58: Identity

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 58. Today we are starting a new topic series. Let’s talk about identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good topic.

[00:32] Stephanie: I love this topic. You know I do. And I have an exciting icebreaker courtesy of one of our listeners. This one is from Claudia, and she says, “Could you share what kind of music or song brings you joy?”

[00:51] Marcus: Really, that’s a good question. Depends on the mood I’m in. I actually kind of like big band sort of music. I listened to enough Nat King Cole when I was little that Ben used to call it “Daddy.” So I would say I tend to lean that direction for something that makes me smile. But I’ve got a whole bunch of them. I like “Happy” by Farrell. Is that how you say it? I guess.

[01:21] Stephanie: That’s how I’ve said it.

[01:22] Marcus: Then I like the old Christian stuff I grew up on, like Keith Green and Russ Taff and that sort of thing.

[01:33] Stephanie: Yes, it definitely depends on my mood and situation. But there is one artist who will always bring me joy, and my father knows exactly who I’m going to say.

[01:45] Marcus: I do.

[01:46] Stephanie: Do you want to say it?

[01:47] Marcus: It’s Brian Duncan.

[01:49] Stephanie: Brian Duncan. Oh my goodness. I have such a nostalgia for Brian Duncan. I mean, I don’t know. You guys must have played his music all the time or something when I was a baby, because literally his voice feels like my father’s voice or something. Yes. To put it this way, I have some of his songs as my alarms. And usually if you make a song your alarm, you get tired of it or you don’t like it anymore. I have never gotten tired of it. Now, I don’t just listen to him all the time. I listen to many different artists and many different things. But if I just need to feel comfort and some joy – Brian Duncan.

[02:29] Marcus: And you like the soundtrack from The Story, was it?

[02:33] Stephanie: Oh, yeah, I love the Bible edition called The Story. There was a soundtrack with many Christian artists who came together and they would each take a Bible character and it’s called Music Inspired by the Story. I think that’s what it’s called.

[02:49] Marcus: Anyway. I remember that one, you talking about that one quite a bit.

[02:53] Stephanie: Yeah. So there are some fun ones.

Well, today we’re setting up the topic for understanding our identity in Christ. And then we’ll take a nice hike digging deeper into both the brain science of identity and the new covenant biblical realities of identity. Identity is indisputably important, whether we’re considering individual identity, group identity, cultural identity, and beyond.

We’ve talked about identity before during our FISH series last year and I’m really excited to come back for a deeper dive. So let us start with the 300,000 foot view.

[03:32] Marcus: That’s really high. Halfway to the moon, I think.

[03:35] Stephanie: Yeah. Will you take a moment to explain FISH as a broader context for identity?

03:42] Marcus: Yes.  The idea behind FISH is gospel-based discipleship. And the idea here is that we, most of us, were taught the gospel as something like, this is your ticket to heaven. All you’ve gotta do is stamp this ticket, you get into heaven. It’s often preached that way. Like, here’s the gospel message Jesus died for: you say this prayer – that’s punching your ticket- and now you get to go to heaven. Congratulations! And it’s almost like whatever you do from now on doesn’t matter because you did this one thing, and that’s not really what the gospel’s supposed to be. The gospel is supposed to be the foundation on which we build our lives. There is an element of eternal life, getting into heaven, all that, but there’s a lot of misconceptions there.

The foundational idea of the gospel is laid out in baptism, and that is that we are buried with Christ in baptism, showing that we have died with him. So just ask the question, why? Why did we have to die with Christ? What is the benefit to us? And the answer comes down to one word, and that’s Freedom. And that by dying with Christ, I am set free from everything that enslaves me. Now, that happens instantaneously, right at the moment I become a Christian, the legal work is done in the courtroom of heaven. The covenant is made. I’m entered into, and I am legally free from sin. I am legally free from death. I’m legally free from the world.

But foundationally, what discipleship means, I now need to learn how to live out of that freedom. How do I experience that freedom that has been given to me?

So then we go to the next thing, once I’ve died with Christ, I’m raised with Christ. And again, you’ve got to ask why. What is the real benefit of rising with Christ? First and foremost, is eternal life, that I am raised with him to eternal life, but right connected to that is I am raised to a new Identity and that I am brought into the new covenant with Christ. And that says that you died to this world so that you could be born into the kingdom. You died to sin so that you could be brought into righteousness. You died as a slave so that you could be a son or a daughter. So you look at these things and you’re like, okay, identity is instantly ours as soon as we become Christians, but learning to grow in our identity, learning to live out of that identity, let that be the foundation that drives the way that we live. That’s discipleship.

And so we just keep going through it. So the “S” is Spirit. I’m born of the Spirit so that I can learn to live in the Spirit. So I’m born of the Spirit. As soon as that happens, it’s a fairly quick thing right then, but learning to walk into Spirit is a lifelong process.

Same thing, I’m brought into Heart-focused community. But how do I put that into practice? What does it look like to live in heart-focused community? So those are the foundations. And then those four foundations lead into mission, which I like to think of as kingdom impact. And so that is the FISH model. That’s our heart-focused discipleship model, and that’s why we wanted to take this series and really camp out on the idea of identity and look at that from a couple of different aspects as we go through that.

[07:08] Stephanie: Excellent. Okay, we can move down to 30,000.

[07:11] Marcus: There you go.

[07:11] Stephanie: Explain to us why you find this topic of identity so crucial.

[07:18] Marcus:  So, I think one of the first times I realized how important identity in Christ was, honestly, was reading Bob George’s book, Classic Christianity, back in the early nineties. I did not grow up with this part of my theology. I don’t remember ever having a lesson on my identity in Christ in church through college. But when I got to seminary, my dad was discovering it, and Neil Anderson wrote Victory Over the Darkness, where he laid out this wonderful collection of “Who I am in Christ” statements.

And then I came across Bob George’s book, and I thought his stories and his illustrations really brought it to life for me in a way that kind of made everything click. I like the way he talked about two halves of the gospel. He would say, “The first half of the gospel is you’re saved by faith and the second half is your identity.” Now, I think the FISH version is a little more complete way of looking at that.

For example, there’s one story he told about a beggar who was dumpster diving and eating trash. The dumpster was in back of a nice restaurant. And the owner of the restaurant saw this one day, said, “Oh, this is horrible! It just breaks my heart to see this guy living like this!”

And so he invited him in and showed him there was a buffet, every kind of food he could possibly want. And the guy goes, “This is all yours. It’s free. It’s my gift to you. You can eat whatever you want. Just keep coming back to the buffet every day, on me.”

And the guy goes, “I can have anything I want. Really?”

He goes, “Yeah, anything. It’s all free. It’s all yours.”

He goes, “Anything? Really? My anything?”

He said, “Yeah.”

He goes, “Can I have the garbage?”

It kind of hit me: we’ve been given this new identity in Christ, we’ve been given all these wonderful things in Christ, yet how many of us are like, “Yeah, but I’m really going to miss the garbage, you know, I’m really going to miss all that worldly stuff.”

I really like the way Neil Anderson put it – to get a little philosophical, Aristotle said that who we are is derived by what we do – but Neil and others have flipped it the other way, and that is, what we do comes out of who we are. I think that’s the more accurate statement, that a lot of this gets back to the way that I see myself.

If I see myself as a loser, I’m going to tend to live like a loser. If I see myself as someone who is special, I’m going to tend to live out of that. If I see myself as somebody that nobody could possibly love, it’s going to affect the way I live. So all of these things. Why is identity important? Because the way that I see myself is such a powerful driver of the way that I live.

[10:23] Stephanie: Can you pull that into everyday living a little bit?

[10:35] Marcus: For example, I did an overseas Zoom meeting this morning with a group of medical professionals, and somebody was praying for me, and they just texted me beforehand and said, “I feel like the Father just wanted me to remind you that you’re a child of the mighty King. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t worry about this. You have nothing to prove. Just go be who you are.”

And so that was something just today that came as a quick reminder. You don’t have to earn everything you get. Just go be yourself. God loves you the way you are. So on a daily basis, there are reasons to remember and remind yourself of these things.

[11:21] Stephanie: That’s a really good.

[11:22] Marcus: Did you have something in mind when you asked that? I’m curious.

[11:25] Stephanie: I do have a book quote that I was thinking about reading from your book, but I was curious what would come to mind for you, and that was awesome. I pulled a book quote from A Deeper Walk. Heard of it? I love that book. You wrote, “The foundation of the Christian life is our identity in Christ. Bad things happen when that foundation collapses. In the same way, when we do not understand our identity in Christ, or if the devil’s lies rob us of that solid foundation, it can impede the flow of the Spirit within and keep us stuck.”

[11:59] Marcus:That’s a good quote. I think that, again, I learned a lot of this from other people along the way. There’ve been a lot of people who’ve taught on grace, taught on exchange life, taught on identity in Christ in the past. It’s not an original idea to me, but it was understanding that when that foundation is shaky, everything else gets shaky.

I think of the story my dad, your grandfather told about meeting with a missionary, a young single missionary, who was ready to come home. And he walked her through this idea of, “Do you see God as an authority, that you have to be submissive to that authority, and if you’re good enough at doing that, he’ll give you affirmation and accept you? Or is it the other way around? Are you already accepted because of what Christ has done for you and it moves in exactly the opposite direction?”

She had never even thought of that before. She had such a performance-based approach to living, the reason she wanted to come home from the mission field was she felt like a fraud. She felt like a failure, like she didn’t really measure up. And for the first time in her life, she discovered that to be a daughter of God, if God is the King of the kingdom, then that makes her a princess. And she had literally never heard that before. Never thought of it that way before.

It changes the whole way you live. That’s why you see this in movies sometimes. “I’m knighting you. I’m giving you a title. Now that you’re a knight, go live like a knight. Go live like a knight of the realm” You see that even in Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan knights Peter first, “You’re (what, Sir Wolfsbane or something like that?) Peter Wolfsbane, Knight of Narnia,” and that title. Or you see it in a movie like Gladiator, where he turns around, he says his name, “Maximus, commander of the Felix legions,” all the things that he says with that. It’s like his identity is what drives everything else. That is the foundation out of which the life comes. We see that over and over again, that if we’re shaky on our identity, our life is going to be shaky.

[14:12] Stephanie: With this in mind, do you want to walk us through an overview of where we’re going on this trek into identity? We’re going to spend a lot of episodes on it.

[14:23] Marcus:We’re taking our time on this because we have the opportunity with the podcast to actually unpack some of these things and not always be at the 30,000 foot level. And so first, we want to take a few episodes to look at how God designed the brain and attachment, and how God designed us to learn identity, which is fascinating because I only knew identity as a set of beliefs that you learned to incorporate into your life. And that’s good. We’re going to spend a lot of sessions on those beliefs.

Understanding that God designed our brains to form an identity through attachment seems really important, so we’re going to take a few sessions to try to unpack that. I call that attachment-based identity. Then we’re going to go to the belief-based identity, and we’ll look at what does the world try to get us to believe? How does the world try to shape our identity?

And then how does the kingdom and the Spirit and Christ, what does a grace-based identity look like? The world tries to give us a performance-based identity, God gives us a grace-based identity, and our brains learn a relationally- based identity. So we’re going to take a look at the topic of identity from all three of those perspectives.

[15:48] Stephanie: Huzzah. I’m excited for every path. And we’re also going to get into, for instance, next episode, we’re going to take a little time to talk about the biblical reasons for why. Yes, the brain science is important and it’s amazing how God has designed us too. That attachment and relationship really is at the heart of our identities. And that’s a beautiful thing.

I’m thinking about how when we talked about FISH in our initial series, it was in juxtaposition with the broken discipleship factory and that there’s so much, there are so many things that have been broken in the way that we approach discipleship. Could you maybe apply that sort of juxtaposition with identity, like ways that you have seen people’s approaches to identity be broken?

[16:44] Marcus: Let’s just start here. Some people have grown up in a theological system of what has often been called “miserable worm theology”. The idea here is that I am totally depraved, I’m a miserable worm and missing the fact that once I get saved that’s not who I am anymore. If you’re going to make a case, you might be able to make a case for that as somebody who is of the world. But if I am of the kingdom, then I need to get past that.

A lot of us were raised with sermons, basically telling us what horrible sinners we were and to try to do a better job. And so I remember in junior high, high school thinking to myself that the gospel basically said, “You are bad, try to be good, but I know you’ll fail.” So it was like Christianity is kind of a burden here. It’s like you’re a bad person, you’re fundamentally bad, no matter what you try to do, you’re gonna be bad. But your job is to be good. And so good luck with that, and that’s why Christ had to die for you, because you’re such a horrible loser. Nothing about that was appealing, and so that is partly what we’re trying to overcome here is.

Beyond that, there can just be all sorts of other aspects of identity that could be broken. For instance, it was  strongly emphasized in some circles that dying to yourself was important. Well, that is important if you have built up a really strong, worldly identity that needs to die. But if you have an undeveloped identity, like you’re a little kid and you’re hearing people in church say, “You need to die to yourself and you need to die to who you are.” You haven’t developed anything to die to yet.  That was a little traumatizing for me, too.

There’re a lot of little elements to this where people have gotten some distortions in the way the gospel was presented to them. It’s not that what they heard was completely wrong, but the way in which it was packaged and the way in which it was presented actually distorted the sense of how God must look at me.

So I remember growing up feeling very much like God is fundamentally disappointed with me all of the time because I never measure up to what I ought to be doing, and that even though it’s impossible for me to measure up, he’s still disappointed with me. If that’s your view of God, that’s your view of yourself. That kind of identity structure led me to, like, “You know what? I’m going to do enough Christianity to try to keep God happy, but I’m going to do enough other stuff to try to have fun.”

[19:40] Stephanie: Well, it led to a very duty mindset for you that your relationship with God was one of duty and not of love. And that’s something you’ve talked about before.

[19:48] Marcus: Yep. So, again, this is why identity is so important.

[19:52] Stephanie: Then there’s the flip side of things. So you had a lot of experience growing up with the judgmental identity. And I think what today we’re seeing, things are polarized as ever. So you still get people who are in an attempt to counteract some of the over tolerance that you see, and they’re getting really purist. There’s a lot of nuance that needs to be dealt with when we’re dealing with identity.

[20:30] Marcus: In today’s world, more than ever, identity has become a cultural issue. That aspect of it wasn’t nearly as strong when I was growing up, but today it’s at the heart of the divide in the church at some level. So it’s important to get some understanding on these things.

[20:53] Stephanie: Well, I’m going to take a moment here to bring some listener engagement directly into the podcast again. Last episode we had a lovely Q & A time celebrating our one year anniversary of doing the podcast together. And for our Q & A episode, there was a form to fill out for listener submissions, and I have replaced that form now with a general form you can use anytime. I’ll keep a button at the bottom of my Monday emails for you to access, as well as put it in the bio link of deeper walks Instagram profile and on that form you can share stories, feedback, questions, icebreakers, and you can choose to stay anonymous or not. So thank you to everyone who has already been sharing with us and we love. Forward to hearing more from you.

Today’s icebreaker came from Claudia and so I’m also going to pull a lovely note up that she shared here. She says,

I found Deeper Walk through Life Model. I have read a couple of Dr. Marcus’s books. A Deeper Walk was especially impactful since I came from a difficult church background. I am nearly 60 years old and have been a Christian since I was young but never had discipling. The FISH model was very eye opening recently. Learning about the pain levels and what I’m learning in Journey Group about joy is helping me with my adult children relationships greatly.

Yes, journey groups are great and I’m so glad this teaching has been helpful. Does that spur any thoughts for you, Father?

[22:25] Marcus: I can identify growing up. I don’t want to make it sound like my Christian experience growing up is horrible because I actually loved going to church. I had lots of friends at church. I had a lot of good experiences. But what I realized was there were booby traps in my Christianity that I needed to get past.

I think there are a lot of people like this listener who have had Christian experiences in their churches that weren’t all bad, but some of them were very toxic. Sometimes it’s more what I would call booby trapped. A lot of good things, but there are a few issues that have just twisted the whole thing for us, and that’s why we want to try to address those.

[23:13] Stephanie: I’m looking forward to continuing this whole series. It’s very important and I hope we can address a lot of those things. So as we are wrapping up this episode, do you have any closing thoughts or hopes for the future?

[23:31] Marcus: Yes, I’m looking forward to this series, partly because I find that I have to revisit this issue of identity on a regular basis. As much as I know it intellectually, as much as I have studied about it, it’s just good to keep coming back to the foundations of the faith and reviewing those. I’m hoping this will be helpful for our listeners, too, to take this little extended journey into the foundations of our faith and what Christ has done for us that has given us a foundation that we didn’t deserve but is completely free.

[24:06] Stephanie: Very good. Thank you, Father.

And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk exists to make heart focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more. And if you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On The Trail Podcast, leave a review and share with your friends.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.