Have you ever asked, “Who am I… really?” Not just what you do, what you’ve been through, or what other people call you—but who you are at your core. In this episode, Kimberly Faith and her dad talk about one of the biggest questions every human wrestles with: identity—and why the only place a steady, life-giving answer can be found is in what God says.
God’s Word is a mirror (James 1), and it’s so easy—even for believers—to say our identity is in Christ while still living as though it’s being shaped by other authorities like performance, approval, comparison, or the fear of losing what matters most. The conversation contrasts three “identity lenses”—works-based religion, atheism, and biblical Christianity—and explains why only the Biblical view offers true value and freedom.
The episode then turns practical, walking through three questions that reveal where identity is truly anchored. The hope is that listeners walk away seeing themselves as God’s workmanship—His masterpiece—created for His glory, and free to live from who they are in Christ. When we belong to God because Jesus has redeemed us; we are made priceless. It’s a marvelous experience.
Jacob Paul: Welcome to the Truth in Love podcast with your hosts Kimberly Faith and John Mac. The Truth in Love podcast seeks to present God’s timeless truth through the lens of his remarkable love.
Kimberly Faith: Well, dad, this podcast, I think, is going to go down in my book anyway as probably one of the most important subjects that I’ve ever studied and that is who does God say I am?
John McLarty: Yeah. That’s one of the universal questions.
Kimberly Faith: It is.
John McLarty: Who am I?
Kimberly Faith: Who am I?
John McLarty: What’s my purpose?
Kimberly Faith: And just to kind of give listeners kind of an overview of what we’re going to talk about, because we have a lot of thoughts that the Lord, really just out of his word, has given us over the years even, given to shape our understanding of who we are. We’re going to talk about how God’s word is the mirror
John McLarty: Yes, the mirror.
Kimberly Faith: That reveals truth.
John McLarty: Look into his word.
Kimberly Faith: The second thing is our identity always comes from a source of truth and authority. And we’re going to look at three of these authorities that give us this identity, and then explore the idea that biblical identity doesn’t begin with our effort, it begins with God. And then how our identity is revealed, and then the power of being who you are in Christ. So there’s a lot that we’re going to cover. Hopefully, we can cover it all in one podcast.
John McLarty: I just have a thought, thinking of a phrase from the last podcast. We’re the creature. He’s the creator.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. Yes.
John McLarty: And we’re created in the image of God.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Fascinating thing to look into. Lord, give us insight.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. We were just praying about that. Lord, this is a big subject. And I think there’s not a human that walks on this earth, I think, that doesn’t think about this.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: And so I’d just like to start out with this first idea that God’s word is the mirror that reveals truth, and this is right out of James Chapter One. You want to read James 1:22-25?
John McLarty: Sure. Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it and is not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
Kimberly Faith: You know, I think the power of this scripture is that not only do we often forget what kind of person we are in Christ
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: But some of us, you know, there was a long period of time in my history as a Christian where I had never even discovered who I was to begin with. And so, I was born again and knew, I had knowledge, I knew I was in Christ, but in practice, my identity was still very, very much influenced by other authorities in my life. And I don’t know if that’s something you’ve experienced, but it was definitely something I experienced.
John McLarty: Well, I think we all experienced that because when we’re born again, our inner man was changed, our inner person, but we’re clothed in this body of flesh that did not change one iota. And that’s our experience. I mean, we just go through life and the flesh says, I’m hungry. The flesh says, I’m cold. The flesh says, I want this. I think we’ve said in previous podcasts, the body has all these life experiences that it brings with it.
Kimberly Faith: And our brain has stored
John McLarty: Yeah, our brain is like
Kimberly Faith: Got grooves.
John McLarty: Got those grooves. Oh, if I feel this, I need to do this.
Kimberly Faith: Right. And so the reason this podcast to me was so, the subject of this podcast was so important to me was because it applies to unbelievers and believers alike. As a believer, I can say my identity is in Christ, but what I actually think and what I do and what I say is often very much influenced by false non biblical ideas. And so in this podcast, I thought it would be really interesting, when I was asking the Lord to show me, okay, what is my identity? Because I want to be challenged by God’s word to continue to grow more and more to be more like Christ.
John McLarty: To be more like Christ. Let this mind be in you, which is in Christ Jesus.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. That’s right. And we know from, you know, discussions about, in First Corinthians 13, the Bible says, for now we see through a glass darkly. But someday we’re going to see face to face. I think that when we are born again, we have this soul that now has the DNA of Christ. You know, my DNA, physical DNA, and your physical DNA is unique, and the code is incredibly long, right? But we have a spiritual DNA. And that spiritual DNA, we’re not all Jesus stamps, you know?
John McLarty: Cookie cutter. Yes.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: When we’ve shed this body, that’s a fascinating idea.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: And we’re souls in heaven and we’re going to have a new body too.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: But we’re not just going to be all these vanilla cookie cutter prototypes.
Kimberly Faith: Cherubs floating around in heaven.
John McLarty: That all are exactly the same. So, that’s fascinating.
Kimberly Faith: It is so fascinating.
John McLarty: It’s kind of like the personality of your actual soul and what is that. And as it’s a new creature of God also, but it’s still distinct.
Kimberly Faith: Well, and I think about what First Corinthians says that we see through a glass darkly. Okay? So I want to know how much of my soul can I discover while I’m here on earth?
John McLarty: In this life.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. And that’s going to tell me who I really am. Because the soul we’ve talked about the human design, body, soul, and spirit. The soul is the essence of who we are. It lasts forever, right? While the body connects us to the earthly radar and the spirit connects us to the heavenly radar when we’re born again. And so I was asking the Lord, teach me who I am in you. And this is when he kind of gave me these three clusters of authorities that we get our viewpoint from. And we’re going to talk about them in the context of the works based religion is the first one. We’re going to take and examine the atheistic viewpoint. And then we’re going to examine who we are under what biblical Christianity, what the Bible actually says.
John McLarty: Yeah. That’s a great process.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Well, what this process did for me was because at the end of this podcast, we’re going to look at three questions. What that did for me is I made myself answer three hard questions. And what it revealed was that a lot of who I think I am has been filtered through something other than what the Bible says.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: And that is not the soul, the regenerated soul that has Jesus’ DNA and has this whole unique eternal existence that I am.
John McLarty: So I’ll just jump ahead a little bit. I’m sure you’re thinking of this. A lot of times we think about ourselves as, well, I’m a part of this family or my children or this is my job, and those kinds of things. We filter who we are through those things.
Kimberly Faith: The identities, right.
John McLarty: The identities.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Well, let’s go ahead and jump into
John McLarty: So we need to yeah. The idea of dissecting through all that and peering into our souls through the word of God and the spirit of who are we really in Jesus?
Kimberly Faith: Right. And so in order to contrast that and understand that we can say we’re in Christ, but we need to look at these other viewpoints because then we can identify, is there any part of this that of my perspective that is actually being viewed through a false lens? And the first one is works based religions, which I’m just going to identify that as any religious system that has the viewpoint that you must earn your way to reconciliation to God, whatever that God deity
John McLarty: Earn the approval of God to
Kimberly Faith: Or whatever deity.
John McLarty: Through practices or lack of practices.
Kimberly Faith: Or even through keeping you know, working to keep your salvation, which is a works based, that’s a man made works based religion. And if you need more information about eternal security, we did two podcasts on it a couple of a few weeks ago. So let’s look at the works based religion. If you are viewing your identity through the lens of a works based religion, then your identity is always rooted in human effort, right? I mean, we’re the sum of our behavior, our morality, our usefulness, our religious performance, and failure isn’t something you did or didn’t do. It’s who you are.
John McLarty: Yeah. I think in politics, they use a term today, performance. That’s performance. Politicians, they might think one way, but they do other things for performance.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: And on both sides of the aisle.
Kimberly Faith: Well, lawyers do it too.
John McLarty: Sure. Performance based.
Kimberly Faith: There’s sometimes we hoop and holler and do all these things in front of our clients just to make them think we’re really being zealous because they need to see that, right?
John McLarty: And that’s really works based religion. It’s performance based. I’m performing this, see this.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: And it’s really done in a sense for God and man.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. It can be. It can be. But the problem with that is then our identity is rooted in our performance.
John McLarty: In that performance. Right.
Kimberly Faith: And our approval must be continually earned. True lasting joy and love are always just beyond our reach. And I’ll tell you, you may say, and I said this too when I first was looking at this, well, that’s not me. I believe in salvation by grace through faith. But God pushed back on me and said, wait a minute, little girl. You’re always, you actually use this lens more than you think you do because think about and and we’re going to get to this test that we did at the end. But he made me think about, no, there are areas. I asked him, you know, the Bible says the psalmist said, search me and try me and see if there’s any wicked way within me. And because I really do want to know what my new DNA based soul is, looks like, I was like, okay, God. And he really revealed to me I am still to some degree trying to earn my value through performance, you know? Do you feel like you do that?
John McLarty: Yeah. But, you know, before God, but also, you know, the idea of going to church just because the people that are there
Kimberly Faith: To be accepted.
John McLarty: Yeah. Have seen you there.
Kimberly Faith: It’s part of your identity.
John McLarty: Yeah.
Kimberly Faith: It’s like your tribe, you want to be accepted by your tribe, and that becomes a big part of your identity. And then there’s the atheistic view, you know, which in that lens becomes even more empty because, you know, if human life is just the product of natural processes, then what are we? We have to create our own purpose.
John McLarty: Yeah, and that really can be depressing and discouraging if you think, is this all there is?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: Your mom, my wife Lynn, she said that was one of the things that led her to salvation. Life was so difficult
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Suffering doesn’t matter. Doesn’t have a purpose.
John McLarty: Just to survive, to eat. She says, And it’s all just for this life? This is going to just end?
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Yeah.
Kimberly Faith: And what’s crazy is that this I mean, these truly atheistic beliefs are truly a religion, and the religion puts the burden of being God on humanity.
John McLarty: Yeah. Humanism.
Kimberly Faith: And then it famously claims to liberate a person from the oppression of religion, but that’s not true. It obliterates hope in any satisfying answer to the question of human value, really. I think about Richard Dawkins, you know, one of the most famous and influential atheists in the modern world. You know, this guy, he has become the central figure in the new atheism movement. And I just want to read some quotes from three of his books.
John McLarty: Okay.
Kimberly Faith: In the book, The Selfish Gene, interesting title, he says,” We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
John McLarty: And I’ll just stop you there because my immediate thought was, if this is all there is, it really is just about survival. And there’s kind of this idea of, well, let’s throw some morality in and be kind to others. But really, if this is all there is, this is an interesting quote. We are survival machines. And that’s from Richard Dawkins.
Kimberly Faith: Morality becomes at that point a self serving tool, really. He also said in River Out of Eden, a Darwinian view of life, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
John McLarty: Wow.
Kimberly Faith: That is so crazy that
John McLarty: No values.
Kimberly Faith: No value.
John McLarty: No firm values.
Kimberly Faith: No purpose, no evil, no good. So who gets to call the shots? Who gets to say anything is evil or good with that viewpoint? That’s demoralizing.
John McLarty: It really is.
Kimberly Faith: And then, in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, he says,” We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. We get to live, so let’s make the most of it.” Well, that is circular reasoning. That really is a circular hopelessness. You know, some people would say, well, if this is all there is and I have to go through all this pain and suffering in life, why be born in the first place? Is it worth it?
John McLarty: Yeah, right. And why allow somebody else to be born?
Kimberly Faith: Right, Right, which is yeah, we won’t get into politics, but you know. And so, this atheistic viewpoint basically says there’s no purpose beyond what we can construct.
John McLarty: Just in this life.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. And does that provide a satisfying answer to the question of identity? Well, you know what? I don’t know that I know anyone that believes that there is no purpose or who says they believe that who truly in their heart can believe that. And we’re going to talk about why that’s true and what the Bible says about that. So let’s, now biblical Christianity.
John McLarty: Gives a very different answer to the question.
Kimberly Faith: Radically different. Yes. And because where does our identity begin?
John McLarty: Created in the image of God.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Genesis 1:27.
John McLarty: We’re created by God. We’re created in the image of God. We’re created to glorify God.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: We’re created to have a relationship with God for eternity.
Kimberly Faith: For eternity.
John McLarty: Which is wonderful. Then to share this with others. There’s what we call the fellowship of believers So, it’s just
Kimberly Faith: We’re never unseen.
John McLarty: Yeah. We’re not an accident. We’re not temporary. We’re not
Kimberly Faith: We’re not anonymous.
John McLarty: Yeah.
Kimberly Faith: You know?
John McLarty: We’re not a creation of our own mind.
Kimberly Faith: I love Psalms 139 where the psalmist says, you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed. These are just some excerpts from Psalms 139.
But like you said, we were created for God’s glory, you know, and that’s in the Old Testament, that’s in the New Testament. You know, both parts of the Bible talk about that over and over and over again.
John McLarty: This is a little bit of a side, but I’ll just we’re fearfully and wonderfully made. I used that a lot. At my age, I spend a lot of time at doctors and dentists. Even my dentist, we were talking about the teeth and how the teeth are formed and how durable they are. Not to get too graphic here, but just the fact that you can slide your teeth back and forth and they don’t bump into each other, they’re perfectly formed to chew and then you feel, if something, a little particle
Kimberly Faith: A little bit of chicken in between your teeth.
John McLarty: Is in your teeth. You feel it. And you need to feel it because if it’s left there, it’ll cause problems. Or my eye doctor, she’s just going on about the eye and how amazing it is, how it even works. And so many people are very aware of just any, human hearing, the eye, the taste, it’s like, this is beyond just this accidental blob. The human brain.
Kimberly Faith: Absolutely.
John McLarty: Yeah, we’re fearfully and wonderfully made and that gives us this awe, the wonderfulness of who we are.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. And God, what’s crazy is that not only did he care about every detail, making the body this amazing machine
John McLarty: That heals itself.
Kimberly Faith: That heals itself, that you get the tiniest speck in your eye and you could feel it, you know? And you want to get it out.
John McLarty: Or something’s coming toward your eye and you blink.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: And block it in a microsecond.
Kimberly Faith: And even if you, like, think about the brain activity that happens by me just raising my hand and moving it back and forth, you know, in conversation, the millions of things that happen just to make that one small action.
John McLarty: So I can be talking to you and reach over and grab my cup of coffee without looking.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Yeah. It’s just amazing.
Kimberly Faith: It’s amazing.
John McLarty: And machinery can’t do that.
Kimberly Faith: Machinery and man hasn’t been able to replicate that.
John McLarty: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: Not to the perfection of God. You know? And I think about then, not only did God make this wonderful, wonderful creation, and we look at the micro with all of our body and everything, then we look at the macro, the galaxies we can’t even see, right? But then he said, this master designer said, oh, and I’m going to give you a purpose. And, you know, one of two of my favorite verses about our purpose is out of Isaiah 43:7. Everyone who is called by my name, whom I have created for my glory, I have formed him. Yes. I have made him. And then read that verse in First Corinthians 10:31.
John McLarty: Yeah. That says, therefore, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. That sums it up. And I remember the first time I heard that that was my purpose. And I really didn’t wrap my mind around that. It was really almost offensive to me.
But then, you know, I asked the lord, you show me what this means. Show me how I’m not understanding this, right? Because I do want to see, I don’t want to see through the glass darkly, you know? And the first picture he gave me was of an artist. And so I just pulled some information out from the Internet just to kind of give this example in a, you know, up to date way. You know, imagine a master artist like Leonardo da Vinci whose painting Salvator Mundi just sold for $450,000,000. And he creates this work, right, that he intends to sign, to treasure, display.
John McLarty: Like It’s a masterpiece.
Kimberly Faith: It’s a masterpiece. And the masterpiece is valuable. Why?
John McLarty: Because of who created it.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. Because it bears his name.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: If it bore my name, it wouldn’t have sold for a dollar. Okay? Because I’m not a master artist. And think about how that masterpiece is treasured by the person who paid $450,000,000 for it. That is not something that goes on public display. You know? It’s very well protected. Well and the value of the painting is completely inseparable from the artist.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: And when we are created in the image of God, you know, we choose at some point to separate ourselves from our master through sin because we choose. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not still a masterpiece.
John McLarty: Right. We’re still fearfully and wonderfully made.
Kimberly Faith: Right. Our value is still the same. The problem is we don’t see it because we can’t, because our foolish heart is darkened, right? Like Romans One says, we fall into a blindness, a spiritual blindness. We can’t see our master. And when we are born again and we’re reconciled to our master, then we have the opportunity to be put on display for his glory.
John McLarty: And we understand that we’re fearfully and wonderfully made.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. But we have
John McLarty: So you know, that even helps us, not in a prideful way, but to value ourselves.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Because I think of people that either don’t know God or they’ve forgotten God in their life.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: And they become self destructive because they don’t know who they are
the mind of God.
Kimberly Faith: Right. And we all do it.
John McLarty: And we all do it.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: But we see that kind of this tragic, what if somebody got ahold of this Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, didn’t know what it was, and just used it to clean up the counter or something.
Kimberly Faith: Right. Right.
John McLarty: And how tragic that is to waste a masterpiece
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Just to clean up a spill.
Kimberly Faith: That’s a great example. That’s a great example, dad, because that is what we do with our lives.
John McLarty: We do.
Kimberly Faith: When we don’t live for God’s glory.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: You know? I just want to hammer this point home though because this is so hard for us to view ourselves through the lens of what the Bible says about us. And we are not made valuable on our own. Our value is intrinsic.
John McLarty: Intrinsic to God who made us.
Kimberly Faith: We are all breathtaking works of art. And every achievement that we do must be for God’s glory because we didn’t create ourself, just like the painting would have no value unless we knew who the artist was. Our life, you know, we taught, I remember when I was in counseling and, the word self esteem was mentioned. I remember how confusing that was to me because you can’t derive your value out of yourself. And that’s a you know, it’s a terrible thing to feel terrible about yourself.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: You know? And we all do it. But like Job, like the one we talked about God making sense out of our suffering, God you know, God’s view of our suffering, when we put our focus back on the master then we get esteem. We get value, and it’s not because of something we did, it’s because of who we are in Christ.
John McLarty: The secular version of that is working on somebody’s self esteem can just lead to, as our last podcast, just pride. But if we have our self esteem rooted in who God made us, that we’re thankful, and it tends itself more to humility because it’s based on who God made us. You know something else, Kim, just a little aside here, but that causes us to value each other, our fellow humans.
Kimberly Faith: 100%.
John McLarty: Is they are created in the image of God. They’re fearfully and wonderfully made. They’re great works.
Kimberly Faith: We have the same master.
John McLarty: We do. Same creator.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: So, all life has value, all human life.
Kimberly Faith: There’s a common respect because we know our design came from a master. And the master, not a master, the master. You know, I think about da Vinci and this, you know, this $450,000,000 work of art. God made da Vinci. Now that that should really register on our richter scale of truth, you know, that if God made everything that we think is beautiful, everything that we value, and he made us, then we need to be looking up the sunbeam to the sun, right? And that’s how we’re going to know who we are.
John McLarty: You think of great music as even a reflection of God
Kimberly Faith: Yes, yes.
John McLarty: Because he put that in us.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah, absolutely. And so, I’d like to kind of take a little side trail here and just say, how does the Bible answer the atheistic view? How does the Bible answer the question of the empty, we have to have a self construction of who we are. We have to self prove who we are. We have to make our own identity. How does the Bible answer that?
John McLarty: Well, I’ll take a good place. It’s Romans 1:19. It says, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, God has put it in us, for God has shown it to them. And I experienced this as just an unbeliever. I began to have this sense, and even apart from the Bible, it was just in me. And I began to think there’s something beyond just me and coincidence that I met this person at this time and just I would see events. I didn’t immediately think about it as God, but I just thought there are spiritual forces at play in my life. It was manifest in me. I had this sense of this. No one taught me that. I didn’t read it in the Bible, but it just was innate. I just began to think there’s something more than just this physical world.
Kimberly Faith: Right. And that’s being the sum of our biology or our chemical reactions.
John Mclarty: I sensed the spiritual aspect to life.
Kimberly Faith: So the Bible
John McLarty: Good experiences.
Kimberly Faith: It’s reality. You know, the Bible points out the reality that Darwinism, that atheism wants to ignore, that there is more to life than just chemical reaction and biological process.
And, you know, not just because, as you said, God has shown it to us in Romans 1:19, but also in Romans 1:20, it says, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen. We just spent some time talking about the creation of the body and how it works. God reveals himself through the world around us. I mean, we have to, you know, we have to absolutely ignore so much about common sense in order to say everything came from nothing. Because we always use this little, I always use this silly little example that there’s if I said to you, dad, my cell phone, I’m holding here in my hand right now, that just happened by chance.
And that cell phone isn’t nearly as complex as you are, but you know what? You have to believe it. It just happened by chance. There were no engineers involved. There was no precision involved. There was no construction involved. No there was, it just happened one day.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: You would say, I was an absolute idiot. Well, if you compare that, that’s because God has given us the knowledge of himself. He’s given us some common sense too, to say, Yeah, there’s somebody out there. There’s something supernatural that did all this.
John McLarty: The very design, as we were saying before, medically, the eyeball. And you think, I use this example, you have a simple cell and it’s just reproducing itself to survive, just the evolutionary thought. Why would it need an eyeball to survive? And then the eyeball, if it just started forming
Kimberly Faith: Or tastebuds.
John McLarty: Yeah. An eyeball started forming, it’s really just a nuisance unless it’s fully functional. It would just be this strange lump starts. So unless the eyeball is fully functional, it’s just a hindrance.
Kimberly Faith: I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s a good thought.
John McLarty: An evolutionary thought. And then there’s this eyeball that is I mean, just study the eyes. It’s fascinating. Our pastor Brian did a PhD work, I think, or a master’s work in just the eyeball because he was having trouble with his eyes, so he studied it. He said the cones and rods and color and seeing in the different frequencies, it’s just so astounding. The way it reverses its imprint on the back of our mind and just all this stuff.
Kimberly Faith: Which is what, in the old school cameras, that’s what we did when we started photography. Kind of you know, the picture will be upside down in the back of the I think I’m saying this right, but it’s these movies and it sort of looks like anyway. Well, so God’s
John McLarty: The design.
Kimberly Faith: The Word
John McLarty: He manifests Himself. Not only like I felt it, but then as
Kimberly Faith: You observed it and you felt it. He showed it to you on the outside and he showed it to you on the inside. And that’s the answer to the atheistic lens that we have to create our purpose. No. God’s given us a purpose and he’s manifested it to us. But then the Bible also answers the question of a works based religious theme. You know, all through the scripture, Old Testament, New Testament, we are taught that the biblical identity that we have does not begin with our effort. All through the Old Testament, we see all these sacrifices being made, and the New Testament, we see all these scriptures in the Old Testament, New Testament that tell us we cannot reconcile ourselves. Our efforts are as filthy rags, our best efforts.
John McLarty: Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. And all through the Bible, God says, but before you do. You have to be in Christ before you can accomplish who you were made to be. And, you know, again, we’ve talked about these verses a lot, and especially in the podcast on eternal security and the reasons that you can’t lose your salvation. But the Bible is clear that our success or failure does not make us who we are. It is what Christ has done for us. And until we are in Christ
John McLarty: New creatures in Christ.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. I love the verse
John McLarty: And by grace through faith.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Not works.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. And that secures our identity in Christ. I love Ephesians 2:10 that says, We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Even after we’re born again, our value doesn’t come from our performance.
John McLarty: No. It’s his workmanship.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. But think about it. When we think about how we actually look at ourselves as Christians, we’re always comparing ourselves. I do it all the time. I’ll say you know, to myself, this self talk, you know, well, I’ll get obsessed about maybe losing weight, or I’ll get obsessed about maybe trying to look younger, or trying to be more successful, or comparing myself to this Christian, or even comparing myself to a lost person who maybe has it together in a certain area. Jesus is like, no, that’s not healthy. That’s not a healthy identity. You know, we are poor imitations of anybody else. We really are. And when, but Christ, I just love this idea that you brought up about having this very unique spiritual DNA in Christ and trying to uncover that as much as we can while we’re here on this earth.
John McLarty: Yeah. And it’s not based on others.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: It’s based on how God made us. And again, it’s due all to the glory of God. It’s uncovering how he made us. And that sets us free, if you think about it, from having to continually compare ourselves to others. Because I have a different spiritual DNA than another person. For instance, I do not have a singing voice. Others do. Well, I don’t have to feel terrible about that. It’s like, well, what talents has God given me? Not only through physical, some people I couldn’t
Kimberly Faith: You play a mean guitar, dad.
John McLarty: I could never slam dunk a basketball, though. And that’s okay. And then there’s a spiritual component to that, which is fascinating because it’s like, what is that?
Kimberly Faith: Yes. Well, Second Corinthians 5:17 says, If we’re in Christ, we’re a new creation. Old things have passed away, all things have become new. And like you said, this truth of who we intrinsically are, this masterpiece that we are, is it frees us both from pride and from despair. That’s really, really rich. For me, that idea that figuring out who I am in Christ will free me from pride and despair.
John McLarty: That’s a good polar opposite.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Not pride, but not despair.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Who am I in God, in Christ?
Kimberly Faith: So I kind of want to shift gears here now and talk about these questions that reveal the real us because, I don’t know, we can look in a mirror and convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not real. I can look in the mirror if I’m twenty pounds overweight and say, Yeah, I look pretty good. But if I step on the scale, it’s going to tell me the truth.
John McLarty: Interesting. I was just thinking of the term metrics, and then you mentioned a scale. Yeah, we could think we’re looking pretty good or feeling pretty good and then we get on the scale and we go, yeah, I’ve been blowing it. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year.
Kimberly Faith: Must have been the baggy shirt, right?
John McLarty: Yeah. So these questions might be some metrics.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. Yes. And so, there are three questions that I prayed about and asked the Lord, okay, I want you to help me answer these questions, and using the biblical lens. And so, the first one is, who or what would crush me if I lost it?
John McLarty: Yeah. And I think one example of that would be if someone’s identity is really wrapped around their job, their career.
Kimberly Faith: Or their family.
John McLarty: Let’s say in this example, their job and they lost it.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: Then who are they?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: That would be one example.
Kimberly Faith: Well, like when the stock market crashed and people were jumping out of the window. You know, I mean, whatever you would lose that would crush you, maybe it’s you know, I love my grandbaby. I mean, it would be really, really hard to lose that part of my life. And, know, we have things that we depend on for our identity. We lean into more than we should. And, you know, but the Bible teaches us that relationships, callings, these are blessings. They’re gifts from God, but they weren’t meant to be our identity or our security.
John McLarty: That’s really fascinating because that brings up kind of a tough situation in life, but it can help people go through tragedies. Because I’m just thinking, if we are actually in Christ and that’s our identity and we’re to serve him as long as we have breath, and say that we lose a family member. And I have seen this personally where somebody loses, especially a young, like a child, and their entire life collapses.
Kimberly Faith: Is shattered.
John McLarty: I’m not minimizing that. But their life is shattered and they never recover and they never get back into just serving God.
Kimberly Faith: And glorifying God.
John McLarty: It’s like they collapse.
Kimberly Faith: They lose their purpose.
John McLarty: Yeah, they lose their purpose.
Kimberly Faith: And the Psalmist said
John McLarty: And I’m not saying there’s not going to be a time to mourn, but your life through Christ goes on.
Kimberly Faith: Mourning is part of life. Lament is part of life. I mean, there’s no question about that.
John McLarty: And you had a podcast about a lady, her boy died.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. Yes. Stephanie Zevallos.
John McLarty: And it crushed her, but then she
Kimberly Faith: Used it for God’s glory.
John McLarty: She used it for God’s glory.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. The story of Rudy Zevallos was just a great testimony. And Psalm 73 says, whom have I in heaven but you? And there is none upon the earth that I desire beside you. Jesus said, if we’re not willing to leave our father, our mother, our family and follow him, you know, he laid down that gauntlet because he knew that whatever we repose our greatest hope in, our greatest security would crush us if we lost it. But he will never crush us. He crushed Satan.
John McLarty: You used the example of when the stock market crashed, people leaped off the building. Well, obviously their life didn’t revolve around Christ because Christ didn’t
Kimberly Faith: It was a stock market. They lost everything. And so, when we use the biblical worldview and we answer this question that none of our circumstances can crush us because our identity lies in unchanging, loving, merciful, just, righteous God.
John McLarty: Life can definitely blindside us and gut punch us. We don’t want to minimize that.
Kimberly Faith: We’re not minimizing that.
John McLarty: But we should be able to recover. And we’ve
Kimberly Faith: Well and the idea
John McLarty: On a smaller scale we’ve experienced that, our family.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Not as tragically as others, but you have to find that, one of the things Lynn and I experienced is, Gee, if we stay in this I’m going to use the word funk. We can’t be joyful Christians and reach out to somebody.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. And the thing about when our strongest identity is in Christ, then we find a purpose for our suffering. Our suffering doesn’t become meaningless, which is what the atheistic view really our suffering becomes meaningless under the atheistic view, and under the works based religious view, it becomes a form of punishment from the one we’re trying to please. And that’s you know, sometimes we suffer because we are being punished, but, you know, other times but we can always use it to glorify God even if we have just messed up our life, derailed our life. So the second question is, what do you spend most of your time and money on.
John McLarty: That’s a good one.
Kimberly Faith: And, you know
John McLarty: It’s a good metric.
Kimberly Faith: It really is.
John McLarty: It’s really measurable.
Kimberly Faith: It’s very measurable. And, you know, Jesus said that our priorities reveal our true identity. He said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
John McLarty: That’s a pointed verse.
Kimberly Faith: Very pointed. And Paul said, for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. So, you think about this. What we consistently invest our time and money it shows whether we view ourselves as self made or God owned. Big difference in our identity there.
John McLarty: That’s something we can just stop and ponder ourselves.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Gee, what do I spend my time on?
Kimberly Faith: That’s right. And somebody I was talking to about this said, Well, are you going to read your Bible all day? I was like, no. I said, my work is a venue for God’s glory. I can go in,
I had a guy in my office the other day and he, you know, all my team are just these amazing Christians. We have Christian music in the lobby, good reading material. We even put lavender scented oils, and it’s just a good place to come. And this guy came in and he said, I never thought I’d say this, but I love coming to your office. I never thought I’d say that about a lawyer’s office. And one of the ladies in my office said, well, that’s because Jesus is here. And she’s right. Our work can become a venue where even if we’re the only one, I’m blessed to be able to call the shots in this office, but even if we’re the only one, we can bring the peace.
John McLarty: Yeah. And you’re applying common sense here to where you spend your time. This isn’t saying you’ve got to lock yourself away in a monastery, in a cave, in a log cabin, spend every waking hour meditating on the Word of God.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: But it’s even using recreation as a ministry.
Kimberly Faith: Absolutely. Paul was a tentmaker. You know, he had to make a living.
John McLarty: Good point.
Kimberly Faith: And you think about, you know, the disciples were fishermen. And when Paul says, do all that you do to the glory of God, whether you eat, whether you drink, whether you go to work, whether you drive a bus, whether you practice law, or you, you know, are a carpenter. Whatever you do, you can do it for God’s glory. And what that looks like cannot happen unless we know who we are. And this is what this is about.
John McLarty: Right.
Kimberly Faith: Finding out who you are. We were kind of, we weren’t betting, but we were talking about, we wonder what percentage of who we really are in Christ we will know before we die. But don’t you want to know as much as you can?
John McLarty: We’re so covered up by the flesh.
Kimberly Faith: We are.
John McLarty: And it is stimulating to me to think, Boy, what of that nature of Christ, the real me, this eternal soul, have I uncovered or let loose in my life.
Kimberly Faith: Yes. Yes. I want to let it all loose.
John McLarty: Yeah. I know it’s not much, really.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so that kind of brings us to the third question: what do we talk about and think about the most? Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And, you know, if we think about what we, I mean, I remember I was teaching a Bible study and one of the guys said, he said, Well, I really don’t know how to start a conversation about the Lord. I said, That’s fair. I said, That is fair. I said, But I want you to think about, when I was thinking about that, when I was first kind of learning how to talk about the Lord, something the Lord gave me that was so pivotal for me was, you don’t have any problem talking about volleyball. This is back when I was playing competitive volleyball. You get excited about it.
You’ll talk to anybody about it, even if they’re not interested in volleyball. You don’t have any problem talking about some of your favorite recipes. And of course, now I don’t have any problem talking about my granddaughter because, you know, she just gives me so much joy. Well, the fact is, when we are finding our greatest love and desire and identity in Jesus Christ, he pours out of every area of our life. We can’t help but talk about him in any context.
John McLarty: That even goes back to, out of the heart, that’s where your treasure is. But out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
Kimberly Faith: Right. If we’re all about money, we’re going to talk about money.
John McLarty: We just had this exciting thing. We have a fellowship once a month and we had some teen girls over here from our church. And one of them, we were discussing renewing of the mind, and one of them had been studying or reading the book of Ephesians.
Kimberly Faith: Interesting.
John McLarty: And all of a sudden, usually in a group of older people, the teens don’t participate. It’s this group discussion, you know, these fifties and sixties and 70 year olds were discussing the Bible. Well, this teenager just blurted out, I’ve been studying Ephesians and I have something to say.
Kimberly Faith: Oh, that’s wonderful.
John McLarty: And it’s just so neat. But out of the abundance of her heart, she’d been in the word and thinking about it.
Kimberly Faith: She was excited.
John McLarty: And she was excited.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: And we like, we all did a double take. We’re like, say on.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah, right. You know, just to kind of set up, we don’t ask these questions because we are trying to produce guilt or anything, but we’re really trying to give people clarity. So, what we’re trying to do is just lovingly expose where we are locating our sense of self. Because when our identity is rooted in Christ, you know, then the Bible says your life is hidden with Christ in God in Colossians 3:3. We’re trying to reveal to ourselves who we really are in Christ so that we can live in our true identity. And this really matters. This really matters because when we are aware of our true identity in Christ, then our life becomes meaningful. We have purpose because we’re becoming imitators of Christ then, which is what we’re commanded to do.
John McLarty: Yeah. I’ll read this verse here, Ephesians 5:1and 2, Therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us, in offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling aroma.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: So it’s exciting to even think about the true person that is created by God. Of course, he created us body, soul, and spirit, but the body is of the flesh. But kind of pondering this, letting the soul out, so to speak.
Kimberly Faith: Yes.
John McLarty: Unhindered.
Kimberly Faith: We can’t become imitators of Christ if we don’t know who we are in Christ.
John McLarty: Yep.
Kimberly Faith: And then the other part of that, the kind of really other part of that is that we stay away from falling into this misery of comparing ourselves to others. So, comparison is kind of a two edged sword of self destruction, really. Because if we measure ourselves by ourselves, we can become proud, if we measure ourselves against others, we become inadequate. And our standard is not them, it’s Jesus Christ.
John McLarty: Well, our church had this New Year’s Eve service led by the youth. One of the youth got up and said, You know, we all talk about New Year’s resolutions and I’m going to do this. I’m going to recreate myself. And he said, No, we need to stop and realize that we’re already who we need to be in Christ. We’re already the new person. And we just need to let that person free. And the whole church was like, That is profound. And that was one of our teens. He says, so it’s not reforming.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
John McLarty: It’s just letting Christ out.
Kimberly Faith: It’s becoming who we are in Jesus. Because our identity then determines our conduct, not our conduct determining our identity. And this is freedom, right? I mean, the Bible says, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. Ephesians 5:8. Well, dad, I just really appreciate the Lord showing us these things, and I’m just praying that this is meaningful to others as well.
John McLarty: It’s challenging to me causing self reflection already. I’m going to have to ponder this.
Kimberly Faith: I want to find that soul identity and reveal as much of it, get to know as much of it I can now.
John McLarty: Tune into that inner person made after the image of God, the new creature in Christ, and just see what’s there.
Kimberly Faith: And live free.
John McLarty: And live free.
Kimberly Faith: That’s right.
John McLarty: Live for the glory of God.
Kimberly Faith: Amen.
Jacob Paul: You’ve been listening to the Truth in Love podcast with your hosts, Kimberly Faith and John Mac. To discover more answers to the big questions in life, visit us at gofaithstrong.com.
