How Does Faith in the Atonement Help Me Recover, Protect and Fulfill My Identity?
The Atonement of Jesus Christ, including the love that motivated it, is the key to understanding, embracing and actualizing our identity. We could say it is the identity theft insurance. In other words, losing our false “natural man” identity and becoming one with Christ—taking His name and nature upon us—is the only way to recognize and further claim our own eternal identity. That seems counter-intuitive but only the Lord can show us the truth of who we are and make us what we have the potential to become. To the extent that we are in harmony with Christ and His Atonement, our identity is insured.
When the Apostle Peter objected to the Lord washing his feet at the Last Supper, the Savior said to him, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part in me” (John 13:8). Like Peter we must serve the Master but we must also let Him serve us. His Atonement is His most important service to us; if we love Him and want to become like Him, we cannot let His ultimate sacrifice be offered to us in vain. We must invite Him to heal all of us, even the ugly and undesirable parts of our lives. He already knows them and has atoned for them anyway. We must hold nothing back as we acknowledge our sins and sinful nature. We must yield our hearts to Him and allow Him to wash them clean and make them new.
William Tyndale (A.D. 1484—1536) was the first to translate large portions of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English, a work for which he was later put to death. During this translation, Tyndale struggled to find an English word that would convey the meaning of the Hebrew word that described the great sacrifice and work that Christ performed in reconciling man to God. Not finding an English word that adequately expressed this concept, Tyndale made up a word—at-one-ment—to express the reuniting of mankind to God through His Son (see Richard N. Holzapfel, Dana M. Pike, and David R. Seely, Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009], 119).
At the Last Supper, in addition to washing the feet of the Apostles, the Savior also prayed a last vocal prayer for them; both of these acts help us understand how our identity is linked to His. That prayer—recorded in John 17 and known as the Great Intercessory Prayer—is one in which the Lord was interceding with the Father for his disciples “may we be one; as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21). In other words, Christ prayed that his “atonement” would unite them with Him and His Father forever. When we become one with our Heavenly Father and Savior, we recover our real identity—a spiritual identity that Satan and the world seek to rob from us. ~Barbara D. Lockhart, Wendy C. Top, Brent L. Top, Protecting Against Eternal Identity Theft (Covenant Communications, Inc. Orem, Utah 2013) 67-8
