Your Royal Identity Unlocks Supernatural Inheritance

Names aren’t just a matter of semantics. Names affect us.

Before we received Christ, we were called “sinners.” We were professionals; our name was a job description. We were prone to sin. When we received Christ, we became “saints.” Paul makes this clear in his letters to the believers because he called them saints. Here are a few examples: “To all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints” (Rom. 1:7a); “To the church of God, which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling” (1 Cor. 1:2a); “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 1:1). The word saint means, “holy believer.” You can’t be a sinner and a saint at the same time. How is it possible to be prone to sin and to still be a holy believer?

The word “sinner” implies that we are prone to do wrong. If we believe we are sinners, we will sin by faith! Remember what we learned earlier, “For as [a man] thinks within himself, so he is” (Prov. 23:7). Like Jacob, trapped in deception by his name, if we still believe we are sinners, we will be unable to access the grace to live as a saint and will still try to perform good works in order to merit forgiveness. It is not our nature to sin anymore. First John 3:7-9 says,

Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

We are Christians; it is not our nature to do wrong. Our very nature has been changed. Now we are actually saints; righteousness is part of our new nature and it is natural for us to glorify God. Our old man is buried. We need to stop visiting our tombs and talking to our dead, old men. (In the Old Testament, people were judged and killed for talking to the dead—a practice called necromancy.) We are a new creation. It’s below our nature to act like that now—we are now princes and princesses of the King!

The power of the cross not only dealt with the forgiveness of our sins, but it also changed our very nature. Some people have isolated the effects of the born-again experience to the spirit. That’s not accurate. Salvation changed our entire being! Peter says that we are “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). Think of it: Your very nature is now divine! Paul said that we are “new creatures” in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). He didn’t say we are new spirits, he said “new creatures!” If we believe that we are still sinners, we dilute the power of Jesus’ blood and then, like Jacob, spend our days trying to be good.

A New Heart and A New Mind

The truth of the matter is that we are good because we have received a new heart and a new mind (see Ezek. 36:26; 1 Cor. 2:16). That’s right—we received a brain transplant! We actually think like God! I have heard these verses misquoted so many times:

“THINGS WHICH EYE HAS NOT SEEN AND EAR HAS NOT HEARD, AND WHICH HAVE NOT ENTERED THE HEART OF MAN, ALL THAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIM.” For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. For “WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM?” But we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:9-16).

Did you notice that some of the text quoted above is an Old Testament verse? Paul is not saying that we don’t know what God has prepared for us; he is saying that they (the Old Testament believers) didn’t know what God had prepared for them because they were not “new creatures.” But we have the mind of Christ because we are born of His Spirit. We think like God.

We still have a free will, and we can still choose to sin. However, as saints it doesn’t come easily anymore. There is a river of God that runs through our souls and carries us towards the throne. If we don’t paddle, we will end up at God’s house. We are prone to righteousness. That is why Paul said, “It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

Trying to Do the Right Thing But

Many people have misunderstood the seventh chapter of Romans. In this chapter Paul talks about his struggle with trying to do good and still doing the wrong thing. If we read these verses in light of the preceding and succeeding Scriptures, we find that it is impossible for Paul to have been speaking about his redeemed life. The entire Book of Romans is a letter of contrast between the life lived under the Law and the life that is in Christ.

In the sixth chapter of Romans, Paul teaches us that when we were baptized, we died with Christ and when we came out of the water, we were raised with Him in the likeness of His resurrection. Baptism is not a symbolic act, but it is a prophetic act. Prophetic acts, like prophetic declarations, release God’s power to bring about change in our lives. In the case of baptism, being submerged under water is the act of dying with Christ, but being pulled up out of the water is equally as important as it brings power to live in Christ! This is how it reads:

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:4-11).

He exhorts us to therefore consider ourselves (that is, think about it this way) dead to sin and alive to Christ. We entered the baptismal tank with a cross and we exited with a crown! Sinning is incongruent with our new nature.

The seventh chapter begins with an analogy of a woman married to a man. Here is what Paul says:

Do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives? For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God (Romans 7:1-4).

Paul is giving us a description of our lives before and after Jesus. We were married to the law. The Law told us about all the things that we were doing wrong, but the Law had no power to change us. When Christ died, the Law was fulfilled, freeing us to marry another husband. If we have identified with Him in His death, we have entered a new covenant and are engaged to Jesus Himself. Paul goes on to make a strong connection with those who struggle under the law by describing the battle he faced when he was married to the law in the present tense. But Paul declares victory in the war of his and our souls in the eighth chapter of Romans with this final blow. He says, “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:1-2).

Faith is the Catalyst of the Spirit Realm

The righteousness of God comes into our lives by faith. In order for us to believe in something we have to know that there is something to believe in. The entire spirit world operates by faith, not just God’s world. For instance, fear is the manifestation that we have faith in the wrong kingdom. When we believe something is going to go wrong, we have given our faith to the enemy. By doing this, we have just empowered the one that Jesus disarmed at the Cross. When we believe in God, we empower the Holy Spirit and the angels to bring about His will.

If we’ve been taught that after receiving Christ we are still sinners, we will struggle with trying to do the right thing because we have put our faith in our ability to fail instead of His work on the Cross! We can spend the rest of our lives living under the curse of our old name, “sinner,” or like Israel, we can receive our new name that has the power to alter our very DNA. We are saints, holy believers, and Christians, which means we are “little Christs”! When the Father looks at us, He sees the image of the Son He loves.