Who God Says You Are

Who God Says You Are

— By M.T. Clark — P-2022, 07/22/2026 — Today’s Audio Podcast

Today’s Message on YouTube:

Today’s photo of a green tractor looking out across a tall hayfield to the rolling Berkshire mountains on the horizon comes to us from my Facebook friend Bill Stewart, who captured this scene while he was out harvesting hay in the Tyringham valley on July 1st, 2026.

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I share Bill’s photo featuring the Berkshires on the horizon as a visual reminder that we have reached the midweek summit, so happy hump day, and because Bill’s photo represents the heart of what the photo of the day is all about:  stopping for a moment to see and to appreciate the beauty in our everyday lives, and even in the midst of our work sometimes, as we go.

When you walk in the Spirit, you practice gratitude, appreciation, and prayer on a continual basis, but when we capture these moments of our lives and share them, we invite others to see the good things in life too and to find the joy of living in the presence of God.  I’ll be extending that invitation tonight at Celebrate Freedom.

Yup, this is a big Wednesday for us, because tonight the Celebrate Freedom support group starts back up again at Starpoint Church, after the summer break. I can’t wait to be back with that group, doing the work of walking with one another into freedom. If you’re in the Capital District and are looking for a place to find your freedom and to do life alongside other believers, come and join us. I’ll be sure to tell you that I am happy to see you and to encourage you to seek the Lord to discover who you are in Christ and to find the life that God has for you. Speaking of who you are in Christ,

Our series, “Freedom Stories,” continues today with who God says you are.

Who God Says You Are

It’s not enough to stop believing what the enemy says about you. The empty space a rejected lie leaves behind must be filled with what God says, or that lie will just move back in. For years I tried to feel better about myself, and it never stuck. I was in a vicious cycle of sin, shame, and condemnation for most of my life before I came to Christ. What finally changed things was learning who I was in Christ and reading passages of Scripture that changed the way I thought about myself. The opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians are one of those passages. When you understand God’s word not as theology about other people, but as God’s own description of you, your mind becomes renewed, and things change.

Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with one of the most lavish descriptions of the believer’s identity in all of Scripture, and it is worth receiving slowly and personally. He writes in Ephesians 1:3-6 (NKJV) that God “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

In a single sentence, Paul tells the believer that they are blessed, chosen, holy, blameless, adopted, and accepted, and every one of those words is meant to be received by us personally.

Look at where each of them is grounded, because that is what makes them unshakable.

• You are chosen and chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, which means your acceptance predates anything you have ever done or failed to do. Little did you know it, but being a ruling member of God’s royal family was your destiny all along.
• You are holy and without blame before Him, not because your record is clean in itself but because you stand in Christ. Through our faith in Jesus, we are made righteous and set apart for God’s purposes.
• You are adopted as a son, brought into the family not as a servant on probation but as a child with a permanent place at the table. As sons and daughters of God, we don’t have to earn our way into God’s good graces; like orphans with nothing to offer, we are adopted by a good, good Father.
• And you are accepted in the Beloved, which is to say your acceptance is bound up in Christ’s own acceptance by the Father, so that to reject you, God would first have to reject His own Son. – And that’s not happening.

That is how secure your standing is.

This is the death of performance-based acceptance, because every one of these blessings is said to be ours already, in Christ, by grace, to the praise of the glory of His grace. None of them is offered as a reward for spiritual achievement. They are stated as accomplished facts about everyone who is in Christ, which means that the most struggling believer reading this is just as chosen, just as adopted, and just as accepted as the most mature believer, because the standing was never based on the maturity.

We don’t become accepted by growing. We grow because we’re already accepted, and the security of acceptance is what frees us to grow without fear.

So, when you need to know who you are, don’t go first to your feelings or to your record or to the verdict of the accuser. Go to what God has said.

You are blessed with every spiritual blessing, chosen before the foundation of the world, holy and blameless before Him, adopted as His own child, and accepted in the Beloved.

Learn these words by heart, preach them to yourself on the hard days, and let them, rather than the old lies, become the ground you stand on. This is who God says you are, and His word on the matter is the only verdict that finally counts.

Keep on walking and talking with God.

— M.T.

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“The views, opinions, and commentary of this publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries, or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the author may represent.”

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