Putting Off and Putting On
Jesus Didn’t Come to Upgrade Your Old Identity
Consider This:
You can believe in Jesus and
still unconsciously live from the self
he died to free you from.
I know I did …
I was out of hope.
At 24, I knew I had no more backyard left to bury my guilt. Though I didn’t consider myself bad, I knew I was a failure at being good.
I’d come to realize that attaining self-directed “goodness” is a useless strategy.
Having grown up with a German Catholic heritage, my perspective on life in general centered on get-it-done, follow-the-rules and do-it-right-or-don’t-do-it-at-all thinking. Religiously, I’d assumed God operated from this same “be good” approach, so I worked hard to be good (enough) and put my all chips on the hopes that he’d grade on a curve.
Uh, … no.
So here I sat, a hopeless failure at being good. But hope came in a flood to my hopelessness when I read Galatians 2.21:
“If we could be made right (a.k.a. being good) by following the rules, then Christ died for nothing.”
(my paraphrase)
I didn’t understand it, but I knew it was true—at levels I didn’t know existed and couldn’t explain. Instantly, my world went from black-and-white to full color. I didn’t know what to do, so without thinking I stood up with my arms raised and shouted to God, “You got me!”
I left behind the idea of achieving self-directed “goodness” … or so I thought.
The Rest of the Story
My journey took a hard right turn into newness of life; wonderful beyond description. “Born again,” the Bible called it.
But as renewing and transformational as it was, I still couldn’t shake an old self-perception of being a failure. For 40 years—including a seminary education and 15 years of vocational ministry experience—I lived with the familiar nagging of accusation and doubt that I didn’t quite measure up.
I knew I was saved, but I viewed myself as a saved failure. I assumed it was my “flesh”1 influencing me, or that it was spiritual attack from the enemy—neither of which, frankly, offered much freedom.
I wondered what it meant to be “free indeed” (John 8.36). I resigned myself to the belief that this indeed-level freedom would eventually come in heaven.
Looking back, I see now what I didn’t then: I believed Jesus had forgiven me, but I still interpreted myself through the same old lens. I’d embraced being a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5.17), but held on to the one thing my salvation wouldn’t change: my old identity.
Unknowingly, I was living with two active and opposing perceptions of who I was.
Two Selves?
On paper, having two active self-perceptions may sound like some kind of schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder (DID). But it’s not.
At the core of these two self-perception options is one central question: What do we believe about being a dependent being? Fundamentally, ontologically, are we relying on God to define us, or are we self-defining?
God created us to “image” him, to be utterly dependent upon him. However, sin involves the inherited belief that we are independent: that we have the ability to generate our own identity, meaning, purpose and passion from within ourselves.
The implication of this dependence/independence issue is profound: We don’t have the ability to 1) define who we are, 2) make sense of our reality, 3) understand our purpose or 4) generate a holy passion for living out that purpose in God-aligned ways.
According to Scripture, we never were meant to.
God designed us to receive all these from him—a concept Jesus reiterated to his disciples, which he described as “abiding”:
“… apart from me you can do nothing.”
(John 15.7)
In my case, I was operating (unconsciously and unawares) from my old identity: independently trying to live out my new dependent identity in Christ. It sounds silly to write it that way, but that’s what was happening.
I was living out the belief that I could (with the help of the Holy Spirit) achieve self-directed “Jesus-ness”2—which, of course, is impossible; nonsensical. In truth, I was failing … at something that no human can ever achieve.
All this contributed to that unshakeable nagging and doubt.
The enemy was telling me I was failing because I was a failure—a lie that I accepted all too frequently.
The Spirit of God was telling me I was failing because my belief about who I was (and who God is) was unrenewed—a truth I’d never explored.
My understanding of what Jesus had saved me from was too narrow.
Problem: Our Limited Perspective on Sin & the Gospel
Western patterns of thinking often narrow our perception of the gospel. We typically view sin and salvation through rational, logical and sequential lenses. Through these lenses:
“Sin” = doing bad things
“Gospel” = the transaction of Jesus’ death as payment for “sin”
“Belief” = the “gospel” content that we grasp intellectually
“Salvation” becomes accepting the gift of justification (where Jesus’ death pays the penalty for sin), while holding on to our old, independent identity.
We add Jesus to our old life.
This perspective misses the broader and more holistic contexts of identity, restoration and reconciliation.
Solution: “Sin” as separation & “Gospel” as Reconciliation
In my last article—What’s Actually Broken in Us—I laid out how the Fall didn’t just cause humanity to begin doing bad things, it disconnected us from the source of life itself. Living in full dependence on God was replaced with a rebellious, independent identity that distanced us from him.
So sin isn’t just unrighteous behavior and being in a state of unholiness; it’s separation from the source of all righteousness and holiness.
Seeing sin as separation helps us see how the gospel’s over-arching emphasis is reconciliation. The gospel reconnects us to God. And since our independent identity is what separated us from him, it can’t contribute to our reconciliation.
So instead, God gives us a new identity—one being conformed into the image of Jesus.
In other words: When we trust in Jesus, God doesn’t upgrade our old self. He gives us a new self, and calls us to live in it.
Practicing New Identity: Denying, Putting Off & Putting On
This is why Jesus said:
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
(Mark 8.34)
My experience is that we usually interpret “deny ourselves” to mean penitence or self-sacrifice, to deprive, loathe or shame ourselves. Or even worse, to believe that we’re unworthy.
Which misses Jesus’ point altogether.
He goes on to clarify what he means:
“For whoever wants to save their [self/soul]3 will lose it, but whoever loses their [self/soul] for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
(Mark 8.35-37)
Read these verses again … but this time from the perspective that Jesus is talking about the two options of self-perception—who we think we are and who we want to be—which is either …
Our old autonomous, independent self, or …
The new dependent self that God created us to be—who he wants to live with to accomplish his kingdom purposes.
Jesus’ point is that reconciliation with God requires abandoning the old independent identity that separated us from him.4 It means losing sight of who we were, shutting ourselves off from its independent interests in order to accept and embrace our dependency to God in Christ.
Paul describes this as “putting off” the old self and “putting on” the new.
Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.
(Col. 3.9-10)
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
(Eph. 4.22-24)
Holding on to the old self is the futile thinking habits of being separated from God. It makes people darkened in their understanding, ignorant and hardened in their heart, making them insensitive to God.
They become increasingly insensitive to God’s presence and influence. So their only way forward is to give themselves over to ever-increasing sensuality, which leads to over-indulgence, impurity and greed—which is idolatry.5
For Paul, this putting off and on is an intentional thought habit believers should lean into. He says to set our minds on things above, not on earthly things (Col. 3.1). We’re told to count our old self as dead to us, since we’re no longer bound to it (Rom. 6.8-14).
Implications
There are several significant implications we need to consider.
Misplaced Trust
We can’t live “free indeed” with two competing self-perceptions. Accepting our new dependent identity without also denying our old, independent self confuses what we trust.6
Sometimes we trust God. Other times we trust ourselves. And even when we trust God, it’s often partial and selective—we aren’t fully convinced he’s trustworthy.
Becoming Double-Souled
This contributes to us being “double-minded” (James 1.8, 4.8)—a term that literally means “double-souled” (“minded” is psychos, the same word translated as “life” and “soul” in Mark 8.35-37).
The result is instability. We trust God for eternal salvation (conveniently, since it’s outside our control anyway), while struggling to trust him for today.
Self-Identifying as Slaves
Perhaps the most insidious and indicting implication is that trusting ourselves means choosing to live under our old self’s power and influence. Though free, we prefer slavery.
This is an identity statement: Instead of living as free-indeed beings, we self-identify as slaves.
Putting On into Practice
I’m choosing the alternative. I’m setting my heart and mind on heavenly things, and learning to deny the old self’s influence over me.
In Jesus’ words, I’m losing my identity—in order to gain it.
Being a disciple is less about becoming a better version of ourselves, and more about learning to live from the identity God gave us in Christ. Let’s do this, together, and then make disciples that do the same.
Peace be with you …
Footnotes:
As you may know, we don’t have a convenient, explicit Biblical description of what Paul refers to as the sinful “flesh.” My working definition would be something like this: The “flesh” is the human operational pattern of fallen humanity. It’s analogous to the operating system of the corrupted creation that empowers and facilitates sin in us, both individually and collectively.
That is to say, be like Jesus and reflect him in everything I did.
I substituted “self/soul” in verse 34 for the “life” that the English translations use because the Greek word used here is psyche, the same word that’s translated “soul” in verses 35 and 36. I don’t think “life” is a bad translation, but it is unfortunately limiting. psyche is a holistic term that captures our whole essence and existence: soul, identity, life, etc. In a Western context, it’s easy to see “life” as “lifespan,” or our physical existence on earth.
The Greek words for “deny” are arnéomai and aparnéomai, which are essentially synonyms. They mean, simply, “to say no in answer to a question,” and “to deny a person (i.e from a prior acknowledgement or commitment).”
See Ephesians 5.5, Colossians 3.5.
This is a longer discussion than can be unpacked here. But it’s important to comprehend that even though we trust Christ by faith and become a “new creation,” our old self hasn’t ceased to exist. It is true that there are Scriptures that seem to support the idea that our old self/identity “died” (see Romans 6.8, Galatians 2.20). But closer examination of the contexts makes it clear that what actually died was our old self’s power over us. In this sense, “death” is also a separation from the old self’s rule over us.