Identity by Performance

Ron Block is a musician with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He addresses the difference between identity by performance and identity by being in Christ:

"That would be the case if our identity was determined by our performance. As such, it’s like my son. If he refuses to trust me (and so disobey me) that does not make him any the less my son, and he can return to faith at any time (to my joy and total acceptance). While he is not trusting me, and so being disobedient, I still love and accept him as my son (his identity remains intact), though his actions are not acceptable to me. That’s how Paul can say, 'When I sin it is no longer I.' Paul’s real identity is this new union with Christ, this new creation identity in which the old is gone and the new has come. This is the rock-solid basis of Paul’s life; he knew this because he was taught it by the Lord Himself.

"That said (identity not determined by performance), then who is responsible when I sin? I am. I make the choice to believe and live from a satanic construct--or trust God’s facts and God’s character and God’s Person and God’s Holy Spirit in me. In fact, knowing I am neutral makes me a heck of a lot more responsible now than when I used to believe I was inherently bad. 'Well, I sinned, Lord. But, I’m just such a sinner, that’s what I do. Thanks for your forgiveness.' And so on, right back into striving and trying to be good rather than reliant faith in the one in me.

"In the Biblical construct, I rely on my real identity in Christ, know that His life is in me and He will live through me, and so I step out on that faith. This inner faith-action produces outer actions which are in accordance with His Spirit; it will look like the behavioral statements Paul makes (usually in the later parts of his letters, after discussing identity). I’ll be kind and hospitable. I’ll love my wife as Christ loved the church. I won’t be harsh with my children, lest they be discouraged. I will, in other words, love God and love my neighbor, because as John says in 1 John, when we love one another it’s really God loving through us. 1 Jo 4:12, '. . . If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.' The Living Bible says, '. . . if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us.' It’s really His love in us, not our own, because we’re just cups, vessels, branches.

"But in the satanic construct the Devil wants me to live not from the tree of life (Christ) but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, I am to see good, choose it and try to be good, and avoid evil; it’s to see myself, my own effort, my own resources, as my own source. That, for the believer, is the Romans 7 treadmill, 'the law of sin and death.' All it produces is constant software crashes until finally the hard drive fails and the human has an epiphany whereby he realizes he cannot be good as God is good; 'There is only one who is good--that is God.' And he realizes, with Jesus, that 'I can do nothing of Myself,' and as Jesus told the disciples, 'Apart from Me you can do nothing.' (Take note that He didn’t say, 'Apart from my help you can do nothing.')

"We learn of a union, a unity of His life fused into our humanity by which He becomes our Source--our Source of everything. Love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, humility, faith--all these things come from Him, because they are who He is.

"So--I’m responsible when I sin, and in a much deeper way now that I know who I am in Christ. The Devil doesn’t usually just have me right off the bat; I usually recognize his thoughts coming in as 'not me.' But what he’ll do now is induce a flood of thoughts at times that continues unabated until I either give in or stand up, armor on, and whack his head off with the Sword (which is simply to speak out that Jesus has already crushed his head, his power).

"What Satan is trying to do in a believer’s life is to create a phantom 'Old Man' by getting us to believe against God’s Word. While we believe this construct (and we usually do because we carry our pre-Christian way of thinking right into our Christian lives--identity by performance) he gets his puppet-strings into us much easier than later, when we know who we are and begin to really stand up in Christ as grown up believers."