What do you believe about you? When you think about yourself, what are your thoughts? In other words, what are you conscious of? Jesus said about Himself, “As I hear, I decide (conclude, judge). John 5:30.
If what you are hearing in your head about yourself isn’t what God thinks about you, and says about you, then what you are hearing is a lie. What God believes about you; what God knows about you, is that you are in union with Christ. Because you are in union with Christ, God believes “as He (Christ) is, so also are we in this world.” 1 John 4:17. God also believes that you are partakers of the divine nature, 2 Peter 1:4 and that you are “the righteousness of God in Christ, 2 Corinthians 5:20. These verses, of course, are not saying that you are Jesus, but they are saying that you are in union with His nature, and therefore His nature is your new nature in Christ. Because of that, God also believes about you that “You can do all things in Christ (because of your union with Jesus and all that He is, and all that He has) who continually strengthens you.” Philippians 4:13.
God also believes that you are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6:11. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t able to sin. It means that you are able not to sin because Christ, who is our life, doesn’t.
Do you believe all these things about yourself, or when you think about you, are you only conscious of personal failures, other people’s opinions about you, shattered dreams, or personal offenses? This is living with a sin consciousness governed by being bent towards the external. During these last days of Lent, we all need to repent from thinking anything about ourselves that God doesn’t think, and He thinks about us as people in Christ. Paul said, in reference to himself in 2 Corinthians 12:2, that he was “a man in Christ.” That was his self-consciousness, and all of his hopes and responses to life were consumed in that reality. Paul knew that any personal failures couldn’t define him. If he thought they did, it would be impossible for him to encourage us to press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. You cannot press forward and look backward at the same time. Our hopes are not dependent on what we have done; they are only dependent on who Christ is and what He is capable of through us. In Christ, dreams (the dreams of Christ) are always before us. Also, dead people don’t get offended, and Christ, who is now our life, won’t.
What God knows and therefore believes about us is beyond anything we could ever ask or think, but it is time for us to repent of anything other than what He believes about us until our self-consciousness is in agreement with His when we think about who, and what we are, and what we can expect in the days and years to come. It is time to dare to lasso the truth and bring it into your heart so that you can know the life more abundant that God paid such an extravagant price for.