The Gift of a New Identity

While picking up a friend I noticed the car next to me in the parking lot of the apartment complex. Someone had scratched into the door the word “cheater.” I wondered whether it was a betrayed spouse or “significant other” who angrily etched those words into the driver’s side door. Or was it a former friend who had been wounded by some breach of friendship? Perhaps it was a fellow student who discovered that this person was taking academic shortcuts. I’ll probably never know. But someone clearly wanted everyone to know that this driver was a “cheater.”

Sin deeply etches all kinds of identities into our lives. Paul lists several of them in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. Some are labeled sexually immoral, idolater, adulterer, practicing homosexual, thief, greedy, drunkard, reviler, swindler. These are just representative identities that sin scratches into our lives. There are many, many others such as proud, angry, liar, lustful, and the list goes on. They are well-deserved labels. Repeated and willing acts of rebellion against God which flow from a fallen and scarred nature cut grooves into our lives which mark us with patterns of sin. Sometimes one particular category of sin so imprisons us that we become known by it. Like the unknown “cheater”, we are identified by categories which highlight the shame of sin.

The gospel of Christ gives us the hope of a new identity. As Paul states in 1 Corinthians 6:11, “Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” By faith in Christ, the cheater, the idolater, the drunkard, the liar, and the practicing homosexual is given a new identity. That identity consists of one who has been washed, sanctified, and justified in Jesus Christ by the work of the Spirit of God. Those who are in Christ need no longer carry around the old labels etched into their lives by sin. They have been made new in Christ. Now, by God’s grace, they have been renamed. They have been given the gift of a new identity.