The great 20th-century Christian teacher and author, A. W. Tozer, had this to say, in the form of a prayer, about our identity as believers:
“Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear, and our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared Thyself to be.”
Tozer here highlights that the truly received redeeming love of God, through Christ, enables us to know that we are saved by God’s perfect attributes, one of which is infinite, eternal love. It is His very identity that, in a sense, ultimately saves us, for in giving our lives to His Son we are now found “in Him,” no longer in ourselves. We come to trust in Who He is and what He is doing in our lives rather than in what all the other voices, internal and external, try to tell us about who we are.
In the end, it is a deepening knowledge of our Lord’s character, being poured into us and transforming us, that we must look to for deliverance from every fear, including those that stem from wrong personal ideas about who we really are.
We love because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19
