Covered

What do you wish people thought about you? It can be easy to get lost in others' perception of you. Do you think people ever talk about you behind your back?

When we’re born, we’re born into a context. We have a family, a history, and a lot of times, expectation. Maybe you were always expected to amount to something. Maybe, no one thought you would amount to anything. But there was a perception around who you were and who you were supposed to be.

We often don't discover this until later. For me, the idea of what people thought of me was affected a lot by my brothers. I was the youngest of three, and they had always gone before me. It was very rare that I went somewhere my brothers hadn’t already been. I was often introduced as "their brother."

As soon as I had this realization, I tried to mold the perception that people had of me. We all do this: we begin to push an identity out into the world that we want to be known by. We start to talk a certain way, act differently, and scheme. We talk about others when they’re not around in order to to prop ourselves up. We only talk about certain aspects of our lives to make ourselves look better. We want people to believe the best versions of ourselves. We constantly work on creating the best identity for ourselves and then push it out into the world.

That's exhausting.

If that’s the way you like to live, then you’re probably not going to get a lot out of what we’re about to read in Galatians. But that idea of constantly laboring to push a certain perception of yourself into the world will drain you.

In Galatians, Paul points us to Jesus. He wants us to understand that our faith belongs with Christ and no one else. No one can save us but Jesus. We can't trust in our own works; Jesus is our only hope. But if we realize that and trust Jesus to forgive us, what really happens?

Sometimes we think about what Christ has done for us as a transaction. We trust Him, and we get forgiveness. We love Him, and He loves us. We make faith about grabbing hold of forgiveness for some things we feel bad about. In Galatians 3:27-29, Paul talks about trusting Jesus in a deeper way:

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul says that if we have been baptized into Christ, we have not only made some ‘decision’ to follow Jesus, but something more has happened. We have put on Christ. What does that mean?

Sometimes we can think of Jesus as a nice attachment to who we are. We think that we’re doing okay, we just need help with a few of the things that we can’t handle on our own. We’ve got the day-to-day pretty much figured out, but we realize the ideas of forgiving our sins and eternal life are a bit out of our grasp. So we’re good where we are, we just want to attach a little Jesus to what we’re doing to make it just right.

That’s not what Paul is talking about.

When he talks about us "putting on Christ," this is the language of an identity change. We are becoming someone different. He says there are no Jews or Greeks, slaves nor free, but surely there are these people in his audience. There were Jews and gentiles in the churches in Galatia; there were free people and slaves. But Paul says those identities do not exist anymore for these people; they have put on Christ!

Jesus is not just an addition to get us over the hump of the things we cannot control. If we trust Jesus for salvation, we are declaring with our hearts a complete need for Christ to make us right. We must realize that we cannot do anything to make that happen for ourselves. It starts with an understanding that we are dead without Christ.

On the cross, Jesus takes our sin and He gives us His righteousness. Putting on Christ means covering ourselves with His righteousness. This is a crazy thought. When we place our faith in Jesus and put on Christ, our appearance changes to God. When God looks at us He sees the good works of Jesus. On the cross, Jesus gives us His status and His identity of having perfectly followed God. Jesus takes our sin and gives us His righteousness.

This is hard to grasp. We stay trapped with our identity. Because we’re so close to ourselves, we know what we’ve done. We know our thoughts and our desires. We’ve watched our own dark hearts. How could God forgive me?

When we step into relationship with Jesus, we put on Christ and are covered in His righteousness. That covering is a protection from God's wrath for our sins and a complete change in who we are. We are made right in Christ. Our old selves are gone– God has made us new!

The question for us is, how do we see ourselves? What identity are we pushing out into the world? What do we want to be known by? Paul says that our old identities are no more. If we've placed our faith in Jesus, we are one in Christ. We are all on the same level: brought low by our sin and rebuilt into new people by Christ.