second one, the second category in which we compare ourselves is looks. We look at ourselves in the mirror and we look at the other person and go, well, I think I’m better looking than them. Or we look at the other person, well, I’m not as good looking as them. And I remember especially for me in junior high and high school, you’re always asking, am I in their league or not? When you’re asking that question it is all about looks. It’s like, am I good enough looking to even talk to this person? In fact, this is behind most eating disorders. They have done studies that show that in some cultures eating disorders are almost unknown. But in American culture, it is a huge problem because we push the importance of looks. And image is so driven into us by the culture, which is our version of the Kosmos or the world in this sense. And so comparison through looks is number two.

The third one, “A”, is achievement. Some of us learn early on that I can walk into the room and status gets me acceptance. If I walk into the room and I’m good looking enough, I will be accepted. Others figure out pretty early on that they’re not going to get it done. A lot of times I will become driven to be a high achiever. I’m going to prove my worth and prove my value by accomplishing things, either becoming a great athlete or a great scholar. An artist, a musician or something. I’m going to achieve something. So that’s the next category.

And then “P” is performance. You might think that those are the same achievement and performance, but there’s a difference. A performer will be witty. I will be the class clown, I will be funny. People like having me at parties. That’s different from becoming a high achiever, right? So there are some of us who become performers and we learn to wear a mask around other people. And the problem is that the mask works. They’re often attracted to who we pretend to be. And now we have a problem because the person they like isn’t really me. It’s somebody I pretend to be. And so all of our flesh identities ultimately boil down to this. They boil down to pretending. And so it ultimately does become a “slap” in the face because that is not my true self. And I can’t form deep attachments with people if I’m not being my true self.

[21:04] Stephanie: Well, and wherever you look you can just literally see this. People will frequently say, oh, she’s a ten or she’s a five. It’s not subtle.

[21:19] Marcus: It’s especially so for girls, but it exists for guys too. I mean, there was a movie called Ten, right? There’s what they call a dime. I think there’s another one, similar idea. And yeah, it’s not subtle at all. It isn’t.

[21:36] Stephanie: Well, next week we’re going to continue looking at the Kosmos identity by looking at how the world can wound us, and some of the ways the devil tries to affect our beliefs. I want to pause and thank our monthly Trailblazers and anyone who has partnered with Deeper Walk with a donation of any size. I was struck again recently by how glad I am that we get to do this podcast. I get to interact with people on a lot of different levels from in person to social media, to emails and such.

And I love hearing from you guys and the testimonies of how the podcast is impacting you, how you’re using it, and how you’re sharing it. I just wanted to say thank you. It’s a great privilege to be able to do this, and we couldn’t do it without our Trailblazers and our donors, so thank you. You’re laughing Father?

[22:35] Marcus:  I just had a conversation with somebody last week who was telling me they had downloaded Spiritual Warfare Basics and was listening to it. That is our number one most downloaded podcast. And I’m sorry, I just had this thought in my head that we should do a podcast series called The Weird, Wild, Wonderful World of Warfare. Weird, Wild, Wonderful World of Warfare. And I’m like, I must be really tired.

[23:07] Stephanie: Oh, my goodness. That’s amazing. Maybe we should. Maybe we should.

[23:10] Marcus: People would find it interesting. It’s just all of the crazy stuff I have seen through the years.

[23:17] Stephanie: We definitely need to come back to that. And we need to peg that title. I love it. All right, we are coming to the end of the episode, so Father, I’m going to let you give any closing thoughts.

[23:29] Marcus: Well, I will say that even though I’ve known about this since I was a teenager. It’s still something that is a real battle. I can have a stable identity but that doesn’t mean the devil doesn’t attack it. And sometimes they come out of the blue. And one of the things we want to do is learn to recognize where we are most vulnerable. To recognize that you know what, I can recognize it as an attack more quickly when I see the pattern. This is where he likes to hit me. This is where it comes and kind of pre-think through for the next time I get attacked in this area, I need to catch it quickly. I need to call it an attack and I need to quickly turn my mind to what is true, and replace that thought with something true. And so hopefully this will help us in practical ways.

[24:19] Stephanie: So, opening comments Father, on pockets of pain.

[24:21] Marcus: Pockets of pain. So that term I first heard it from Dr. Alaine Pakkala, and she would use it in describing how she helped her clients. And her story is one of having endured horrendous abuse from a split personality from a member of the family, and from all this trauma in her life. And so she really understands pockets of pain really well. And the idea is that I may trust God when I am operating out of my core heart, but when my pocket of pain in my heart, the wounded part of my heart gets triggered that part of my heart doesn’t trust God.

I can literally become a completely different person when my pain gets triggered and that part of my heart comes out. Because that part of my heart doesn’t trust God, doesn’t have the same worldview, doesn’t have the same values, is very self protected, and is very flesh driven. And that’s why pockets of pain are so important because I can almost function as if I have a split personality, because I act so differently when my wounds get triggered than I do when they don’t. And so that’s the idea behind pockets of pain and why they’re so important to understand.

[25:46] Stephanie:  Yeah. So let’s break down how you can be wounded.

[25:51] Marcus: How you can be wounded.

[25:52] Stephanie: So a happy topic.

[25:56] Marcus:  You’re an author, give me a list. I list three primary ways that we get wounded in the book Understanding the Wounded Heart. And that is A, B, and C trauma. So A, is the absence of good stuff I need. And first of all, I would define trauma as anything that stunts my ability to grow. So you think about what keeps a plant from growing and what it doesn’t get.That would be A trauma, not getting enough water. For me as a child, not getting somebody comforting me in my upsetting emotions. And what I don’t get traumatizes my growth and my development. So that’s A trauma.

B trauma is bad stuff that happens to me. And that bad stuff that happens to me is more in the abuse form. So it confuses some people because they think A, abuse, but B, bad. And then the C is comparison.

And I added this one to what Life Model teaches simply because I noticed that I had met with a lot of people in which somebody didn’t do a bad thing to them, what was happening was they were simply comparing themselves to somebody else. That led to a wound. And I remember this hit twice in one week. Twins told me a story that one of them was the academic excellence twin and one of them was the social party twin. And they found out decades later that both of them had been jealous of each other. Like, I wish I could be smart like you. I wish I could have been fun like you. And so what happened was they were actually wounded by the comparisons they were making of themselves with each other. And then I was preaching at a church and there was a line of people talking to me afterwards, and I turned and there was this young lady who was just kind of stunning. Every now and then it just like, almost surprises you how stunning someone else is.

And she said, I just want to thank you for talking about wounds of comparison. She went on to explain that when she was in high school she was apparently a late bloomer. And she said her sister was the pretty one that everybody wanted. And she got tired of everybody saying, I just wanted to get to know her to get to her sister. Nobody did anything bad to her, her sister didn’t do anything bad to her, but she was wounded by the comparison. Like, I’m never going to be as good as her. And that led to all this inferiority, which led to a lot of bad decisions, which led to a lot of stuff. And she said she had never heard of wounds of comparison before and that it opened up a whole light on what she had been going through, and where her problems had started.

[28:31] Stephanie: And that it fits perfectly in with what we just talked about last episode and the “SLAP.”

[28:37] Marcus:  Yeah. You know it’s ironic how often like with eating disorders, it’s really attractive women who don’t think they’re attractive. And that comes from comparison. Let’s take looks out of it for a second because this happens in almost every area of life. I have found that one of the things I struggled with was there was this sort of artificial person I would create in my head who had every perfect attribute. And so they were sort of this amalgam of every person I had ever met and every strength that I could put together from all of them.

And so no matter what happened, I never measured up to that person. There was always somebody out there who was better. And as a result, you could never feel good about anything you did because, well, sure, I wrote a book and did this, but that person wrote a book and it did way better. You know, it’s like no matter what it is, there’s always something that knocks it down. And that’s what we’re talking about. That’s a comparison wound.

[29:40] Stephanie: And our flesh can make those tapes. And also the devil has to put his little birds on the shoulder and be like, oh, yeah, good job on that, but you really messed up on that one over there. And so you’re just constantly in a cycle of the inferiority and conceit that we talked about last time. Whatever the twin virtues or counterfeit virtues are that the devil will make you prone towards. But yeah, anyway, sorry, continue.

[30:11] Marcus: No, that was it. So there’s ABC. Now you can unpack things further. So some people talk about mother wounds or father wounds. I think in one of my books I talk about father wounds, mother wounds and religious wounds.

[30:23] Stephanie: That’s in A Deeper Walk.

[30:24] Marcus: In A Deeper Walk, thank you. I couldn’t remember where I wrote that. And one of the things I’ve been told is that father wounds tend to go to the identity as much as anything. And that is who I am whether I’m a guy or a girl. My sense of identity is often anchored in my attachment to my father. And so that can be very joyful or it can be fear bonded. The mother wound issues tend to go to my ability to be compassionate. And there’s some other things that come with it, but that’s just some of the things I’ve heard about how they affect us in different ways, I guess is the point. And then there are religious wounds. So in my own life it was helpful to me to look in terms of that, I love my mom and my dad. I had a great relationship with both of them, but everybody was wounded. We wound each other without intending to. And so realizing what patterns got established in my life because of the father wound, mother wound, and religious wound.

So those were significant in my own journey. I’ve talked about this in a few different places, but my early religious wounds started when I was young. When you grow up in church, every now and then you’re introduced to ideas too young. So I can remember Carl Layman talking about hearing oh, you got to sell everything, give it to the poor. As this little kid I’m picturing I’ve got to go around naked and poor and not protect myself. And I need to give everybody anything they ask for from me. When you’re like an intelligent, sensitive child listening to adult themes in church, though people can do nothing wrong, it creates in you this sense of fear.

I remember as a young kid, that although most people have this thing where God is scary but Jesus comforts them. For me, it was flipped. The Father made sense to me but Jesus felt fickle, like I never knew what he was going to do next. And so there is this religious trauma that comes. And so sometimes it happens because the church is doing bad things to you or people do bad things to you in the name of God, or in the name of Christ. And sometimes you’ve just got a really toxic church environment, but sometimes you get religious trauma just because you’re introduced to things too young, and you can’t process it. And so it processes in your head in a way that it makes you not like God.. And I had to deal with a lot of that in my life.

[33:11] Stephanie: Yeah. Or maybe there is something true that gets stated, but it’s not presented within context.

[33:18] Marcus: Yeah, there were a lot of those for me. You know, whether it was, if somebody asks you for something, you can’t say no. Like when I listened to the sermon on the mount, that’s what I was hearing as a little kid, that I’m a bad person if I tell someone no. And to this day as a leader, I tend to be predisposed to try to say yes to people. And I’m realizing that I can’t. You just end up disappointing everybody by saying yes too many times, you’ve got to say no. And that’s not what Jesus was talking about. But as a little kid that’s sure what it sounded like.

[33:51] Stephanie: So I’m trying to decide which direction to go here. There are different ways of addressing A trauma versus B trauma, versus C trauma. Do you want to cast a vision for each of those?

[34:06] Marcus: Yeah, certainly. A trauma is primarily about learning skills that you missed. So if you didn’t get comforted, you didn’t have people help you quiet, you didn’t learn how to return to joy and share joy. Those are skills. So A trauma has to be resolved with skill training. And that means I have to experience those things now. And again, that’s where I promote Thrive Today because that’s what their training is all about. It’s helping you learn skills that you missed through A trauma. B trauma is largely about inner healing, spiritual warfare.

So if I were going to put it together, A trauma is about Building Bounce and The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, Thrive Today, all that. So the B trauma is about understanding the wounded heart and spiritual warfare. Wounds, lies, vows and strongholds, and getting those things addressed. And then C trauma, honestly tends to fall under the category with the same solution as B trauma. And so you could think of it as a subcategory of B trauma because something bad happened to you. But the bad thing that happened was that you compared yourself to somebody.

[35:26] Stephanie: Yeah, I keep thinking about T- bar charts, too. Thinking about lies and truth and figuring out how you see yourself? How’s the devil trying to get you to see yourself? Versus how is God trying to get you to see yourself?

[35:40] Marcus: There’s no question about it. People look at me and have some interesting ideas about me that I hear through the years. And some people looked at me and thought I just had life handed to me on a silver platter because my dad was Dr. Timothy Warner. I grew up in an intact family. I got to go to Bible college for free, got a great education and got all this. And at some level, they’re absolutely right. I have had life handed to me on a silver platter. One of the things that went with that was, and again, this goes back to early childhood religious trauma, I would hear as a little kid the story of the five talents and think to myself, well, I’m a five talent person because of everything that I’ve been given. It turned into a fear thing. It’s like I have to excel, I have no excuses.

And what that led into was the constant feeling that I was a disappointment. That no matter what I did it didn’t measure up to what I should have done or could have done, based on all the advantages that I had. That’s an example of how that goes right at your identity. The devil’s good at even taking blessings and turning them into curses if we look at it wrong, and we get our beliefs about it turned around. And a lot of times we’re predisposed to those beliefs because our attachments aren’t strong enough surrounding them. So I could go on, but this isn’t just “a me counseling session.”

[37:23] Stephanie: I can identify with a lot of that. Also, in the last episode and in this episode, I keep thinking about super sheep. One of Satan’s tactics is to try to separate us and make us think that, hey, we are strong enough on our own, or we can do it on our own. Maybe we’ll talk about that more next episode.

[37:53] Marcus: For those who don’t know the super sheep story.

[37:54] Stephanie: Do you want to talk about it next episode? Because we can save it?

[37:58] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a core story in a couple of the books that I’ve written. It’s basically this idea, and we’ll expand on it next time. But it’s basically the idea that the devil tries to get us away from the shepherd because we’re easier prey. And his primary strategy is deception. So if he gets us to believe things about ourselves that says we’re a disappointment to the shepherd, for example, then I might not spend as much time in prayer with the shepherd, because I don’t think he’s all that happy to see me. Well, that just sets me up to be easier prey for the enemy. So all of these things keep coming back to this idea of slavery, right? The devil wants us in slavery and God wants to set us free.

[38:42] Stephanie: Hallelujah! So do you want to cover some WLVS at the very core? You’ve mentioned it before.

[38:51] Marcus: Well, yeah, we’re going to obviously talk about this a lot. It can come up in a lot of episodes because it’s such a core illustration. When I was a pastor people would block out two hour appointments and so I needed some tools to make these two hours as efficient as they could be. And one of the tools that developed pretty quickly was this idea of wounds, lies, and vows. The world wounds us, the devil lies to us, and our flesh makes vows.

So you got the world, the devil, and the flesh. The world wounds us, the devil lies to us, the flesh makes vows, and the product is strongholds. And so as I would sit there and listen to people tell their stories and take notes, what jumps out at you is, oh, that’s a wounding story. Oh, I hear a lie there, oh, that’s a vow. That’s an “I will” statement, I will never let you….. And then you’re also noting the strongholds they’re dealing with. I’m depressed. I have an addiction. I hate myself. What are the things going on here?

So it affects even the way that I would take notes on listening to people tell their story. So you got an idea. This is what we need to push into now when we start praying through these issues. So we say, God, out of all these wounds that have been talked about, is there one in particular you want to heal while we’re together here? So we would just ask Jesus to bring to my mind one memory? And we’d go to that one memory and we’d camp out there a little bit, process a little bit, and then dive in saying, Jesus, I now ask you to do something to heal it.

And then I’d say, just pay attention to the first thing that comes into your mind. Go back and revisit it. Do you have new thoughts? Do you see new things? Do you have new feelings? Has anything changed because you just asked Jesus to come in? Let’s push into that and be sensitive to what those changes are. And now you evaluate those and say, so these new thoughts, these new things you’re seeing, these new feelings, are they bringing you a greater sense of peace?  A greater sense of, ah, I’m going to be okay.

Are they leading you to the truth of where we’re going, or are they increasing the bondage and the tension and the problem? And so what you find is that discerning whether this is God or not is not as hard as it at first seems, because this thing’s either setting them free or it’s not. And so that’s kind of where WLVS started. It’s the wounds, lies, vows and strongholds. And it’s the model that explains really how the devil uses wounds that happen to us to plant lies largely about our identity and God’s identity. So that’s our core model that I have been teaching ever since.

[41:38] Stephanie: Yeah. We have not only the book but a whole video course on Understanding the Wounded Heart that you can find at our website. And I think it’s under the get started….I don’t know. I should have double checked it.

[41:50] Marcus: Our website keeps changing, but it is on there. You can also find it at YouTube, Understanding the Wounded Heart.

[41:57] Stephanie: Huzzah!  Can you tell us any stories that show how wounds affect identity?

[42:04] Marcus: Well, the opening story in Understanding the Wounded Heart is about a teenage girl whose parents got divorced and the devil used the wound of this early childhood memory of her parents divorcing to plant a lie. And the lie he planted was they divorced because you’re not lovable. If you were really lovable then how could your dad have possibly left? The only obvious explanation is that you weren’t enough to keep him here. And so there’s this deep seated wound that led to a deep seated lie that led to vows. And the vows were, I’m never letting anybody close enough to me to find out that I’m unlovable. And in her case her presenting issue she came for help with was, why do I sabotage all my relationships? Well, it kind of laid out pretty clearly after that. And so I look at this and I think that’s super common, right?

There’s a lot of people who have patterns like that where something happened and they may have dismissed it. Like, in her case she dismissed it. She’s like, oh, everybody’s parents get divorced right? This happens to everybody. What kind of a wimp am I? That would be the core issue in my life. And we are often dismissive of things that happen to us. And I find that one of the reasons that we don’t deal with our wounds more often, the number one reason I run into is that people dismiss them. The other end of the spectrum are people who have made those wounds so massive and so big and so monumental that they don’t think anything can be done about it, so they don’t try. And I find it goes one direction or the other, a kind of two extremes idea. And so we want to encourage people that Jesus has a solution.

[43:57] Stephanie: It reminds me of, and I mean this is more niche, but the peacock versus skunk narcissism. Where you create your identity like a skunk narcissist, like, oh nobody’s problems are as special as mine. And so you almost glorify your wounds.

[44:12] Marcus: And you run into that a lot. We call it a victim mindset or a victim spirit, which is very similar to what we would call skunk narcissism. And it’s the idea that what makes me special are my problems. Therefore my identity comes from all of my problems. We call that a victim mindset, a victim mentality. I am a victim and that is my identity. And I take that identity from the fact that my problems are what make me special. Well, that’s no way to live life.

And so what we want is to help people transition to having a victor mentality that Christ came to set us free to live as his sons and daughters. To be princes and princesses in the kingdom. And to live with the freedom that comes out of this. And so that isn’t just a switch you flip. There’s often a lot of wounds and a lot of lies and a lot of things that need to change. Sometimes there are key ones that can make a big difference but that’s what we’re trying to help people break free from.

[45:19] Stephanie: And you have to deal with that at the attachment level, at the beliefs level, and at the community level.

[45:24] Marcus: Exactly. Because people tend to gather around them in their community. They tend to gather people around them who will reinforce the narrative that in a sense, they need to be true in order to maintain their identity. And so that can happen as well. It’s not the only pattern but it’s a pattern that can happen.

[45:43] Stephanie: Well, I’m going to pause real quick here and I’m going to pull a Q & A question from one of our listeners. This person says, “Some of the more recent episodes and older ones gave me the thought of using some of these techniques, like calming and appreciation with our youngest adopted son. He is 15 years old and on the spectrum. I was wondering if you have ever utilized this with children or teens on the spectrum?”

[46:07] Marcus: That’s an excellent question. I’ve actually been asked that quite a bit. So I usually refer folks with this question to Stephanie Hinman, who co-authored the book Building Bounce with me. She does work with children and teens quite a bit. Also, I have zero experience personally with people on the spectrum and doing this stuff, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who haven’t done it. What I have been told by some of the people. Yeah, did I say that wrong?.

[46:36] Stephanie: There are those who have done it.

[46:37] Marcus: There are people out there who have used these tools with people on  the spectrum. And one feedback I got from somebody who did that said, the one exception is eye contact, that works differently. And so it can be triggering to some people on the spectrum to give them too much eye contact. So there’s some differences and I’m not really in a position to speak with authority on that, other than to say, yeah,  there’s people out there who do use these tools. Especially quieting and appreciation. They are two really good ones.

[47:12] Stephanie: Thank you. So as we are coming up to the end of the episode, do you  have any closing thoughts?

[47:21] Marcus: Well, you know, wounds is a big, big topic, and sometimes just talking about the idea of wounds opens things up for people. And they don’t always know how to  shut this back down and how to get on with life now that I’ve been triggered with all this? This is where you take a deep breath and say, Jesus, (the John Eldridge pause prayer.) I give everyone and everything to you. I don’t have to solve all of my problems today. I don’t have to solve all my problems in the next ten minutes. I trust you that you’re going to take me on a journey that’s going to get me exactly where I need to be. I can trust you to be my good shepherd and my Father. And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves of those things and that it’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath and realize that I don’t have to solve all my problems right now.

[48:14] Stephanie: How Father, does the devil interact with the world and the flesh to affect our beliefs and identity?

[48:20] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a good question because I’ve been asked for years, how can I tell if it’s the flesh or if it’s the devil? Well, I kind of like Karl Payne’s simple answer to this. And he said he separates it this way. He says my flesh is that internal impulse to sin that goes with me everywhere that I go. And the proper strategy for dealing with the flesh is to replace the thoughts that are thinking in there. So if I’m laying on my bed and I’m just filled with fear or filled with lust or filled with anger, or whatever is going on. Or if I’m just depressed, the core solution is to replace the thoughts that I’m thinking with other thoughts. If I find that I just can’t do that and I can’t replace those thoughts then maybe something else is going on.

So the world on the other hand, would be the external impulse to sin. So, for example, that would be watching a TV show and something makes you angry or something makes you scared or something creates lust in what you’ve seen or makes you depressed. So now the world is what is triggering this thing that you’ve experienced. So the core idea that Karl Payne teaches is that you run. It’s like fleeing sexual immorality, like Joseph fled from Potiphar’s wife. But you can’t flee from the flesh so it’s an internal thing that you take with you. So it’s run and then it’s replaced but if those two things aren’t options, they’re not going to work. Now you should consider that this might be the devil and the core strategy there is resist. So we resist the devil and we make him flee. So let me give you a story because I think that’ll help.

[50:12] Stephanie: I love stories.

[50:13] Marcus: All right, so I remember my dad telling a story over and over and over again as a classic example of taking your thoughts captive. And there was a leader who came to see him when he was teaching at Trinity. And this leader worked overseas and he came to privately confess that he had a problem when he would go to worship services. And when the praise music would start he would start having a real battle in his mind with these sexually perverted thoughts. And it happened almost every time worship started. And he was like, what is wrong with me?

That was his question to my dad. What is wrong with me that this would be happening? So you run it through the grid, the first one is the world. Well, are you putting yourself in a position where you’re seeing a lot of ****? And he’s like, no. I mean, years ago that was an issue but it’s been years and I’ve been really diligent about staying away from that. Is it the flesh? And my dad said, well, do you want to be thinking these things? He goes, well, no. He said, well, if you don’t want to be thinking these thoughts do you think God’s putting those thoughts there? Clearly it’s not God.

So if it’s not God and it’s not you what option have we not yet considered? Maybe it’s the devil. So my dad told him this. He said, the next time that you go to a worship service you just say, in the name of Jesus, I cut off any access any demons have to my thought life. If you start to get these thoughts you say, whatever spirit is bringing these thoughts to my mind I command you to leave in Jesus’ name. And that guy came back later and he said, I just want to thank you for teaching me how to take my thoughts captive. Not only did that work the very first time I did it, it just stopped.

But I began to notice that it was happening in my marriage where my wife would do things and I would immediately have this train of thoughts that would take off. And I said, no, in Jesus name I command the demons that are bringing these thoughts to my mind to get out of here. And those stopped and I realized, oh my word, how much of my thought life is run by the devil because I just never resisted him. So he said, I’m going back to the mission field as a different person. And it really all comes down to that.

[52:36] Stephanie: Yeah, that was making me think about how you see this a lot on social media where people will talk about, oh, the intrusive thoughts got to me. And sometimes it’s really funny. Like, the intrusive thought is totally harmless and it’s really funny. But sometimes people talk about intrusive thoughts and I’m just like, oh, honey, that is demonic. That’s not just a random dark thought that you’re having that you’re like, oh, that was weird that I had that thought. No, I want to teach people.

[53:09] Marcus: It’s amazing how many times when you read articles about mass shootings, and how many of these people have been in seances and done occult things beforehand and have opened the doors to dark, intrusive thoughts. And some of them will even say, the voices in my head were making me do this. And we assume it’s schizophrenia, but there’s a lot of people opening a lot of doors that are letting the devil bring in a lot of intrusive thoughts. And it’s really a major problem in our culture right now. And our focus here is not so much to change the culture, it’s to change the church. We want to keep this out of the church. And anything we do to help culture is fine, but our priority here is let’s get Christians understanding how to live in victory over these things

[54:02] Stephanie: Yes, indeed. Here I pulled a quote from A Deeper Walk that I liked. It says, “Given the fact that identity is so foundational to our new life in Christ, it is not surprising that Satan tries to give us a counterfeit identity. He uses the world to provide us one based on the flesh.” And I’m going to bring us back around to the idea of the super sheep that we brought up last time, which is how the devil tries to get us to see ourselves. Whether that’s through intrusive thoughts or wounds, so many different things he can use to get us to see ourselves in God differently. But will you talk about this phenomenon? You’ve noticed that when Satan lies to you, it’s two sides of a coin. So when he lies it is attacking your identity and it’s attacking God’s identity. So can we talk about that more?

[54:58] Marcus: Yeah. So my identity and my view of God are directly related and that’s why I talk about them like two sides of the same coin. So picture this giant silver coin maybe six inches around and one side is my identity and the other side is God’s identity. So one is how I see myself and the other is how I see God. When I get wounded an arrow pierces that coin. Well, what happened? There’s now a hole on both sides of the coin which means that both my identity and God’s identity are under attack every time I get wounded.

And so that’s kind of the way I picture it. Now, where that connects to the super sheep is that if the devil’s a roaring lion and he’s looking for someone to devour, and I am a sheep and Jesus is the shepherd, then it gives us a nice little identity here. Sheep, shepherd, lion. Well, the lion wants to eat the sheep. So what is the sheep’s best defense? Well, for most of us it can feel like my best defense against the devil is to become super sheep. Like, I’m not afraid of the devil coming here, I will take you on. And that’s just stupid, right? Because I am not a match for him on my own.

[56:21] Stephanie: Yeah, the point is, in your own strength.

[56:23] Marcus: Yeah, I’m not a match for him on my own in my own strength. In many cases where I’ve encountered people who had something demonic speaking through them I’ve said that, this is not between you and me. I said, I know you’re stronger and you’re smarter and I don’t care. This is between you and Christ. So do you want to battle with him on who’s stronger and who’s smarter? I’d love to watch. So the devil comes after us and he wants to have us for lunch. He knows the secret to that is keeping us away from the shepherd.

[57:05] Stephanie: Because our best defense is being close to the shepherd.

[57:07] Marcus: Right. Because that is our only defense.

[57:10] Stephanie: Yes.

[57:11] Marcus: Our only defense against the devil is that the shepherd and his rod and his staff comfort me. Why do they comfort me? Because he’s using them on the line. That’s kind of the idea here. How is his rod and staff comforting? It’s because of what he’s doing to that predator that’s coming after me with them. So I want to be close to Jesus with these things. He knows that if he can shoot that arrow through the big coin what will happen is that I will feel bad about myself and think thoughts like, I’m such a bad sheep, the shepherd probably doesn’t want me around. Or have you ever heard this one? I have to clean myself up before I can go back to church, or I’ve got to clean myself up before I can go talk to God. And I always think of a little kid who’s fallen down. Do you tell the little kid who fell down, why don’t you go get yourself all cleaned up and fix yourself and then go to your parents?

No, it doesn’t make any sense, you get them involved as quickly as possible so they can help you. It’s the same thing. As quickly as I fall, I want to get Jesus involved sooner than later to get me back on my feet to deal with what’s happened. So not only do the wounds make me think I’m unworthy of being around Jesus or he wouldn’t want to be around me. It also can cause me to doubt Him. It’s like, well, where was he? Why didn’t he protect me from this bad thing happening? Maybe he’s not as good as everybody says he is. Maybe there’s something dark about him that I can’t trust. And so if I don’t trust the shepherd I will stay away from him, and the lion wins. If I feel like the shepherd doesn’t want me around because I’m such a bad sheep, the lion wins. So you can see why this would be such a fundamental strategy for the devil because he relies on our isolation to make us vulnerable.

[59:17] Stephanie: Yeah. So if you’re feeling isolated that would be one strategy, to assess. God am I believing something about myself or about you Lord that is causing this?

[59:30] Marcus: Well, and frankly, you can take this to the next level. I saw this wonderful documentary on sheep and shepherds by Joel Kramer on YouTube. He does Expedition Bible stuff and I love watching his stuff. And one of the things you noticed was that the sheep stay together in a cluster because they’re safer. It’s also one of the things that keeps them safe from the wolves is not only staying close to the shepherd, but staying close to each other. And you see that the sheep who end up getting eaten by the wolves are the ones who wander off from the pack and don’t stay with the rest of the sheep. And now the shepherd’s got to go find them and bring them back to the safety of those things. It’s fascinating. So if you want to get a better insight into what shepherding in the ancient Near East might have looked like, it’s a good little view. Again, that’s Joel Kramer and Expedition Bible on YouTube.

[01:00:28] Stephanie: Sheep, sheep. So to kind of start putting things together in a picture that people can see world flesh and devil at work, could you tell the story that you heard John Trent tell about the alcoholic father and the three sons?

[01:00:47] Marcus: I give credit to John Trent because I heard him tell this story in a speech, but it was like decades ago. So if I get some of the details wrong my apologies to him. But  there’s a mom and three boys and she was married to an alcoholic. And so one night the dad comes home, and this is not about the wife. My apologies to the women out there. This is going to focus on the three boys. And the dad comes home and he’s drunk and the husband and the wife get into a fight. The next thing you know he strikes her while the oldest son flares up with rage, grabs the dad and throws him up against the wall. It’s like, don’t you ever hit my mother again you blankety blank blank. It’s like, you touch her again, I’m going to kill you. He’s like, I can’t take this anymore, I’m out of here. And with that the boy leaves, gets into his car, and tires go squealing off. He takes off leaving behind two younger boys and a hurting woman who can’t do that to their drunk dad. So the littlest boy goes running upstairs and hides under bed till it’s all over.

And the middle son is now left dealing with it. And he’s like, Well, dad, can I get you anything? Do you need your slippers? Do you want something to drink? What can I do for you? So what happens from this is that all three of these boys, again focusing on them, have been wounded by this event. They are all believing things about life and about themselves and about their dad and about how life works. And now they are all making vows about how they’re going to live life.

So the oldest son’s vow is, I will never live with this kind of chaos. I will never live with anybody dealing with this again. I will stop it, I’ll fight and I’m going to use anger. And so what happens is that vow now gives shape to his life. He becomes a very angry person who relies on intimidation and being big with people, to keep them in line and to keep himself safe. The youngest child who ran away, if you’ve seen Forrest Gump, I always think of Jenny and Forrest Gump. And Jenny was abused by her dad in that movie and she developed the pattern of whenever things get hard, I’m out of here, I run.

And so that’s what happened to this boy. He ran and hid and it now became a pattern for him. Whenever life gets hard, whenever relationships get hard, you just duck and run and you’re out of there. And the third boy his vow was I’m not going to let this happen. I’m going to find a way to keep everybody happy. And he becomes a people pleaser. And at first he looks like the most mature one of the bunch but people-pleasing isn’t maturity. It looks like he’s going to succeed, but really there’s no way you can do that.

And all three of them end up in disasters because of their flesh. The flesh that is making the vows is now what they are relying on for their protection. And so that is a classic example of how our vows can give shape and direction to the way that we live our lives. And why we need to deal with the wounds, the lies, and the vows underneath these things if we really want to see freedom from the strongholds.

[01:04:17] Stephanie: And can you speak to maybe how the devil might get involved in that scenario?

[01:04:21] Marcus: Clearly the devil I often say is like a shark. He doesn’t see blood in the water and says, they’re in enough trouble, stay out of it. So we don’t have to say, well, the devil sent the dad in there or anything, but the devil’s going to take advantage of stuff like that. And it’s not the devil, we’re talking about demons. We’re talking about the spirits that are part of that kingdom. And these spirits show up and they know their clients. In a sense they know what to do with each client.

And so they’ve got a different strategy with the oldest son and the middle son and the youngest son. They know what to go after. They know how they’re going to do this. And so they get in the whispering game and they don’t have to constantly whisper in somebody’s ear. You just have to plant the seed and then let it grow. Because as soon as I bite and I go, you know what, that’s true. That’s true now that I have believed it.

So the devil is the father of lies. Not in the sense that he is actively whispering every lie into our ears but every lie that we believe has its source, ultimately in the father of lies. And so there is a warfare element in saying no to those things, or if I have already said yes, renouncing the agreement that I have made that this is true. Commanding whatever has taken advantage of that to leave.

[01:05:48] Stephanie: So on that note, with the devil being the father of lies and the source of our beliefs that grow out of our experiences and such. Where do you commonly see the devil at work trying to affect our identity? We’ve talked a lot about individuals….

[01:06:06] Marcus: So the individual level and the wounds, but there’s also the cultural level right? When we think about the world it manifests itself through culture. And so in Jesus’ day there was a Roman culture, there was a Pharisee culture, there was a Sadducee culture, and there was the Jewish fishermen culture. There were a lot of subcultures. And the world, the kosmos, manifested itself in these different subcultures. And what would happen in each subculture was a belonging that happened, like, these are my people, this is who I am.

And my belonging to that subculture gives me my identity. So one thing Jesus is addressing in the Sermon on the Mount is, hey, just because you’re part of this group here doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t love the people in that group there. You should at least say hi to them. You should be good to them when you have the opportunity to be good to them. We live in a world today where we see this explosion taking place of subcultures that are giving people identities.

And so now people, many of them will only bond with people who are in their little subculture. They will only be good to people who are in their little subculture. They will only greet people who are in their little subculture. What happens is the peer pressure of these cultures gives them an identity and says, these are my people. This is what we do. And then out of that peer pressure it shapes my beliefs which then drives my values which then drives my behavior and things.

And that’s why some people when the exact same thing happens, you get diametrically opposite responses. Like some people go, yay, praise the Lord, this happened. Other people are like, I am so mad, that is so unfair, this is so wrong. Because their worldview gives them a completely different value system. And usually if you look underneath it the people that they’re with, are reinforcing whatever that is. So this is where you look at how the devil uses the world? He uses the world as a propaganda machine and peer pressure. Peer pressure is on belonging and propaganda then on the beliefs. And so it’s like, all right, we’re going to get you to the point where only people who believe these things can belong.

And there is some element of this even in the church. We don’t just throw the doors open saying that anybody who wants to can call themselves a Christian and be a part of the know. There’s church discipline that says, no, you actually don’t believe the right things, you’re not actually doing the right things. We need to correct this. That’s why Paul says be good to those who are of the household of faith, especially to them, but also to those who are outside the family. We are a family in the kingdom of God and we should be especially good at loving one another, being kind to each other. Interacting and remaining relational and acting like ourselves with people.

We practice so much with each other that we get good at doing this with those who are outside of our people or are not a part of it. So it’s not a universal invitation to belong to any particular group. It’s the idea that just because you belong to this group doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be kind or good to people who are outside of it. So there’s a big topic, right? This is one of the biggest things going on in our world today. But we understand how this is an identity issue because it’s trying to form this question of who are your people, who does that make you, and what kind of person are you? And there’s a propaganda that goes with that and if you buy into it that will drive the way you live.

[01:10:09] Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. And I am sure we’re going to keep circling back on all these concepts as we continue on in the identity series. I am going to pause here and pull a note from one of our listeners. It’s a little longer, but it is lovely and it might encourage or inform some of our other listeners too. I just wanted to share this journey. Lindsay says, “I have spent the last four to five years being discipled by an amazing woman.

During this time God has pulled this woman into the ministry of deliverance. So she’s walked me through the steps to freedom and also deliverance. What has happened or what has opened up for me is experiencing the Holy Spirit like never before. I have had a continual craving to know Jesus in a bigger and deeper way. So I was introduced to this podcast in early spring and what it’s given me is a language for what God has and is doing in my life.

It tied many things together for me. Most of all, it’s given me so much confirmation for the work that has been done in me and now what the Spirit continues to do through me. My favorite episodes have been “Real Prayer” and “Listening Prayer” as those have both been big tools for me and also tools I have given to others. I have also really loved the episodes on the ways the devil gains ground in our lives. SOUL, the acrostic you paired with each concept or process has made the concept so much easier to digest and pass along, especially to my teenage children too. I have also enjoyed podcasts and books of joy.

Again, I have been given a language for what has happened over the last few years as I have been discipled. My fear house has been torn down and I’ve been rebuilding my Joy house and it’s given me more tools to use for my ongoing journey to stay in joy. This podcast has just been such a great aid in my spiritual maturity. So grateful.

[01:11:59] Marcus: That’s amazing. And so thankful that she found somebody with those kinds of skills and those kinds of tools who could walk her through a journey like this. And that is one of the powers of a paradigm, is that it gives you a language and that’s part of the reason we do what we do. We’re trying to help people create and find a common language for talking about heart issues. That’s why we call it heart-focused discipleship. And that’s kind of what we’re after here is trying to introduce this vocabulary so that we can be on a common journey. It just reminds me that none of us are perfect but we’re on a journey and the common language helps.

[01:12:41] Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. So now we’re at the end of the episode, any closing thoughts?

[01:12:44] Marcus: On the devil? You know, it’s hard not to teach about this stuff without becoming self reflective. Because you do think about yourself and go, well, how am I doing compared to the way that I used to do? I’ve been teaching some of this stuff a really long time and realizing that sometimes it waxes and wanes, it ebbs and flows. And I found that one of the benefits of repeating things and going through them again and even listening to things again, reading books again, is that it can re-spark something for you.

And the Holy Spirit uses it as a reminder to say, yeah, you used to know all about this and maybe you thought you didn’t need it anymore, but the devil hasn’t gone away. This is still a reality in your life. Maybe it’s a new season to step into this a little bit more fully and a little bit more aggressively. So just encouragement. We all go through seasons and just because you may have already been through a season where this was important, doesn’t mean that there might not be another time coming up to dive into some of this stuff again.

[01:14:07] Stephanie:  So Father, let us start basic in the context of the scriptures, what is the new covenant?

[01:14:11] Marcus: Okay, so there’s an old covenant and a new covenant. In fact, it helps me to start this way. There was a promise covenant that was made to Abraham and then there was a law covenant that was made with Moses. And the promise was like an engagement where God says to Abraham, you’re going to have kids, they’re going to grow up someday. Metaphorically, they’ll become my wife. It’s like two fathers negotiating a betrothal as they did back in the ancient world. And then the law is the wedding covenant. And the wedding covenant basically was, okay, Israel, do you accept Yahweh to be your God, forsaking all others? And Israel said yes.

And God said, then out of all peoples on earth, you’ll be my chosen special treasured possession. The problem was Israel didn’t keep the covenant, right? They basically committed adultery on their honeymoon and kept committing adultery all the way to the end till they were sent into exile, at which time both Jeremiah and Ezekiel say a new covenant is needed. God is going to send a new covenant. And this covenant’s not going to be like the old covenant, it’s going to be a new one. So Jesus, when he died on the cross, he established the new covenant that replaced the old covenant. And this new covenant defines who are God’s people? Do you belong to God or not?

And so in today’s world the most common covenant is a wedding covenant. A wedding covenant defines your relationship in very specific terms and says you two are now one, so learn to act like it, right? That’s kind of the way that goes. And then you grow in your ability to live in oneness after that. But the covenant connects you together and defines your relationship. In the same way the new covenant says on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, you belong to God, you are in his family and this now defines who you are. Therefore, the new covenant is the foundation on which we build everything that goes on in our lives.

[01:17:07] Stephanie: Yeah. Part of this goal is reconciliation of human and God together, restoring that relationship. You have said, and I just want to read this, I love it. You said, “Sin is not the point, it is the obstacle. Obedience is not the goal, it is the fruit.” Do you want to unpack that thought?

[01:17:26] Marcus: Yeah. A lot of people feel like they have a gospel of sin basically, and that  God is so mad at us because of our sin that Christ had to die. That’s just how bad our sin is. And that’s about as far as the gospel goes. They don’t seem to understand that God loves us so much that he wants to be with us. The obstacle keeping that from happening is sin. So God had to deal with sin in order to get what he wanted, which was reconciliation. A relational reconciliation that we could be together with Him without that obstacle between us anymore.

So the gospel is really about relationships and it deals with sin to make that relationship possible. Also, some people have the idea that you have to perform or be a good enough person in order to be saved. But the whole point of the gospel is that nobody can be good enough. Our obedience can’t get us into a relationship with God. You can’t earn it. So what the gospel teaches is that the relationship is a free gift, forgiveness is a free gift, and righteousness is the natural fruit. Then the obedience that we live out is the natural result of being in relationship with God.

[01:18:38] Stephanie: Huzzah! I want to dwell more on God’s identity and what the new covenant shines a light on, from that perspective. And not just, oh, this is who I am in Christ, but who is Christ?

[01:18:56] Marcus: So there’s two keywords that are used over and over again in the New Testament about God related to the gospel. One is mercy, the other is grace. And it says, out of his great mercy he did this. What does that mean? He looked at us in our predicament, he had pity on us. He said, these people are in a hopeless situation. I will have mercy on them and I will do something about it. So we weren’t like knocking on heaven’s doors saying, we are in a desperate position, please rescue us, because we were happily ignorant of our plight.

And God just had mercy on us and said, I’m going to do something about this, I want to take care of it. So he initiated everything. He put a plan in place, he sent his son. He did everything himself to make this available to us out of his great mercy. The other thing that we’re told about God is his grace. And there’s two kinds of grace. There is a grace that is earned and there is a grace that is not earned. But this isn’t even talking about that. This is talking about the graciousness of God.

And it’s this idea that what kind of God is he? He is the sort of God who not only looks at us with mercy and with compassion, but he does something about it. And what he does is so far above and beyond what would be expected. You look at God and say, he has a lavish grace, he has a remarkable grace.

[01:20:26] Stephanie: Why don’t you go ahead, you just said there are like three graces.

[01:20:29] Marcus: You’re right. Let’s start with the grace you earn. So you’ve had people say, you should forgive that person. Well, they don’t deserve it and there’s truth to that. But we don’t forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive people for our own sake so that we can be free from the bondage that we’re in. But there is a sense in which sometimes I extend grace to you in order to breed loyalty in you. There’s sort of a give and take to it. And the same thing with blessing. It might be easier to think of grace as a blessing in this sense. There are blessings that come because of obedience and there are blessings that come because a righteous generation passes on a blessing to future generations. That’s more of the earned blessing, if you will.

But then there is this unearned grace. There is this unearned blessing where God gives it to you as a free gift. So salvation falls into that category of this is a free gift that is given by God. There are good things that happen to us that God gives to us as a blessing, sort of as a reward for good behavior, if you will. But that isn’t everything. And where we get in trouble is if all of your ideas of God’s blessing is to obey and you’ll be blessed, if that is your only theology, you will inevitably end up in legalism. Because now you’re going to feel like God owes you.

[01:22:00] Stephanie: It’s a very transactional relationship.

[01:22:01] Marcus: Very transactional, yes. And so there are things like that. Just like you and I have a grace based relationship. That doesn’t mean that if you don’t do something good, you don’t get something special every now and then. Like, well done, you really did a good job. Let’s celebrate that. There’s blessings that come your way because of obedience or performance, but there’s also blessings that are yours just because of being part of the family. And it’s the same way, we could apply that to a whole lot of different relationships.

[01:22:32] Stephanie: Thank you for pausing on that. I’m sure someday we will do a whole series on grace and unpack more, but I just wanted to make sure we paused and people aren’t like, wait, three graces?

[01:22:44] Marcus:  Any word has what’s called a semantic range. And one of the mistakes that we make in exegesis is forcing a word to mean exactly the same thing every time it shows up. It’s a mistake and you’ve got to look at the context sometimes to know which version of the word is in mind in a particular passage.

[01:23:05] Stephanie: One of my favorite versions of that is the word bank. Like, there’s a river bank or there’s a bank where you keep your money. And maybe poetically, those can be given the same nuance, but you don’t usually think, oh, yes, this bank means that bank.

[01:23:19] Marcus: Yeah. When you say, hey, let’s go on a date. I want to go sit on the bank of the river. It’s like, wait, there’s not a bank by the river. So clearly context tells you what you mean by that word. It’s the same thing with a lot of words in the Bible. And again, one of the exegetical mistakes people make is forcing words to have the same meaning regardless of context. And we have to be careful when we do that even with words like grace.

[01:23:42] Stephanie: Cool. Are there any scriptures for understanding God’s identity in this context or any more you want to unpack there? I know this question is way more complicated than it sounds.

[01:23:57] Marcus: Well, if you go back into the Old Testament, in the Hebrew we read about Psalm 89, which is a covenant Psalm where it says, “Give thanks to Lord, for he is good.”  His hesed endures forever. And we’re told that over and again. Here two words are paired together, and it’s this word hesed and the word emeth. Now, hesed can be translated as love or loving kindness. But it’s this idea of attachment love that says, because we belong to Him, he loves us because of that. And then emeth is usually translated as faithfulness, but I actually prefer the translation of integrity or truthfulness. And it’s the idea that God’s character is that he loves us and that he is trustworthy because he is a person of integrity.

The best definition I’ve heard of integrity is that your words and your deeds match, right? You don’t say one thing and do another. Your words and your deeds line up. And so God because of his integrity is faithful and trustworthy. God because he’s loving and wants what’s best for us, the result is that God is good. And so that means I can trust God and I can trust his love for me, and know that the plans that he’s putting together for me are for my good and not for my evil. And it takes us to therefore if God is for me, who can be against me? And let’s push into and rest in that love.

[01:25:37] Stephanie: That’s beautiful. Thank you. All right, let’s start looking at more of tying us and our identity back into how we interact with God, and his identity. Starting with the idea of the role we play that we are image bearers of God.

[01:25:56] Marcus: So before you ever get to the new covenant there is an identity that God gives and every human has being before the new covenant even comes into play. And that’s the identity that we get via Adam of being image bearers. In Genesis chapter five, verse one, it would have probably helped me if I looked this up and had it right in front of me. So a little rustling of the pages here. I am looking for Genesis 5:1, here it is. So it says this is the Toledoth of Adam’s family line. This is the written account of Adam’s family line. I’m in the NIV and it says, “When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them, and he named them Adam, or he named them mankind when they were created.”

Notice a couple of things there: the likeness of God, the image of God, male and female, they were blessed. They’re all collectively called Adam. So now we get to verse three, and he’s just introduced us to the likeness of God, the image of God. And it says, “When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and named him Seth.” Now, the wording there is not accidental. We’re just told we’re made in the likeness of God. In Genesis 1 we’re told we’re made in the image of God. And now for the first time, we’re given something to compare that to. What does it look like to be in the likeness and image of God? Well, he’s saying it’s just like Adam having Seth, a father to a Son. This is a likeness and an image is passed down.

And what that tells me is that all of us were created to be in relationship with God. We are created to be family. We were created to be his children. So we’ve already seen that male and female are in his image. It could have been talking about the birth of Adam’s daughter, but in this case it’s talking about his son. And the likeness means Eve didn’t give birth to a giraffe, Eve gave birth to a human.

Now, some people have taken this too far and said, oh, we’re divine. To be made in the image of God doesn’t mean we’re little “gods” running around. But it means that we are children of God. Therefore we are, in a unique way, designed and created for a relationship with God. So the way that I explain this a lot is that God is the sun and we’re the moon. And we are just dark rocks floating through space until we come into relationship to the sun. And then the brilliance of the sun reflects off of us and we ourselves become glorious.  We don’t obtain our full meaning and purpose in life until we’re in that relationship. Part of what the image of God says, is that we are created to reflect God’s glory. We are designed to be in a relationship with Him. God designed us uniquely to bear his image and that’s why giraffes don’t run the world.

01:28:55] Stephanie: This is great, keep talking. Do you want to talk about our hearts and God’s image?

[01:29:02] Marcus: This is great, keep talking. Do you want to talk about our hearts and God’s image?

[01:31:00] Stephanie: That’s awesome. Thank you. Well, for the sake of getting to this next part while we have time, I want us to give an overview of what we’re about to go into for the next several episodes. We’re going to be digging deeper into your acrostic PACT and how that informs our kingdom identity. So would you give an overview of that relationship to the new Covenant?

[01:31:27] Marcus: How do I put this? In trying to define what the new covenant is, the biggest challenge we have is there’s no one passage that says, here is the new covenant. We can do that with the old covenant to some extent. There are 600 some commandments and you collect those commandments and you put them together and you say, here’s the old covenant. And then you can get a list of blessings and you get a list of curses. You say, if you obey these 613 commandments you’ll get these blessings, and if you don’t, you’ll get these curses.

And it’s all very straightforward. But how do you do that with the new covenant? A long time ago, I saw Dr. Neil Anderson’s list of all the things that are true about us in Christ from the New Testament. And it occurred to me that each one of those “In Christ” statements is a term of the new covenant. So every time in the New Testament you read in Christ, this is true of us that you are God’s child. In Christ, this is true of you. You could read it also under the new covenant that this is true of you. Under the new covenant, this is true of you. So anytime you have an “In Christ” statement, you have a new covenant statement being made. So starting there, there’s a lot of them.

Dr. Anderson’s listed about over 30 of them I think, of all these “In Christ” statements in the New Testament. So as I like to do, I tried to organize those into buckets that we can collect a bunch of these in that would summarize where all of this is going in this list. And that led me to that there’s justification, there’s adoption, there’s citizenship, and there’s sanctification. And I thought well, those are hard words to remember. What if we’d call justification pardon? Adoption can stay the same. Citizenship can stay the same.

What if we take sanctification and make it the title saint, like I am a saint? Because over 80 times it uses sanctification or saint to describe the Christian in the New Testament. So I’m like, well, that kind of sums it up. That gives us four buckets. So the first one, pardon is all of the words related to our justification. It’s all the legal kind of courtroom terms related to our salvation. Our adoption is pretty straightforward. Our citizenship is not of the world anymore but now of the kingdom of Heaven. And that we’re now called Saints, it’s a new title. So pardon, adoption, citizenship, title, and you get PACT. So PACT is an attempt to create four buckets that summarize all of these “In Christ” statements that are made about us in the New Testament.

[01:34:05] Stephanie: Yay. And we are going to take an episode on each one of those and it’s going to be great. So I’m going to pause now and pull a note from one of our listeners. This was submitted back during our one year anniversary celebration and it’s so sweet. So this person says, “Congratulations on the one year anniversary of On the Trail. I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts. I look forward to Mondays when a new podcast is released. Thank you for your time and care in presenting this amazing material. I love the joyful and close family dynamics displayed in your podcasts. You model so much as you talk together. Thank you. My husband and I will be at the family gathering in October. We can’t wait to meet you. You are all so precious.”

And to that I say, “Huzzah!” Are you surprised? I’m so excited for this conference too. And honestly, we’re recording this enough in advance that there might not actually be space for new people to sign up because it’s filling up fast. So if you were hoping to come to this conference run to the website and see if there’s any space left. Otherwise there will be some online options.

[01:35:14] Marcus: Yes, we are planning to have some online options because it looks like we’re going to fill up here maybe even before the month of September starts.

[01:35:20] Stephanie:  I know it’s going fast, I’m so excited. We’re going to have so many people together and it’s a wonderful time. Dad’s going to be presenting for the first time on his upcoming book Breakthrough. And yeah, anyway, excited about that and thank you so much for your notes. And I also just want to say if you want to submit a question for us or a testimony, or even an icebreaker, I have put a little button that leads to a mailbox in my Monday emails and you can also find it on Instagram.

[01:35:53] Marcus: It’s easy. Just look for the word behold. Just look for the word behold in the email and you will find the email.

[01:35:59] Stephanie: I can be melodramatic, okay. Behold the mailbox! I did say that in my emails, so yes. All right, any closing thoughts for this episode Father?

[01:36:11] Marcus:  just remember the first time I saw that and you said, “Could you proofread this email?” I’m like, behold the mailbox, okay, let’s do that.

[01:36:20] Stephanie: It makes me smile.

[01:36:21] Marcus: It does. It was pretty funny. Closing thoughts. This is a topic that you can dive into and turn pretty academic. One of the reasons that we want to take this pause and really look at identity is that the wounds of life have taught us a false identity about ourselves. When we think about our heart values words come to mind like disappointment, failure, and God must be disappointed with me. I have words that come up as worthless. Part of the reason we take the time to pause on this is that the world and the devil and our flesh are relentless in trying to rob us of our identity.

And they’re relentless about trying to keep us from seeing ourselves the way that God wants us to see ourselves. And the reason that’s so important is that when I see myself accurately, it facilitates that relationship. Because I begin to see myself as someone God wants to be with. And that’s really the bottom line and why we are doing all this. You could sum it all up and say, we don’t need all these podcasts. God wants to be with you. That’s really what we’re trying to say. He wants to be in a relationship with you.

[01:37:37] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, and share with a friend. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.