Dale Johnson: And as promised from last week I have with me our dear brother, Paul Tautges. He serves as pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in Cleveland, Ohio. He has authored many books about Christian Living, Pastoral Ministry, Counseling and Parenting, including this new book we’re going to continue talking about: Remade: Embracing Your Complete Identity in Christ, Anxiety: Knowing God’s Peace, A Small Book for the Hurting Heart, [1] and the foundational book: Counseling One Another [2]. He also serves as editor for the popular Lifeline mini-book series. Paul and his wife Karen enjoy life with their 10 children and their spouses and a growing tribe of grandchildren. He blogs regularly at counselingoneanother.com
Paul, I’m so glad that you’re with us. Thanks for our time last week together and we were running a little long, so I wanted to bring you back and let’s chat a little bit more about your book. I used the subtitle actually of this book, so the full title is Remade: Embracing your Complete Identity in Christ. So, what I want to do just to catch people up, you know, it’s been seven days since they probably listened to the first one. And so I want to catch them up on our previous episode, just to give a basic understanding. One of the most distinct things that I think you were able to do last week is to help us to understand the difference between a self-created identity, which is so common in our culture, it’s sort of the pattern by which we think hope and help is intended to follow to make a person feel better about themselves or to empower them in some way and what you call a given identity where you go on to describe the subtle identity for those who are believers in the Lord Jesus and our union with him just briefly summarize some of those particular thoughts and reset our mind back on those truths.
Paul Tautges: Yeah, thanks Dale. I think that we place an unbearable burden upon ourselves and other people when we adopt this idea that we create our own identity. God did not create us with the capacity to do that. And so, when we think we should do that for ourselves or our culture places that on other people. It’s an unbearable burden that God did not equip any of us to do. Instead, he has given us an identity, we are created in His image and then when we are saved we are then redeemed by Christ and being remade into the image of Christ. My hope and desire for this book is that it will be used alongside the Scriptures, never in place of the Scriptures, but I hope that it will be a tool alongside the Scriptures whereby believers will begin to explore the depths of this new given identity that they have in Jesus Christ.
Dale Johnson: That’s helpful. I want you to do one more bit of summary if we can. The book is laid out into three primary sections what you call a triple lens of Saint, Sinner and Sufferer. So, help catch our minds back up on those categories and what you tried to develop there in the book.
Paul Tautges: Sure, the first lens we look at is Saint, which is the biggest of the three lenses. And saint, what that means is that God has called us out from the slave market of sin to belong to Him. He’s adopted us into His family. We now belong to Him and so every believer is a saint, a called out one and we now belong to God and our identity is fixed in our Union with Christ.
Then we look through the lens of the Sinner, in other words, how has redemption and regeneration, and how has salvation changed our status such that now we look at our sin differently and now we act against our sin differently and we learned to rest in the provision that is ours in Christ, who is the victor.
And then thirdly the lens of Suffering. How does my new status as belonging to God help me to interpret suffering not as a punishment from God because Jesus already endured all of the punishment for my sin but as living in a fallen world and in part of God’s ways of disciplining me at times, but ultimately God using suffering as a means to refine us and to remake us into the image of Jesus Christ. And so that’s the whole point of the three lenses.
Dale Johnson: Yes, such helpful categories that are clearly identified in Scripture and I think it’s really helpful, you know, the value of a book can often be measured by the way in which it helps us to see the beauty of the treasures of Scripture. And so, what I want you to do now if you can, is relate specific biblical texts that obviously you were burdened about to explain in a particular way and often as an author you write in a way that’s burdened something that you see maybe is missing or forgotten in the current culture and you’re trying to bring people back to a biblical understanding of particular things. And so, I want you to sort of give that biblical framework some of the key texts that really fueled away that you see this very important truth, I would argue very foundational framework that we have that would encourage people to truly embrace their identity in the Lord.
Paul Tautges: Yeah, I’m going to kind of zero in on the book of Colossians. I could go many, many places, but for me Colossians is so foundational to this particular issue. As I mentioned last week, I was blessed as soon as the Lord saved me I was brought into home Bible study whereby I was discipled faithfully in a small group, and two of the verses that stand out to me that kind of picture that whole time period in my life is Colossians 2: 6-7 were Paul says “as you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord so walk in him.” Where he’s making a connection immediately there to who I now am in Christ, having received Him as Lord and as Savior now that is supposed to impact the way that I walk. And then verse 7, “having been firmly rooted and now being built up in him and established in your faith just as you were instructed in overflowing with gratitude.” So, Paul says the moment that I was saved I was firmly rooted in Christ, but I am also being built up in Him. And so, there’s this sense in which I am something new but I’m also becoming something new, and I think that that is crucial for believers to understand.
I think we have many people in our churches today who understand salvation primarily as a transaction rather than as a transformation. Now, there is a transaction aspect to salvation, it’s called justification. That is that Jesus paid for our sin debt the moment we repent and believe in Jesus. We are justified by faith. We are declared righteous by God because Jesus gives us that gift of His perfect righteousness, but I think what’s lacking in today’s church is this connection between justification and sanctification that is: okay, now that I have been declared righteous by God in Christ. And that’s my new position. How is that to impact the way that I walk, the way that I live which is what we call progressive sanctification. So, we are sanctified, we are a Saint, set apart. We are being Sanctified —present tense— by the spirit of God through the Word of God through the people of God and one day we will be ultimately sanctified and that is when we are we are glorified. So, that passage of Scripture impacts me as a believer in Christ.
But in the previous chapter and Colossians 1 verse 28, that’s what really guides me from the standpoint of being a pastor where Paul says, “We proclaim him that his Christ, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom that we may present every man complete in Christ.” So, my burden and desires as a pastor, which flows then into everything that I write, is that I may help believers to come to understand the riches of Christ and who they are in Him and that will move them toward maturity to become more and more like the Lord Jesus Himself and just because you know Colossians 1:28 lands where it does we have our chapter divisions and so on, in the Bible it’s interesting to notice though the logical flow of the of the Apostle because he begins with exalting Christ in chapter 1, in who Christ is, then he makes the connection that we have been reconciled by God through Christ. We’ve been redeemed by God through Christ and then that leads into God’s purpose of remaking us into the image of Christ.
So, it’s that burden and he does all that foundational work before he gets any to any specific in chapter 3 about behavior and that’s where I think our burden should be. We have to deal with the behavioral stuff because God deals with it. But if we start there then we’re really saying to people you just need to be better instead of saying no, no, this is who you are as a new creature in Christ. And now the spirit of God is moving you to behave differently and live differently.
Dale Johnson: You just said a mouthful, brother. I mean quite significant. I have such a passion for the book of Colossians, in fact, Colossians 1:28 really was the impetus behind me writing my book, The Church as A Culture of Care, because I see exactly what you described in Colossians 1:22 where we see it’s the aim of Christ which leads to the aim of the church and then Paul flushes that out in battling specific ideas. And I may be one of the reasons that this is resonating here with you in your book Remade is Colossians really speaks to a contemporary problem that I think we’re facing on so many levels this idea of you know, having gnostic insight from different places and trying to root and ground us into theological reality not to be dismissive of the physical world relative to behavior and such as that but never to leave those foundational purposes that the Lord gives that are incited by the physical world, right? It is about growing in the Lord Jesus and being rooted and grounded specifically there.
I wanted to rehash maybe a couple of things that you said that I thought were really quite significant when you described the idea of transaction versus transformation. There’s no need to make those two things’ enemies right the idea of having some sort of transaction relative to justification. That’s the way the Bible presents this initial aspect of salvation, but then not divorcing the idea of transaction into what we are called to be remade into, which is this transformation that should be constant and ongoing and one of the passages you mentioned in Colossians 2:6. I think this is really important as we think about sanctification itself. So many integrationist want to describe the Bible is helpful for quote-on-quote spiritual issues, but there are aspects of life that would be somehow divorce from this idea. And the reality is Paul set society in Colossians 2:6, where in the same way in which we received the Lord Jesus, which you described as “we receive him by faith”, he says “so now walk in him”. So, the idea of us walking in the Lord in everything that we do as he will summarize later in Colossians 3:17 is for the glory of God. So everything is to be done as the writer of Hebrews describes by faith and this prospect of sanctification can never be divorced from the work of the Spirit and the work of the Word in our hearts and lives to do this process of transformation that is not just salvation in terms of the transaction that salvation in terms of sanctifying this transformation that’s happening and you’re rooting that so well and it’s something that we need to constantly revisit as a basis of grounding an anchor if you will and how we think about our own problems, people in their problems and how we really believe hope is found in Christ as you’ve articulated so well.
I want you to work now into, you do a couple of things which I always appreciate Paul that I think is really helpful. You really help us to not just take the Scripture intellectually but to move this into a practice of application. Okay, how do these things really flesh out in our life? How does this really accomplish transformation in our lives? You end each chapter with three basic applications that you’re trying to help push people to believe the truth that you’ve tried to reflect from Scripture. Sometimes, this might be confusing, so I want to give you a chance to articulate this where you say talk to yourself, talk to God, and talk to others. So why did you include these applications and just flush these out for us specifically.
Paul Tautges: Well, the talk to yourself point is really something I borrow from Martin Lloyd-Jones, having picked that up many years ago in his book Spiritual Depression, where he confronts our tendency to listen to ourselves instead of to speak to ourselves and he uses Psalms 42 and 43 to show us that there are times in our lives where we need to speak specifically to ourselves, speak truth to ourselves. And so, the whole point of that is to initiate a point of reflection that’s based on biblical truth. Look at yourself, think of yourself differently now based on what you just learned in this chapter, then from that, talk to God about it. Talk to God about this new biblical insight that you have about who you are in Christ, and then talk to others; why? Because sanctification is not a private, isolated adventure. God saved us as individuals, yes, but His brilliant design of the local church demonstrates the fact that we need each other in order to be sanctified. And so, we need to learn to talk to others and because just one of my burdens is that this book would be used not only in private personal devotions, so to speak, but also in small groups and counseling relationships and in the local church. We need to start realizing that there is a sense in which we are responsible not only for our own sanctification but also partly for the sanctification of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, well said. We’ve been talking about Paul’s new book, Remade, Embracing your Complete identity in Christ.
Paul, I want you to flesh out a little bit what you were describing there at the end as we close out just an encouragement to our listeners on you as the author, how did you envision people utilizing this book? First of as believers and then in our context as counselors and then as local churches, how do you envision people really making the most of the book you’ve tried to write here?
Paul Tautges: You know Lord willing, as I’m writing I’m praying Lord use this, you know to strengthen believers, which of course will have a trickle-down effect into churches. at the same time, I wanted to help local churches begin to realize how we may be in our discipleship strategies we may be missing one of the key elements of Christian growth, which is understanding the riches of who we are in Christ and building on that foundation again going back to Colossians 2 verse 7 conviction where I want to help believers be rooted and firmly grounded in Christ. And in the truth of Christ.
You know, in Colossians, we want to go back to that just for a second. Paul exalts Christ. And then what he does is shows that all of these worldly philosophies are unhelpful to the Christian, not necessarily because they are anti-Christian, some of them are, but they are sub-Christian. Paul’s burden was that anything that diminishes the glory of Christ is unhelpful to us as believers to grow in who we are in Christ and to grow to maturity. So, I’ve been really encouraged by the response of believers to this book. I continue to get emails and messages from people saying I’m going through it for the second time, you know, with myself, or now I’m going through with a friend. I’ve heard from three churches that have told me they’re taking all of their small groups through Remade. Because it’s becoming a foundational discipleship tool. I’ve heard from people saying they’re using it with people who just got saved. So a brand new believer discipleship tool, and so even though I can’t say I thought of all those things as I was writing it, I can reflect back on and say yeah, I can see how that works because it’s been simmering on my mind these kinds of them and simmering in my mind for so long you kind of get lost in it and you don’t realize how the Lord might end up using and so to the extent that he helps believers to grow to maturity in Christ and helps churches, perhaps become a little more focused on the transformation aspect of salvation is very encouraging to me.
Dale Johnson: I love it because it’s useful personally for us as individuals to be reminded consistently of these truths which, as life happens we have a tendency to drift away from or forget in our personal life and I think the value of it for reminding the church. You know, C.S. Lewis, I’m thinking about this issue as you talk. C.S. Lewis said something I’ll paraphrase: “The great moral teachers are not one to give us a new morality, but they remind us of the old.” And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’ve tried to accomplish through that process, and you know, the church is going to benefit, I pray individuals will and certainly counselors will as we continue to make this a primary framework. That’s a non-negotiable in the biblical counseling room.
Brother, thank you for your hard work, your time, and your effort to remember what the Scripture says and encourage us with these beautiful truths.
Paul Tautges: Yeah. You’re welcome. It’s been a joy to talk with you about it, Brother.
Helpful Information:
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