Introduction & History

I'm one of those guys that I don't like. I mean, I don't like I can do it. Teach with overheads and outlines. And from a lecture standpoint, what I like to do is to have you engaged in the conversation. So I've always thought that if I if I conduct a class in which I do all the talking, it wasn't a very good class. And so to that end, what I like to do is every week I will give you questions with scriptural references and stuff that will if you take the time to kind of answer them from the viewpoint of how your answers might contribute to the conversation for the next week. I really invite participation.

I really like that. And the whole purpose. of understanding identification truths is so that we would come into a greater intimacy, a personal fellowship with Christ. If you understand what God has done through His grace by uniting you to Christ, I think it gives you a greater freedom to approach Him and to rest in Him because these facts are already true of you. You don't make them true, they already are. You may be ignorant of them, no one ever told them to you, but once you know them, and you believe them, you know, the Spirit of God, He's going to make them real. And to that end, He's going to make the Lord Jesus Christ real to you as a person, not just a doctrine. So I think that's critical in every growing believer's life. So, I want to give you a little history on what we call The identification truths. Anybody want to tell me what identification? Give me a synonym for the word identification.

Relation or association. Relation, association. In Christ. In Christ. Good word. How about the word union? What identification really means is union. So what we're going to do in terms of the way the course is going to go. We're going to start out next week.

If you'll notice, the first question for next week is, why did God create? You could spend five years on that one. But what we're after is the issue of God has put certain principles in play right from the very beginning, right in Genesis 1. And we're going to look at principles next week in terms of, just to give an example, when God created birds, when they procreated, what did they procreate? Birds. So there's a very interesting dynamic that's there, that like begets like. And that's a principle God put in place. Not only is it true in the physical realm, but it's also true in the spiritual realm, that like begets like.

We're going to basically divide the course up into three sections. The first section is to demonstrate the likeness that we all have with our man Adam. Every one of us came from Adam and there are certain characteristics about us only because we were identified in union with Adam. And so whatever Adam does is going to accrue to us. So identification starts right in the Garden of Eden. So we'll spend some time on Adam and we'll You know, because Adam didn't spend a whole lot of time being innocent. He spent most of his time being sinful. We're going to spend a lot of time on sin.

Hopefully, like Courtney said last time, so that by the time we get to the solution, you'll be really happy we got there. And then we'll spend time on the actual mechanics by which God disassociates you from Adam, cuts off that union with you from Adam. and reunites you with the resurrected, glorified Christ.

And then the last part of the class will be basically, what do you get? What do you have when you're united to Christ? There's all kinds of stuff that you got, came with the package when you were born, conceived in Adam. You got a whole grocery bag full of garbage when that happened.

God went through the mechanics to leave that behind. And now you have a whole new realm of things that are true of you because you are identified with Christ. And so that's basically where the course will go. Three basic steps. Now, about 500 years ago, God brought this guy, Martin Luther, and revealed to him that justification, or to be declared righteous by God, was by the principle of faith alone.

Now, you might think, well, gee, that's not a big deal. Well, it's not a big deal to us, but from about the second century A.D. to the beginning of the 1500s, nothing. No word of God. Every so-called Christian existence revolved around what we now know today as the Catholic Church, and they were and are a works-oriented religion.

And so, for Martin Luther to come and say salvation is by grace alone through faith alone was a huge revolution. But that was the beginning of the revelation that God has made, expanded revelation that started roughly 500 years ago and gets here today. But that was only what we would call the birth truths. I think most of Christianity understands the birth truths, salvation by grace through faith. Birth truths are what can be described in Hebrews and other places as the milk of the word.

Most of Christianity tries to build an entire superstructure of spiritual growth based on milk. I think about any of you or any of your kids, you know, there's a time in their life early when milk is all they can take and it's the thing that nourishes them. But if they're 18 and they're still drinking only milk, not a good thing, right? It's not enough nourishment.

When you begin to grow out of the birth truths into the growth truths, You're now beginning to enter into meat. And another term for growth truths are identification. So basically it goes like this. If you're going to grow, the first thing you have to understand is that you're born anew in Christ.

And the second thing that you have to come to, and I don't mean legally, I mean by grace, is that you are accepted in Christ. That there's no barrier now between you and God because you're accepted in Christ. The third thing is that you must be restful on the fact that you are eternally secure. There's no doubt about that. And that the next thing is that you are positioned in Christ. If those four things aren't in place, it's going to be very difficult for you to grow spiritually. These are the foundations on which you grow. Those things need to be in place.

If you look at some of the denominations around, not to criticize the denominations, but in some denominations, like Lutheranism and Catholicism, there's very little even birth truths. Very little about that. If you get to the Reformed churches, you'll find that they are pretty solid on birth truths. but not very much on the growth truths. Miles Stanford used to say that Christianity today moves from Romans 1-1 to Romans 5-11 and they stop because starting in 5-12 are the identification truths and they don't go beyond that.

Now they'll go into Paul's epistles and they'll You know how Paul's epistles are set up. The first half of them are positional truth, things that are true of you. And the second half are the implementation or the living out of what this positional truth is.

If you're in the reform movement, the deal is that you'll get all of the birth stuff, no position, but a whole lot of get with it. You know, all of these imperatives that a Christian does this and this and this. You know, here's what you need to do. But there's never any explanation about a position. And so we'll talk about position and condition. Let's define that term. That's another term you hear a lot around here is position and condition. What's a position?

To be who you are in Christ. Who you are in Christ. Word of God, especially Paul's epistles in the first part, will spell out these things that are true of you. Like open up Romans chapter six. The first 10 verses, what Paul says is you just sit back and I'm going to tell you some stuff. Here's what the deal is. One, two, three, four. And not until you get to 11 does he say, here's what I want you to do about what I just told you is true. See that? I want you to reckon.

But most of us love to go to the reckoning part before we even know what we're supposed to be reckoning on. So you have a position. that the Word of God lays out to you. And when you study the Word of God, especially Paul's epistles, every once in a while in your mind you should say, is this position or is this something else? So what's condition? Where we are currently. Where you are currently. The working out in your life, the position that you have. A couple of principles.

One, position never varies. It cannot be changed. It is permanent. It's solid. It's complete. There is no additions to it and there are no subtractions to it. Your position is firm in Christ. It doesn't float around. Your condition, however, is a different story. It moves all over the lot. You can be resting and abiding today, and this afternoon you're not, and you're fearful tomorrow, and you're joyful on Tuesday, but Wednesday you're all over the lot.

It's really important for us to know that our condition can never affect your position. How you feel about your position has nothing to do with what it is. It's solid and it's in place. So a lot of what we're going to do in this class is talk about position and things that are true of you, even if you don't know them, even if you don't believe them, and even if you don't abide in them, they're still true about you. It's really cool. You know, it isn't up to you. I mean, salvation was your idea, right?

So 350 years ago, the substitution or the new birth truths came in and they were reaffirmed by God. And then in about 1840, roughly, now, there were some people before that, like Madame Guyon and some people like that. who sort of danced around these identification truths. But the one guy that wrote and made them clear was John Darby. And John Darby was an interesting character.

He was born in 1800. He was an Irishman. He was educated in the Church of England. He was also an attorney. And he was a really bright man. And the Lord began to reveal to him what we know as identification truths. And he began to teach them. He ended up leaving the Church of England and he resigned from the bar. He thought being an attorney wasn't what God called him to do. And he began to teach these positional truths and identification. And he was the founder of the Brethren Movement.

And I don't know if any of you have ever spent any time reading anything that he wrote. He's a difficult man for us to read. One is because the language is 150 years old now, and the English spoken in red then is the words used, and the phraseology is a little different than what we're used to. But if you spend a little time with them, you kind of get used to it. It's like reading the King James Version, you know. If you spend time with it, you kind of get a handle on it.

So what Darby brought to the table was the full assurance of salvation, because the Church of England didn't teach that. that we have complete access to the Father by His beloved Son, the Church as the body of Christ, and what all of that means. The next thing he brought was that he made an absolute distinction between Israel and the Church. He was the first one that really said, look, the Church is not an extension of Israel. It's a separate entity.

So he's the one that brought this dirty word into existence, which is we call dispensations. If you happen to walk around contemporary Christian circles and you mention the word dispensation, out you go. It's the Christian cuss word today. It really is.

He also reintroduced pre-tribulation. Pre-trib means that the rapture will take place prior to the tribulation. He said, in time sequence, the next great event in the history of the earth is the rapture of the church, which could be right now. It would be cool if it was. We wouldn't have to go to class. If the rapture happens today, then beginning today, the grace dispensation goes away and God begins to deal with the human race through the nation of Israel again. The Antichrist shows up.

There's this seven year period of which the second half of it is the tribulation. Then Christ comes to rule and reign. We come with him to rule and reign. And he rules on the earth for a thousand years. That's called the millennium. Up until Darby, most churches taught post-millennialism, which meant that we had to clean up our act and be really good. And then God would come. Christ would come. and that we were living in the millennial kingdom now, which I couldn't figure out since Christ had been gone a couple thousand years.

But he introduced pre-millennial and pre-trib doctrine. He put an awful lot of light on prophecy, and he is the father of what we call the identification truths. Now, they've always been in the Word of God. Isn't that interesting? But they hadn't been explained, or the understanding of them was given to John Darby. to write about it.

And he was the one that, at least in the English language and most of the Western civilization, explained what Romans 6.6 really was. He also introduced the doctrine of the principle of being totally free from the principle of law. And that's a little scary because you don't think, well, gee, if I don't have any laws to abide by, what am I going to do? Isn't chaos going to, you know?

He also introduced what we just talked about, the idea of position and condition, that we have a position in the Lord Jesus before the Father at His right hand right now and what that means. And the last thing, the major thing that he introduced was the purpose that God had for every single believer. Want to tell me what it is? I'm sure some of you have been in Bible studies or conversations with Christians and here's the question. What do you think God's purpose is for your life? Like it's something different than it is for the guy sitting next to him. So what is God's purpose for your life here right now?

What is it? To glorify Him. Okay. And how's He going to do it? He's going to conform us to the image of His Son. God does everything to you and I individually today to carry out that one purpose, to conform us to the image of Christ so that that can be recognized, that we can glorify Him. John Darby introduced that back into the realm of things. Now, I can give you a whole deal about the Plymouth Brethren movement, but I don't think we need to go there.

But they did have kind of a golden age, if you want to call it that, from about 1830 to 1845. They functioned as close as to what the original church was as any group has ever for about 15 years. They had these things called assemblies where they met and they broke bread. They studied the word of God. They were incredibly cool communities. But then at about the 15 year mark, they started a fragment. You would think if they were that good, how did they screw it up? You want to know how they did it? It's so subtle, but it's so informative in terms of how we do things.

They started out by focusing on the person and the work of the Lord Jesus and the Word of God. That was their whole focus was Christ and growing in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus. Every one of their assemblies was built around that premise. But they began to sort of lean, they began to focus on how they met rather than why they met. They began to focus on the traditions and on the things that we always do. Well, we sing first and then we read scripture and you know, you know how that goes.

I mean, you fall into that. We do it here. I mean, I have, I've stood up and led the service, right? And sometimes I forgot something. And I'm telling you, after the service, here it comes. You forgot four. Where does that come from? I mean, that's what happened to the brethren. You forgot four. And so where does the focus go? It goes on one, two, three, four, rather than the glory of the Lord Jesus. You see that?

So the reason that we study identification is to focus on the Lord Jesus Christ himself and to learn the truths that actually free you to do that. That you, in fact, can do it. You're called to do it. And the Spirit of God has been given to you and me so that we can behold his glory. And so you'll find that traditions and rituals and stuff seem to sort of float away as Christ becomes more important to you.

Now, when the Darbyites or the Brethren Church began to sort of, you know, float down the river with all of their tradition, it was interesting what God did. He didn't let these truths just sort of disappear with the Brethren Church. He brought into existence the next thing, which you've heard is the Keswick movement spelled K-E-S-W-I-C-K. So when you see that word, it's pronounced Keswick. So here's what happened. Some bright, enterprising, spiritually minded believers said, well, these brethren churches aren't the holders of the doctrine, but we know it. Brian knows it, you know, and Courtney knows it.

Let's have these conferences. We'll go into a place for one week and we will have intense study and we'll have a whole week of Sunday school, eight in the morning till five at night. And we'll lay out these identification positional truths to all those that come. And it'll be really beneficial. Sounds good, doesn't it? Wonderful.

And so that's what happened. The Keswick move, it started in England and Ireland. Ended up in the United States. I think it still goes on in some places. And the benefit derived from going to those things was incredible. Because in a week's time, you got what can be described as the whole gospel of God, including identification and positional truths. They would start out with just like we're doing. Old man, identification with Christ, new man, positional truths, conditional truths.

What do you think the problem was with that? The problem was time. You can go to one of these conferences and you can learn a ton. But do you think that God is going to cause you to be spiritually mature in seven days? No, no. And that was the problem.

The problem is like the one we have today with some of these evangelistic crusades. Or these evangelistic organizations that do like Campus Crusade and some of those, they go into a place or like the AIA basketball team, they go into a place, they have a crusade, right?

And they lay out the birth truths. They challenge people to believe on the person and work of Christ. Well, most of them do. Most of them want you to make commitments or do something else. And so a person comes forward and believes. What happens to the evangelistic bandwagon? It leaves town. How about this believer? What happens to him or her?

Well, now they think, well, I ought to find a church someplace. In other words, there isn't the nurturing there. Well, the same thing was true in the Keswick environment. So they would spend this week giving you these tremendous truths. And if you happen to be one of the rare people that showed up at that thing with a really hungry heart, it was tremendously beneficial to you.

But if you went because you thought, that's the next thing I ought to be doing in my Christian life, then you got a bunch of facts in your head and took a bunch of notes and you ended up with another religion, is what happened. And the time element was not considered, that it takes the Lord, not because he's slow, but because we're slow. It takes the Lord a long time to prepare you for growth. It takes him a long time for you to grow and to settle.

And that's OK. That's OK. So they'd leave these saints or these saints would leave these conferences with all of this terrific information. But then the wonderful Keswick speakers would be gone. And who would be in the local environment who one of these hearts could go to and say, well, you know, I'm a little confused on this point. So they were left to flounder. So even though it was a really terrific thing, still, it wasn't the answer because the local church, I don't think, was prepared to nurture those who were introduced to the truth. And the pastors and the elders weren't prepared.

Now, then what happened was is that, you know how any good movement is, we've got to have more of them. Which means we've got to have more speakers and maybe we'll lower the standards a little bit for the speakers because we've got to have more conferences. We don't have as qualified a guy as we did the last time, but we've got to put the conference on. So, Brian, you're going to teach. You see what happens there? So that began to to no reflection on Brian, that that began to to dilute the purity of the message.

And so the Keswick movement today is, if it comes to town, don't waste your time. The other really good thing that the Keswicks did was they put out good literature. And that's a good thing that the Brethren did. They put out good literature. If you've ever researched John Darby's writings, it's like this wide in your bookshelf. It's unbelievable. These brethren guys could crank out material. That's because they didn't have any flat screen TVs. Imagine these guys as much material as they put out. If they were writing in the day, the daytime, they had plenty of light, but at night they did it with candles.

And you can still buy all of their literature. You can buy Darby, Stoney, Coates. All of these guys are still available and it's beneficial to read. The Keswick people did the same thing. They had they would bring the Brethren literature with them. And then some of their speakers had their own own literature that you could buy there and keep. So you could go to a Keswick conference and you could come home with all this great literature. You could spend your time reading.

And the problem is that there wasn't the fellowship of other believers around you to nurture you along. Not that it wasn't beneficial, it really was, but it wasn't enough to hold it together. You would think that, boy, a Keswick conference would be something that would endure for a long time because it had a really good foundation, the truth was taught. But like all human institutions, it has a tendency to get diluted and polluted.

So the next step, I think, in the identification truce actually became literature itself. So that, you know, the 1930s and 40s, 50s, 60s up to today, other than a kind of a unique place like Holly Hills, where do you find out about this stuff? If you walk into a Christian bookstore today, maybe the green letters will be in there, but only if it's a good seller. Everything else in the bookshelves will not address identification. They won't address position condition. It's all a bunch of books about how to do something and to feel good about it.

Even the evangelistic books don't really present the gospel. Just to get that clear, what is the gospel? In 1 Corinthians 15, Christ died for your sins according to the scriptures. He was buried and he was resurrected according to the scriptures. Period. Nothing more than that. That's the entire gospel message. The gospel is not receiving Jesus into your heart. It's not making a commitment to Christ.

It is believing that Jesus Christ died for your sins on the cross He was buried and he was resurrected. And so you get this thing called salvation. What's salvation mean? Initially, it's you've been saved from the penalty of your sins. One of the things you're going to learn in this class is that there are 34 things that happened to you at the cross.

34. And there's actually more, but we're only going to talk about 34 of them, which is the entire salvation package.

You got a lot more than fire insurance. You've got a lot more than, you know, God is never going to condemn me. You've got a lot more than just your sins being paid for. You've got a lot more than that. Now, you find that the gospel message has been so polluted today, you don't even hear it. Some places you do, but mostly what you hear is You've got a problem and the Lord Jesus Christ is the best aspirin you can take. He's the best solution to your problem. But your problem isn't presented as sin. Sin is your problem. And faith in the person and work of Christ is the solution for you. He's the Savior.

If I say to you, your life is miserable and what you need is God and come down here and make a commitment to Christ, have I given you the gospel? So you come down and make a commitment to Christ, you say. You might be, but more than likely you're not because you didn't hear the gospel. You see that?

So the clarity of what you say and what you know is really important. Same thing with identification truths. As you grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus. And you begin to understand what identification really is. Clarity about that is really important because believers will come to you and say, boy, I'm really struggling with sin.

I know my sins are forgiven, but I have sin in my life. And boy, I'm hoping that God did more for me as a Christian than pay the penalty for my sins, because I find my whole life is taking up with sinning and confessing and sinning and confessing. And that's all I'm doing. And you say, well, there is more. Let's talk about what God did about your sin.

I think the best example I've ever read, and I don't recommend this guy except for two books, is a guy named Watchman Nee. Two books, The Normal Christian Life and Sit, Walk, Stand. The rest of the stuff makes good kindling for your fireplace. But those two books are really good. And here's how he described it.

He said most of Christianity spends all of their time going around the world looking for whiskey bottles. And they break them. They break the bottles. But they never think about where did that whiskey come from? Where did those bottles come from? Where were they produced? And what identification teaches you is what God did about the factory that produced those whiskey bottles.

You see the difference? I thought that was a really good example of really what identification truths are. didn't just go around and break all the whiskey bottles. He did do that. But he took care of the factory that produces them. That's what identification really turns out to be.

So when somebody comes to you and says, you know, the bottles are coming down the production line faster than I can break them. What am I going to do? If you know The identification truth is you can say, sit down, let me tell you what God already did about that. It's already done. So identification deals with sin.

And we will learn the difference between sins and sin. We'll spend some time going through Romans 5, 12, 6, and 7. And you'll learn the difference between sins and sin. What are sins? They're the whiskey bottles. What is sin? S-I-N with a definite article in front of it. The sin. It's the factory. We call the whiskey factory, the old man, the sin nature, the producer of the sins. And God did something about that. Which, if you haven't been exposed to that early on, might seem a little radical, but in fact, it's one of those truths that are so magnificently gracious. But they're hard to believe sometimes.

As an example, I don't know about any of your salvation, but when you think about it, when God comes to you and says, You're condemned and sinned and trespassed. You're separated from me." I don't think he had a lot of trouble believing that. But when he says, my son came and died for your sins. And if you believe that, I will save you for all eternity. That's the hard part. Well, I can assent to the fact that he did that. But is it for me? And if I believe it, will God, in fact, be true to his word. Will he save me? So you say, OK, I believe it.

And you get saved. Right. So now you're cruising along in your Christian life. And you happen to one day get into Romans 6 and you're reading down and it says that your old man was crucified with him. And you think, what? I'm sitting here. It's 2006. You know, Bronco's around this afternoon. Oh, bye week. You know, and I'm committing sins and I am a Christian. I am saved, but I'm committing sins. He says I died.

What is that about? So you investigate a little further. You call up your buddy and say, well, you know about this? And he says, yeah. And so what does God say to you to do about that information? What are you supposed to do about that information? What did you do with the information he gave you about salvation? Yeah, you believe it. Did it make any sense? The fact that you died 2,000 years ago? Not really. What logic, what experience What do you have in your life that would indicate to you that you actually died 2000 years ago, especially if you're 30 years old?

So wait a minute. Well, God says it's so. So it gets to be one of those things. I'm going to have to take God at his word even though I don't experience it. And then he starts to tell you about all of this tremendous, all of these tremendous things that he says are true of you. Did you know that you're seated in Christ in the heavenlies? I know it. Do you believe it? Are you sure? Do you see what I'm saying?

So one of the things you encounter as you go through identification and position and condition are some stupendous facts that your experience and your old sin nature and your mind being controlled a lot of times by that sin nature are going to say, nah, nice theory.

Yeah, it's in the Word of God, but that doesn't fit. You know, you have to trust God when he tells you something, no matter what the experience is. I don't mean that legally. The grace comes along with the truth and you do believe. So I would say that don't be afraid of what you're going to learn.

It's actually all based on God's grace. Everything that God has done is based on the fact that He's gracious and He loves us. And our response is always based on the fact that His grace is coming towards us, His love is coming towards us, and we respond in kind.

Why do you love God? Why do you do it? Because He first loved you. Right? So if God first loved you, Then there's some results from that. The first result is that you love him. But he caused it because he first loved you, right? The next result is that you will obey him. Why will you obey him? Because you love him. Why do you love him? Because he loved you. You see that?

And then the third step is that I will be rewarded because I obeyed him. How does that work? Let's see, I obeyed him. All right. I'm going to get rewarded because I obeyed him and I'm obeying him because I love him. But I'm loving him because he first loved me.

You see the grace in that scenario? It all starts with him and it goes around the circle. And guess where it goes back? Right back to him. So when you get rewarded at the beam of judgment, you know why you're going to be rewarded? Because of what he did. You see that?

So everything has to be based in this dispensation on the grace of God and the fact that he loved us first and that he is the causer. We are exhorted to believe Him, to obey Him. There's all these things in Greek called imperatives that says, do this, do this, do this. But every imperative, and I have a list, I'll bring it up Sunday, of all the commands in the New Testament. How many Jewish laws were there? 627, something like that. How many imperatives do you think there are in the New Testament?

1,500 plus. So here you are as a believer living under grace by faith. You have 1,500 commands. You just thought you were free from the law. All of those commands are based on God love me. And as you learn the grace, you find that those commands are fulfilled by you And the motivator for you to respond is God's grace and love towards you. You've heard Vern up there talk about logical imperatives rather than moral ones. I like to add the word gracious logical imperatives because grace is the greatest motivator there is.

And we don't understand that. It's a very hard thing, I think, to get our arms around. Because if we invite you over for lunch, what are you thinking? Oh, we've got to return the favor. Right? Grace comes at us totally unmerited. There's nothing you can do to merit it. And if the thought ever enters your mind about merit, it's not grace anymore. And it's totally unlimited. Your job is to receive it. Period. So, okay, that's the overview. Next week we'll get down to the details.