68: Title (Belief-Based Identity, Part 8)

[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 68. Today we are wrapping up our look at New Covenant Identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:29] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Time to dive into the new covenant.

[00:32] Stephanie: Yeah, but first I have an icebreaker. And actually even first, I have to give a shout out to the conference that just happened this weekend, aka in the future cause we’re recording this before the conference. But I’m excited for it now and I’m sure that it was lovely.

[00:49] Marcus: So I think that was a future passive era, something, I don’t know. .

[00:58] Stephanie: Perfect. And I guess on that note, if you missed it there will be recordings available. I’m anticipating that it was a great time. All right, let me give us an icebreaker, shall we? One of our listeners wants to know, what is one of your favorite adventures? For instance, hiking, camping, biking?

[01:26] Marcus: Yeah. You’re laughing. I am not the most adventurous person in the world. My biking experiences have been less than admirable. I think the last two times I ended up with blood all over my face.

[01:38] Stephanie: No.

[01:41] Marcus: I tell people that my sense of adventure when it comes to the mountains, tends to be a stroll through the Garden of the Gods with rest stops every so often. But I do like driving in the mountains and stopping at beautiful scenic places and enjoying those.

[01:58] Stephanie: But you love epic nature. You love being in adventures, but you had some childhood things.

[02:06] Marcus: Traumatic memories when it came to camping so that I’ve just never been interested.

[02:12] Stephanie: When I read that question I was thinking, oh man, we as a family have taken so many road trips throughout my life. It usually involved piling everyone into the van and going from one speaking event to another. And then if there’s something pretty in between, we’ll go see it, and that’s a lot of fun. I was also thinking about youth group camping trips that were fun, like going to Clifty Falls.

[02:40] Marcus: One of my favorite things we did is when your mom and I had our 30th anniversary and we had a speaking engagement in Montana. So we took advantage of the opportunity to spend a night at one of the lodges in Yellowstone. This was a big lodge with lots of amenities in it, it was not camping. I think the closest I’ve come to camping was staying at Yosemite. We stayed at Camp Curry once when it was still kind of a half cabin……..

[03:12] Stephanie: I was eight.

[03:12] Marcus: You were eight. Yeah, that’s the last time.

[03:17] Stephanie: I mean, so those were examples. So your favorite adventures would be not hiking or camping, but a road trip.

[03:26] Marcus: Yeah, I like road trips. I like seeing things. Mount Rainier was one of my favorite places. Yellowstone, the national parks. I love the national parks.

[03:37] Stephanie: We always love going to Wilkerson Pass when we’re in Colorado.

[03:41] Marcus: Yes.

[03:41] Stephanie:  All right. Well, thank you for sharing. We are continuing our dive into your acrostic PACT, with a look at T, for title. So, to review, the core elements of the new covenant can be remembered with this acrostic. In Christ we are pardoned, adopted, made citizens of the kingdom, and given a new title, saint. Let’s talk more about title. I’m thinking in terms, like, we’ve been in the belief based identity part of our identity series. So title really does, at least to me, focuses a lot on what we believe about ourselves too. There’s a lot of debate and we’re going to get into it. So in Christ, are we sinners or are we saints? Actually, before I give that to you now, I’m going to give it to you from the past and read an excerpt from one of your books.

So this is an excerpt from A Deeper Walk. You say, “As Christians, we are given the title saint. The word saint is easily misunderstood because we often have associated it with people who are particularly godly or virtuous. It has become common to say, I’m no saint, but no Christian can honestly say this. We are all saints. Paul did not address a single letter to these sinners in the church of such and such city. It wasn’t that the Christians there were all virtuous. But being a saint is not something earned. It is an identity that serves as a foundation for virtue.” All right, Father, are we sinners or saints?

[05:21] Marcus: There you go. Well, I think I just said it.

[05:23] Stephanie: Yeah.

[05:25] Marcus: So there are three main views on this. There are Christians who are like, we are just sinners saved by grace. And that’s partly true, but it’s more accurate to say we were sinners and we have been saved by grace, and it’s changed our identity. I have yet to find a passage in one of Paul’s letters or anywhere in the New Testament after the cross, where anyone who is a follower of God is called a sinner. That title is not used, “you are a sinner.” So the closest we have to it is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is talking, and this is pre-cross though. He says, “If you who are evil know how to do good things for your children, give them good gifts, how much more, your Father, who is in heaven?”

So what we have is this idea that there is something about me that is flawed. And what being given the title saint does, is it doesn’t take away all of my flaws and means that I no longer have any propensity for sin. So what we’re not saying is that my old sin nature has been dissolved and eliminated, and I no longer have any impulses towards sin. This is a title. So the idea of a title is saying that now saint is your core identity. Now, that takes us into a pretty big rabbit’s hole here, right?

What does it actually mean to be a saint? It’s directly related to all the words for holy. So in Greek, that’s the Hagios word. So maybe people have heard of the Hagios Sophia, which is Saint Sophia in Istanbul. Or Latin is probably more familiar to us. It’s Sanctus and all things related to Sacra. And we hear the very word sacred in this. That’s the latin word for holy. And just like Hagios is a Greek word for holy, the Hebrew word for those who want to know is Kadosh. Kadosh is the Hebrew word for holy. But what does it mean to be holy? And that’s what we’ll have to dive into.

So back to the sinner, saint thing. I am no longer a sinner, that is no longer my title as a Christian. I was a sinner. That’s why Paul can say in 1st Corinthians 6, and that is what some of you were. He gives this long list of sins that people have engaged in in the past. And what he doesn’t say is, and that’s what you still are, this is who you are. He says, and that is what some of you were, but you have been washed, you have been sanctified, and you have been justified. In other words, this has changed. And what has changed is that I’ve been given a new title, I’m a saint.

In fact, I heard Alistair Begg not too long ago say, “That we’re very quick to talk about what God has done in us in our conversion experience, but we sometimes miss that the core of what’s going on at conversion, is what God has done for us.” And I really like that distinction between us and for us, because some of us have these dramatic testimonies like, oh, I was selling drugs and then one day God zapped me. And all of a sudden I realized I needed to change.

And there’s others of us who grew up going to church our whole lives and have never really been bad or rebellious. And we’re like, well, you know, what’s going on? Well, the answer is, God did the same thing for each of us, even though the way it worked out in us may have looked differently. And so when we’re talking about being a saint that’s one of the things that God has done for us. He has given us the right to say, you are holy. And what that means is that I belong to God. And so it’s actually an attachment statement. It’s an identity statement that says, I belong to God, I am his. Because I belong to God, because that’s my identity, that is now the foundation for the way I want to live my life. I want to live as someone who belongs to God, not as somebody who belongs to the world. So it’s kind of similar to that citizenship thing in that sense.

[09:29] Stephanie: Especially in the ancient world, the idea of holiness, that wasn’t just a unique Christian idea. Holiness is reflecting the character. Belonging and reflecting the character of another, or of a deity.

[09:48] Marcus: That’s worth getting Into a little bit because a lot of people don’t realize that the word holy is used in other religions. It’s not an exclusively Christian term. And in those religions it doesn’t mean moral. Let’s say you’re talking to a Greek pagan who worships Athena. They would talk about something being holy. Well, what that means is that it belongs to Athena and thus it is connected to the realm of the divine, the realm of the unseen. So when something is sacred, there was actually a little bit of fear about treading into a sacred place because it belonged to the god.

And if you tread into that place and you do something that displeases the god, they just might curse you or something. And so everybody in the ancient world understood this idea of holiness and that there are some things that are not of this world strictly. And when you creep into those areas and touch those areas, you are opening yourself up to interaction with that realm. So in the same way the Old Testament and Biblical view of holiness has some of that to it. I heard R.C. Sproul, a good reformed theologian, said, “That the counterfeit to holiness in our culture is horror,” which I thought was really interesting.

He said, like, in horror movies, you encounter something that’s not of this world, something that won’t die. It’s like it keeps coming back and you can’t quite kill it. And so in a similar way, the counterfeit of that, is the idea that when something is holy it is connected to another realm. It is connected to that unseen realm, it’s connected to the eternal realm. And so when we enter into that realm things do get dangerous. I’m now playing with something that is more powerful than me, something that is greater than me, something that is more awesome than me.

And in the sense of our God, someone who is so pure and so majestic that he’s called a consuming fire. And so now God is saying, I am inviting you into my holiness and you will be holy because I am holy, you belong to me. You are connected to all of these things that are true about me in this unseen realm. Now live like it. So that’s the whole idea. It’s the foundation. This is who you are, I’m giving this to you. This is the new foundation, now live like it. Well, part of living like that is you need to walk in the spirit, not the flesh now, because that’s what holy people do. Holy people are connected to the spirit realm, so they walk in the spirit and not in the flesh.

[12:29] Stephanie: Which again, goes back to both the concepts of adoption and citizenship of who you are, act like it. This is who you are, believe it.

[12:41] Marcus: Exactly. In some ways, all of these are just different metaphors for describing the same reality. Whether it’s adoption, citizenship, or whether it’s the new title of saint, they’re all describing the same transaction that has happened. I have been taken out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s own son. Therefore I have moved from the realm of the lost to the realm of the found. I’ve gone from those who are distant to those who are near. Everything has changed.

And what I come near to is something that is eternal, it’s sacred, it’s holy, it’s of another realm. It’s pure, it’s majestic. And I now share in that because I belong to it and that changes everything. And I belong to it as a child who’s been adopted. I belong to it as a citizen who has changed kingdoms. I belong to it as a saint who is no longer defined by my sin, but is now defined by what God through Christ has done for me.

[13:40] Stephanie: Yes. On that note, let’s go back. You were starting to talk about the three basic views for understanding sinner versus saint. And do you want to unpack your understanding of those views?

[13:52] Marcus: Yeah, sure. So it’s like I’m either I am a sinner and nothing has changed his view, number one. And I just think that’s not biblical. You can’t defend that. Number two…. I’m sorry, people will try. Here’s the challenge on this. Let me just give a little love here.

[14:16] Stephanie: I was gonna say, imagine somebody who believes this is listening.

[14:18] Marcus: Yes. So here we go. When I wake up in the morning I am very much aware that if I live today in the flesh, I will sin. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking I am sinless. I don’t wake up in the morning saying, I am impervious to sin, I cannot be tempted to sin. That’s not what it means to be a saint. But I wake up in the morning and I have to remind myself that I am a saint, not a sinner. Let’s live like a saint today. I also have to walk in the spirit and not in the flesh, because either one of those will undermine my ability. So the title saint doesn’t take away my capacity to sin. So somebody said, well, you still have the capacity to sin, aren’t you a sinner? And my point here is we’re talking titles.

When you stand before God in the throne room of heaven he’s not saying, next sinner, next sinner. He’s saying, bring in the saint, bring in my son, bring in my daughter, bring in the next citizen. There are titles that are true about us in the kingdom and there are titles that are not used about us in the kingdom. And he is not going to say, bring in the next sinner when it’s our turn to stand before God because that transaction has already taken place.

[15:36] Stephanie: As you said before, Paul would have been fully in his rights to address letters to sinners if that was a title. Because usually his letters were like, oh, the church has received a letter from Paul, oh, no.

[15:50] Marcus: Hey, you saints, why aren’t you living like saints? So then the second one is that we are both sinners and saints kind of equally. It’s correct to call us sinners or saints. What they’re trying to do with this duality is acknowledge the fact that I still have a propensity to sin. I still have a fleshly nature that is drawn to and attracted to what is sinful, what is of this world, and not what is holy.

And so because of that they’re saying,  it’s appropriate to call that your sinful self or that you’re a sinner. Again, I’m not denying that we have a flesh that’s drawn towards and attracted to sin. What I am saying is that is the title that the New Testament uses of us.

[16:35] Stephanie: So we can be lowercase sinners, but we are uppercase saints.

[16:38] Marcus: Yeah, there’s another way to put it. Lowercase sinners, uppercase saints. And then the last one is that we should not be calling ourselves sinners, we should be calling ourselves saints. Now, one of the problems that some people have with this position is they think that it’s psychobabble. Like, oh, you’re just trying to talk yourself into positive reinforcement, into being good. And I will say they’re partly right. So part of this is that I am reminding myself who I really am.

[17:09] Stephanie: You’re not manifesting something that isn’t true. You are reminding yourself of who you are.

[17:15] Marcus: Yeah. There’s a difference between pretending I’m a saint and reminding myself that I’m a saint. So throughout the day I say, oh, let’s pretend you’re a saint right now and act like that, that’s one thing. But if I say, you know what the Bible says, you’re a saint and you should live a life worthy of the calling you’ve received. Maybe right now I should think about how a saint would handle this and see if it changes the way that I act? So there is some truth to this idea of reminding ourselves of these things. But calling it psychobabble is not correct because it implies we’re pretending, and there’s nothing pretend about this.

[17:49] Stephanie: Well, and with any good thing, you can push it to a limit that is twisted or whatever. So you could say, oh, I’m only a saint and I’ve never sinned, or I never was sinner.

[18:02] Marcus: Like, I wasn’t a saint Tuesday because I had a really bad day, but I am a saint today. That is not how it works because it’s a title.

[18:09] Stephanie: All right, let’s see. I have a question to pull from one of our listeners. Do you have anything else you wanted to say before I pull it?

[18:19] Marcus: I will get there.

[18:19] Stephanie: Okay. So this person says, “The phrase in the Lord’s prayer, lead us not in temptation, has puzzled me. Could you help clarify what this actually means? It sounds like God would intentionally lead us to be tempted.”

[18:35] Marcus: It does, doesn’t it? There are some things in the Bible that when you first read them you’re going, say what? Especially in English it’s like, that can’t really be what it’s talking about here. So let me just give you some parallel verses that maybe will help shed some light on it. In Matthew 26:41, Jesus says, “Watch and pray so that you don’t fall into temptation.” And basically it’s like, don’t lead yourself into temptation. But what is the way that we do this? By watching and praying we stay out of temptation. So what is the Lord’s prayer doing? It’s modeling what that looks like. God, don’t lead me into temptation. Meaning I am watching and praying in the Lord’s prayer, I want my eyes to be open so I don’t fall into this temptation.

Another passage similarly is 1st Corinthians 10:13 which says, that no temptation takes you except what is common to man. God’s faithful and he won’t give you something more than you can handle, he’ll always show you the way out. But again, how does he show you the way out? Part of what the Lord’s prayer is modeling is when I say, Lord, lead me not into temptation, part of what I’m asking is open my eyes to see what is a temptation and what isn’t.

And we see something similar to that in 2nd Peter 2:9 which says, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials. Well, that word trials and temptation is the same word. It’s a Greek word, Peirasmos. Trial or temptation are both legitimate translations of the same word. Now, some people take this to mean that we’re saying, God, don’t let me go through suffering. And this is sort of what Jesus prayed even in the garden of Gethsemane when he prayed, if I don’t have to go through this Peirasmos, I’d rather not go through this Peirasmos. But in this case we’re essentially praying, God would you open up my eyes so that I recognize the pitfalls? Because the next line clarifies it.

There’s also a poetic element here. So it says, lead me not into temptation, but deliver us from, not temptation, it says, but from the evil one. He’s the hunter who was laying the snares. So it’s like, you’re my shepherd, we’re on this journey, don’t lead me into one of the hunter snares here, but in a sense lead me around it and open my eyes to it. But there are also times when we don’t avoid temptation just because we recognize it, but God literally steers us in a direction where we don’t face certain things. And that’s a legitimate prayer too. It’s like, God led me on a path today where I don’t even have to face something that’s going to be overwhelming for me, that I’m not going to be able to handle. This is a long explanation.

[21:19] Stephanie: No, this is great.

[21:19] Marcus: One explanation I think of here is when the Israelites came up out of Egypt and God intentionally did not lead them on the shortest route into the promised land. And he does this so they might face a battle they couldn’t handle. And so in a sense, we’re praying to God, which battles can I handle, which battles can I not? Which path should I be on today? So he didn’t just open their eyes to oh, there’s a battle here you can’t handle. He literally led them on a different path so they wouldn’t have to go through that.

[21:52] Stephanie: He took them through boot camp first.

[21:54] Marcus: Yeah, it’s not that they had no trials or that they had no temptations. We’re basically saying there is a hunter out there who wants to enslave me, don’t let that happen. Whether that is opening my eyes or whether it’s guiding me on a different path. And so it’s sort of modeling this idea of let’s watch and pray so that we don’t fall into temptation.

[22:18] Stephanie: I haven’t personally exegeted that exact text, but it also makes me think of your own ownership in it. You’re saying the watching and praying, but to me it’s almost like putting my trust in him saying, okay, Jesus, I don’t want to be tempted. I’m putting my eyes on you and I trust that you’re going to not lead me in this path. And I trust wherever you take me. And so it’s the relational aspect too, is how I read it.

[22:50] Marcus: Yeah. Something relational about prayer, shocking.

[22:55] Stephanie: Well, hey, before we get to the end of the episode, I’m going to want some final thoughts from you. And also at the conference we had a bunch of lovely school of ministry students and graduates praying with people. They were practicing what they went through the school of ministry to do, which is their prayer ministry certification. I just want to give a shout out that the applications for the next cohort are still open. That cohort is going to start up in January, and you can come to our website and find out all the prerequisites you need, and all the details there. It’s https://deeperwalk.com/som

[23:38] Marcus: I gotta tell you, every time I see that word, I want to rearrange the letters so it spells wisdom. Because all of the letters of wisdom are in that, but it just needs to get rearranged. It’s really hard not to change it, but it is what it is.

[23:53] Stephanie: That’s amazing. Well, and just to spell it out it is Deeper Walk International School of Ministry is what it would be spelled out, but then we shortened it. So it’s https://deeperwalk.com/som. If you are interested, you want more information, go there. It’s an awesome group of people and you get really good, good learning. So, Father, any closing thoughts on our title of saint?

[24:19] Marcus: So one of the first people who really brought this to my attention was Neil Anderson. It was his writings back in the early nineties where I hadn’t really thought about this, I’ll be honest. The only thing I’d ever been taught was, you’re a sinner saved by grace. And I’m like, well, that makes sense, I know I sin. I know I have impulses to evil that I have to overcome. So I guess my core identity is sinner. And it was the first time anybody said to me, take a look at the New Testament and see, does it actually call you a sinner? I realized that no, that is not the preferred terminology in the New Testament. In fact, I have a friend who went through a lot of AA where you have to get up and you say, hi, my name is Marcus, and I am an alcoholic kind of thing. And someone challenged him on that. He said, no, you’re not an alcoholic, that’s not your identity. You’re actually a saint.

And at first he thought that was heresy, he was so upset. He’s like, how can you even say something like that? So he did something interesting. He actually went home and read Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians that afternoon. And by the time he was done he was like, wait a second. The title that’s used by me throughout here is saint or holy one. He’s right it never says, you addict, you sinner. And that’s one of the challenges we have, is we too often define ourselves by what I call our “malfunctions.” We too often define ourselves by our malfunctions.

And God wants us to define ourselves by what he has done for us. And what he’s done for us is adopt us, change our citizenship, and give us a new title. He said, let these things define you. Let them be the foundation of your life and live from there. And my friend said it changed everything for him in terms of his battle with alcohol. Seeing himself as a saint had much more power in his life than seeing himself as an alcoholic.

[26:11] Stephanie: Yeah, that will literally preach. Very good. We’re good?

[26:19] Marcus: We’re good. That was my last thought on this, not that I have no more thoughts.

[26:23] Stephanie: Your final thought. That was a great concluding thought. Well, 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.