Today we shall commence a series of teachings that would explore our identity as Children of God.
Hopefully this study would raise so many issues that you may be ignoring inadvertently.

Recall that in our previous teachings I pointed out that you are a spirit, you possess a soul and you live in a body. Like God, we are spirit beings.
I said that our spirit is the part of us that God interacts and communes with. The soul is the mental part of us including our mind and will and the emotional part of us, while the body is the external part of us which responds to our five senses.

As we know, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, the nature of God in their spirits was replaced with the sin nature.
Adam and Eve transferred this sin nature to all men born on earth, so we all came into the world with the sin nature.

However, when we give our lives to Christ, the Holy Spirit regenerates the spirit and brings about the spiritual rebirth of a man. This is what is meant by the Born Again experience.
According to John 6:63, the Spirit (Big S) gives birth to the spirit (small s).
The Holy Spirit gives birth to the spirit of man.

At the point of regeneration, the spirit of man is instantly and radically transformed and totally changed into the image of God. It takes on the nature of God. This event happens instantly. It is not a process.

What am I saying?
Our spirits were totally changed and made like Jesus when we received Christ.
2 Peter 1:4 states that we share in Christ’s divine nature. So, in your spirit—which is the part of you that God fellowships and communes with—you are perfect.

However, all these instant changes, transformation, and perfection took place only in our spirit, which the Bible sometimes refers to as our inner man.
The born-again experience happens only in the spirit.
Even after we are born again, the soul and body remain the same. They are not regenerated.
Our perfection and oneness with Christ happens only in our spirits.

So many people that are born again still overreact, get easily angry, steal, etc.
It does not mean they are not born again. The spirit changed, but the soul—their way of thinking, their emotions, which is reflected in their impatience and overreaction to issues—has remained the same.

The soul and our way of thinking may change with time depending on the person, but it does not change automatically like the spirit.

Let me reiterate: When you came to Christ and received salvation, you became a brand-new person in your inner man.
You received a new identity.
This is why 2 Corinthians 5:17 says:
If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

The difficulty most of us face in our Christian lives is as a result of the fact that we do not understand the truth that the divine nature of God and the pronouncement that we have become new creatures happens only in our spirits; that the body and the soul remain the same.
This is why the word of God says we are perfect, righteous and holy, and yet we find that we are struggling with sin, selfishness, bitterness, anger, unanswered prayers.

It is absolutely necessary that we understand this truth, because if you do not understand the difference between the SSB (Spirit, Soul, Body), and that regeneration happens only in the spirit, your Christian life will be frustrated; your growth will be stunted; Christianity and prayer life will be a struggle because the foundation is not right.
And we know what Psalm 11:3 says:
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

From our next episode, we will start looking into God’s mirror to better understand our new identity in Christ and to start the process of drawing that identity from our perfect spirit into our physical circumstances.