Our True Selves...

This jumped out at me this morning in John 4. The woman at the well says, "Well, tell me this: Our ancestors worshiped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?" Jesus respondes by saying, "Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you Samaritans will worship the Father neither here at this mountain nor there in Jerusalem. You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day. God's way of salvation is made available through the Jews. But the time is coming--it has, in fact, come--when what you're called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.
I'ts who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for; those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself--Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.

Who am I really? Am I a sinner just scraping by hanging on to Christ's coat tails or as 1 Corinthians 1:2 says, "All who are in Christ are saints." Why do I always feel so unrighteous when 2 Cor. 5:21 says, "I am the righteousness of God in Christ." Before Christ I was indeed dead but in Christ my spirit is alive--it is my true self--not what my mind or religious programing has always said I am, a worm, a lowly pathetic sort of sinner and sort of saint. "Since it is the presence of Jesus in the spirit that gives it life, our identity is simply that we are in Christ! He becomes our life. --Steve McVey "For in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring." Acts17:28 or as Eugene Peterson words it, " We live and move in him, can't get away form him! One of your poets said it well: 'We're the God-created.'

I have been very convicted lately that my mind needs to constantly be renewed in God's perspective of his children, not what I have always thought to be. I no longer have an 'Adamic' nature my very nature is Christ. 2Cor.5:17
Such a small mental shift of truth has changed the world for me.