Session Nine
Identifying With Jesus
Psalm 51:5,6: Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. We were born in sin. That does not mean we were born out of wedlock, it means we inherited at birth the Adamic nature to sin.
Romans 5:12: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinnedÖ We are born in flesh that desires to do evil. That sinful nature has been passed down from Adam to the present generation.
We may feel that is highly unfair. How can God reckon Himself to be fair and just when He allowed us to be born into this condition through no choice of our own?
Job 9:32,33: For He (God) is not a man as I am that I may answer Him, that we may go to court together. There is no umpire between us, who may lay his hand upon both of us. Job requested a face-to-face encounter with God, so God could explain what happened to him. In Chapter 38, God finally responds to Job's plea, and confronts Job with many difficult questions, such as, "Where were you when I created the world?"
When confronted directly by God, Job eventually fell on his face, crying, I heard about You before, but now I have seen you face to face, and I repent! Job had become self-righteous, like many of us who get a small taste of God. We soar into the realms of self-righteousness, demanding things of God, instead of asking.
To paraphrase verse 33, Job was saying to God, "God, it would be different if you were a man like me, then you would understand. Our problem is that there is no go-between who can lay his hand on each of us." That was actually the truth in Job's day, but the situation has since changed.
According to the scriptures, we were born sinners. Because of that, we were also born, in many respects, with the potential to be losers. That is the raw reality. If we were born with that kind of nature and that kind of propensity, it seems that we have been set up to fail, doesn't it?
At first, this appears to put God on the spot. But if we listen carefully to the scriptures, we are going to have to let God off the hook and put ourselves on the spot, instead.
Isaiah 7:14: Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel. Until this prophecy was fulfilled, man and the devil could shout all kinds of accusations toward God. "God, you're unfair," "God, you don't understand," "God, you're not a man."
About 800 years before Jesus was born, God revealed His forthcoming birth through prophecy. Neither man nor the devil bothers God. Until this event, man and the devil felt they had a legitimate argument with God, but when this prophecy became a reality it changed the relationship between God and man.
Matthew, Chapter 1, tells about the change in the way in which God began to relate with man. At this point, God united Himself with us. He became flesh; He took on our humanity, and identified Himself with us. Now, He wants us to learn to identify ourselves with Him. If we can grasp that, we have accepted a mighty revelation.
God came down to this earth and began to experience life from our perspective. The God of the universe, in the Person of His Son, came through the vessel of the virgin Mary. He entered our world, experienced our temptations and our woundedness. He opened Himself to attack by the same sinfulness that attacks us. That is what God did through Jesus.
Because of that, we now have a mediator, an umpire. We can no longer use the excuse that God doesn't understand. We can't get away with that. God did this to bring healing, deliverance, and salvation to His people. He brought to us the fullness of who He really is. As a result, we can now enter into the fullness of God.
But it is hard for us to let any part of God come into us when we are so full of ourselves. We are filled with what has transpired throughout our lives since we took our first breath. Our lives have been stuffed with sinfulness and woundedness and junk. It becomes obvious that when we ask Jesus to come into our lives, there isn't much room left for Him.
But Jesus takes whatever we offer Him. He takes the smallest part we give Him, and begins the process of identifying His presence within us. We need to allow that. It is not enough for us to understand that we have been rejected during our lives. It is not enough for us to understand we have an incredible root of fear. It not enough to simply understand that we are wounded people.
Understanding our problem is only the start. Unfortunately, many people go off on a tangent of being wounded and sick, because they now have an understanding of why they are the way they are. That gives them a reason to continue being that way.
Emotional sickness is in right now in America. It is in to have something emotionally wrong with us. People spend millions going to psychiatrists and doctors and health clinics, so someone can tell them there is something wrong with them. People say, "I'm an ACOA (Adult Child Of Alcoholics), I now understand why I behave the way I do." "I'm a serious co-dependent."
But as we allow Jesus Christ to identify with us as Savior and Lord, health and wholeness begin to enter our lives. The Apostle Paul actually came to a level of maturity where he could rejoice in his infirmities, because God could manifest His strength in Paul's weaknesses.
We need to see the depth of what God actually accomplished. He not only identified Himself with our flesh, He also identified with our human life situations. He even aligned Himself with a dysfunctional genealogical background.
Matthew, Chapter 1, contains the genealogy of Jesus. Perhaps there are some strange people in our family trees. Sometimes, we use that for an excuse. "Well, I'm an alcoholic because there are four generations of alcoholics in my family."
Let's take a look at the family tree of Jesus. First of all, Jesus was called the son of David. David was the greatest king Israel ever had, in the flesh. But as David got comfortable and relaxed in his laurels, he also got lax in his walk with God. He committed adultery and murder, yet he is in the genealogy of Jesus.
Also, there was Abraham. Abraham had a terrible problem with fear and with lying. God told him to go in a certain direction, but because there was a famine in the land he went to Egypt, instead.
He feared the king, because Abraham had a beautiful wife and he thought the king might kill him and take her for himself. So he told Sarah to tell the king she was Abraham's sister, which she did. When the king took her in, God caused havoc in his house, and the king confronted Abraham for lying. Later, Abraham did the very same thing. He relapsed.
God had promised him a son, and he wanted to see the promises of God fulfilled. He also had a problem with impatience. He wasn't willing to wait on God because God was moving too slowly.
Sarah came up with a plan. She suggested that Abraham should go into her handmaiden Hagar and let Hagar conceive. Abraham gladly complied, but God would not accept that son as the promise of the covenant. Abraham was a man just like we are, in that he had problems, yet he is in the genealogy of Jesus.
Abraham's grandson, Jacob, was also less than perfect. He was a deceiver, a supplanter. He stole the birthright from his older brother, and deceived his father by putting hairy skins on his arms. Even though God had promised to bless him, he still connived and deceived.
However, his life drastically changed one night after he wrestled with an angel of the Lord. God changed his name to Israel, which means overcomer, prince of God. He is also in the genealogy of Jesus. Can we appreciate the scope of this? God is not interested in our background.
There was also a woman named Ruth. She wasn't even a Jew, she was a Moabite. She was a Gentile, yet she was in the genealogy of Jesus There are some adulterous women in His genealogy, such as Tamar, and Rahab, the harlot, and others.
It is important for us to see how He identified with us. His family tree by human standards was just like ours. It was full of sinful human beings. But Jesus did not use that as an excuse. He did not let it affect Him. A lot of us have been sloughing off all our lives because our fathers were not what they should have been.
It's time we let our fathers off the hook. They were the product of the generation before them. Dysfunction gets passed down through generations. That may be the reason we are the way we are, but it is not a legitimate excuse to stay the way we are.
Jesus took on a genealogy like ours so He could identify with us and we could identify with Him. He humbled Himself to that depth. What does that say about our God?
He also had an opportunity to experience the same kind of wounds we experience. Matt 1, reveals something about that. We should admire the parents of Jesus the more we study them. Joseph was a good man, but inadvertently he did something a lot of fathers have done, especially in our generation. During the betrothal period, Joseph and Mary were not allowed to see each other, so they obviously had no physical contact.
When Joseph discovered Mary was pregnant, he decided to divorce her quietly. Now, how did that affect the child in the womb? Psychologists have determined that a child can be affected while in its mother's womb. So we see that Jesus was rejected in the womb by his earthly father. That rejection didn't last long, because an angel visited Joseph and explained that Mary was telling the truth.
There are many cases of children suffering rejection while still in the womb. It is not uncommon to have a husband walk out on his wife during her pregnancy. It is not inconceivable to expect the mother to lay awake nights, thinking it would be a whole lot easier if she weren't pregnant. That could generate a lot of rejection. A child may be born not knowing its father, never hearing its father's voice. It is important to young children, for dad to be there.
That is the sort of thing we must let Jesus identify with. When Jesus is allowed to enter that type situation, He will take the hurt away. We identify with Jesus, and we allow Him to identify with us. Many of us need to let Jesus identify with us at the point of rejection in our lives.
Luke 2:7: And she gave birth to her first-born son; and she wrapped him in cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn. Joseph and Mary were both of the lineage of David. That meant their parents were also of the lineage of David. It is possible that at least one set of parents had a home in Bethlehem, since it was the city of David. Also, being the age they were, it is highly unlikely that both sets of parents were dead.
That raises a question. Why would Joseph and Mary go to an inn, when they probably had at least one set of grandparents living in town? The answer is that their parents rejected them because of the pregnancy issue. So, we see that Jesus was turned away by other parts of His family.
In addition, He was turned away from the inn. There was much rejection in the early experiences of Jesus. Again, we can see that He entered into and identified with a form of our woundedness.
Deuteronomy 23:2: No one of illegitimate birth shall enter the assembly of the Lord, none of his descendants, even to the tenth generation, shall enter the assembly of the Lord. Jesus also experienced generational curses. The strongest curse in the Old Testament is found in this verse.
The illegitimate person was excommunicated from the congregation, and so were his descendants to the 10th generation. This is any child who was born without a father. That gives us an indication of how important fathers are in God's eyes. Jesus was called illegitimate all His life.
John 8:19: And so they were saying to Him, Where is Your Father?' Jesus answered, You know neither Me, nor My Father; if you knew Me, you would know My Father also. The Pharisees are saying, "You, who have no father, who are you to tell us about our father? Our father was Abraham." But Jesus responded by telling them their father was the "father of lies" the devil.
Galatians 3:13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us--for it is written, 'CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO HANGS ON A TREE... It was no accident that Christ identified Himself with being illegitimate, of being subject to the strongest curse in the Old Testament. By going to the bottom, that meant He covered all of the curses.
Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. That the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit, through faith.
We may have generational curses in our families, but that means nothing to Jesus because He has identified with all curses. For the born-again believer, He has broken all curses, which may have been passed down through the family. Even if alcoholism has wrecked our families for three generations, it will not wreck the fourth generation. That won't happen, if we let Jesus identify Himself with the curse in us. He will take it upon Himself and remove it from us. He wants to do that with each of us.
Hebrews 2: 14-18: Since then the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.
For assuredly He does not give help to angels, but He gives help to the descendants of Abraham. Therefore, He had to be made like His brethren in all things, that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
For since He Himself was tempted in that which He suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted. These verses show us Jesus also identified with our temptations The Bible says He was tempted in all points. We have no legitimate reason to remain sick or wounded any longer.
Jesus is able to help us because of what He accomplished. 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells us there is no temptation which is not common to man. When that temptation comes, God will provide a way of escape. James said, Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for after he has been tested, he will receive the crown of life. If He says we can endure it, we can endure it, because the power of Jesus Christ comes into us to identify with us.
Hebrews 4:14-16: Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and may find grace to help in time of need.
Our High Priest can sympathize with our weakness. He was tempted in all points, yet He was without sin. Jesus walked the earth for 33 years and He never gave in to sin. That tells us about the magnitude of His temptation. Once we give in, it is not difficult for Satan to get us to sin again. On the other hand, if someone has never submitted to sin he can expect to receive a double dose from the devil, who is intent upon making him fall
Verse 16 says we are to come boldly before the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in the time of need. We usually get that backwards. We run to God for help when we're already in the time of need. But he is telling us to come beforehand so we'll be ready in our time of need.
So we can see, Jesus entered the world through a dysfunctional family tree. He identified with us in that respect. He also identified with our woundedness. He took on and walked through our temptations and weaknesses, and He is now our merciful and faithful High Priest.
When we pray to God about our struggles, He is there to identify with us, to give us grace and mercy and help. He is waiting for us to tell Him, Jesus, take this, identify with me and help me.
Isaiah 53 tells us Jesus was despised and rejected; He was a man of sorrows (pains); He was acquainted with grief (sicknesses); He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes (lashes), we are (have been) healed.
The Bible says that Jesus is the last Adam. He came to restore and to recover what the first Adam lost. The first thing He encountered as He started His ministry was the wilderness experience with the devil. He faced three temptations in the wilderness. It is interesting that we can find three similar temptations in the Garden of Eden.
The first temptation involved food. For Adam, it was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. For Jesus, it was turning stones into bread. But Jesus said, "Man shall not live by bread alone."
The second temptation involved the deception of magic. Satan appeared as magical creature who had great wisdom. Satan also tried to tempt Jesus to do something God had not told Him to do, with the promise that if He did, everyone would follow Him.
The third temptation implied that God had lied to Adam and Eve, and if they would eat of the fruit they would be as God. Likewise, the devil promised Jesus the kingdoms if He would simply bow down before him.
We can see that Jesus identified with Adam by experiencing the same type of temptations. But He refused to be deceived by the devil. Jesus lived 33 years of perfection, meeting every temptation and deception through His faith in the Father. He then walked to Calvary and exchanged His life for the life of Adam and all his descendants.
It is good for us to understand that we have experienced rejection. Now it is time to allow Jesus to identify with our rejection, and heal the wounds caused by it. Also, it is all right to understand that we have an inner problem, such as a root of fear. But we are not to just sit around, bemoaning the fact that we have fear. We are to let Jesus identify with our fear and take it from us.
God may show us that we have had all manner of abuse in our lives, but Jesus can handle it all. Let Him identify with each one. Remember those Roman guards put their fists in His face. They spit in His face, and they called Him everything under the sun. He can understand abuse.
The key to inner healing is to accept the good news of the Gospel: that Jesus Christ came to earth, entered our level, no matter how low, and gave Himself for us freely. He willingly poured out His blood for our redemption. Our healing is involved in taking that truth and applying it to our inner man. The key is in the application of the good news to our inner man
When we give things to Jesus, it is really an unfair exchange, because we get all the benefit. Jesus tells us, "I know you have been rejected, so I want to take your rejection from you and give you My acceptance. I want to take your sense of unworthiness from you and give you of My worth."
That is the application of the Gospel at a level where inner healing will really take place. We are not to get caught up in identifying with being rejected, neglected, or terrorized. Those can become excuses for failure. We must begin to allow Jesus to identify Himself with us. We have to let Him give us His identity.
Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me."
That needs to be our daily experience. Whatever our problems happen to be, in our quiet time we need to tell Jesus, Jesus, I come to you and I identify this part of me, this weakness, this woundedness, this sinfulness. I really need to identify this with you, and I ask you, in place of that, identify with me your health and strength and the godliness that is You. I want to relate to You from the perspective of who I am in Christ, not who I am in the flesh."
In exchange, as we willingly give Him those things, He gives us His righteousness, His health, His wholeness and His right standing with God.
Colossians 2:13, 14: "And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
When we know in our heart we have received Jesus Christ as our Savior, this scripture becomes ours. It is as if we have a bank account with God. He has a book of remembrance for those who refuse to accept what God has done. It contains a record of all we have ever been or done before we began our walk with Christ. That is all we have to offer God on the day of judgment.
But when we received Jesus as Lord and Savior, God wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was charged against us. We had an incredible debt we could never pay, but when we took Jesus into our heart, God canceled our debt. He marked it "paid in full."
Ephesians 1:13, 14: "In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation--having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of His glory. By this we can see that He didn't leave the account empty. What He has started in us, He will complete.
If we ever decide to go in the other direction, we will never enjoy things of the world the way we once did. We will not enjoy sin any more. We will not enjoy getting high or getting drunk, or having sex outside of God. We will give up those things.
The Holy Spirit came to live in our hearts when we received Jesus Christ as our Savior. He is the guarantee that we will receive the inheritance of God. He is like a down payment on what is to come. God filled our account with the down payment that guarantees we will receive His inheritance.
Some of us still have a hard time believing that. We have become so accustomed to believing lies all our lives that the lies seem like the truth in our minds. Now, when the truth comes, the lies in our minds say, "No, that isn't the truth." So, we have to go to war against the lies, and we do it with the truth of the Gospel.
The scripture says we are sealed. Back in the old days, the kings wore signet rings, which carried a copy of their own face. After they had written a mandate, they would impress their signet ring on the wax seal. The seal conveyed the message that it was the mandate of the king.
God has taken His own impression, His own signet and He has placed His mark upon us. It is His statement to the world that we are His possession. That is why the devil hates us so much. We belong to God, and we carry His mark.
HOMEWORK: Write down the areas of your life in which you need to let Jesus identify.
Session Nine . . . Identifying With Jesus
Personal And Group Exercise (see page 114)
1. In what way did God provide us with a Mediator, or an Umpire who can understand our human feelings?
2. Why is it important for us to be aware of the genealogy of Jesus?
3. If we have inherited certain dysfunctional characteristics, which have been passed down to us through previous generations, what should we do?
4. How do we let Jesus identify with our dysfunction?
5. Why is it important for us to come to Jesus before our time of need rather than wait until our: time of need, then come to Him?
6. What is the real key to inner healing?
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