Waking Up to Grace is a Bible-centered podcast for anyone who is weary of religious performance and ready to rest confidently in Christ.
Hosted by Lenny, each episode brings honest conversations and a fresh look at Scripture to questions about grace, faith, the New Covenant, identity in Christ, forgiveness, assurance, the church, and eternal life. The goal is not to give you another religious checklist, but to help you see the finished work of Jesus more clearly and reconsider long-held traditions in the light of Scripture.
Whether you are questioning what you have been taught, recovering from legalism, or simply longing to know Christ more deeply, join us as we wake up to grace—one conversation at a time.
Find companion Bible studies and more at WakingUpToGrace.com.
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The episode explores a grace-centered view of Christianity focused on identity in Christ rather than fear, guilt, or performance. The speakers discuss how believers are loved and accepted by God as “new creations,” and argue that spiritual struggles often come from forgetting that identity. They emphasize renewing the mind, trusting God’s love, and living by faith instead of shame or self-condemnation.
Can our behavior ever be displeasing? Can we be displeasing, or can our behaviors be displeasing, or either one or both?
SPEAKER_01
New covenant believers have a different perception of those things than a traditional mainline. Because the traditional mainline would say, I'm displeasing to God, so I'm going to apologize. Like God is watching every move they make. The new covenant believer has reckoned themselves dead, their new creation. As far as that's concerned, God is pleased with us. We have to live the life of perception that says he's pleased with us because he sees his son as a result of the reflection of the image of his son in our lives, because of this great swap that took place, our sin for his righteousness. God is pleased with us. That has to be the focus of our life. We can't second guess God and say, look, are you happy with me? Are you not happy with me? That's religion. Relationship is this. I'm feeding hogs. I know my dad still loves me. I've made mistakes, I know my dad still loves me. That has got to be the New Testament perception of our Father, because that's what the Word of God shows us. It's not like we fail him in our actions because we're one with him in our heart. As we grow in him and realize these things, we have to sort of change our rhetoric a little bit. And this is my opinion. It's not anything I'm trying to force on anyone, but I would just like to say that we now live in an era of life and death as opposed to right and wrong. So when we live in life, we're living in life with Christ because he rejoices over us. Now death still walks around us, and sometimes that encroaches in our lives, but our heart is still inclined towards our Father. So he's always happy with us. I believe my Father is always rejoices over me, even in my failures and my weaknesses, my fallings. He never says, Oh, Jack, that's not right. Because we know that the Spirit of God came to convict us of what? Of righteousness. He convicts the world of sin, but his children of righteousness. So instead of the Holy Spirit coming to us and saying, Ah, that doesn't please your father, Jack, it may be more along the lines of, Jack, you're righteous. You're better than that. You're righteous. That's my perception of the whole thing, as far as my life is concerned, and especially as far as grace is concerned in my life. Anything else makes us go back into the circle of defeat and failure. And our father does not see us as failures. We are not failures. He is so happy that we're part of his family that he would kill the fatted calf every day for us.
SPEAKER_00
What happens when we're failing to live with grace and peace multiplying our lives? What's going on when those things aren't multiplying and we're actually struggling with fear or anxiety about worry? What is happening? What is failing, and what's going wrong there? God's love drives out fear, and if we've been perfected in love, we shouldn't be living by that stuff. So, what exactly is going on in our Christian lives when we're not expressing the values that Christ trained us to express? In a relationship, there's interaction, and the only person that's ever going to really mess up is us. It's not going to be the Spirit of God within us making any mistakes. So, what goes wrong in those times? You know, what is happening? Isn't it just part of the human condition? What's the remedy?
SPEAKER_01
Jesus is the remedy. If we fall back into doing, we have issues. We have to live in being. If we live in being, let's say we have there's struggles, whatever those struggles are in our lives. Remember what Jesus said about defilement? He said it's not what you eat, it's what comes out of your mouth.
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
SPEAKER_01
And I believe today that many, many people, you know, new covenant believers, renewed mind Christians, are learning that we probably say less about who we really are than the masses. We need to confess who we are. This is not name it, claim it. This is confessing who we are. I am a new creation. See, we need that on our refrigerator, 2 Corinthians 5.17. We need that on the dashboard of our car. We need to say, I'm a new creation. And we need to develop our relationship with Christ based on that. We have struggles. We're going to have struggles. We go through cycles. We're going to go through those cycles. But we have those things that God has given to us, His spirit, the renewed mind, of course, His Word. The struggles, they're not going to go away. God is not going to deliver us from those things in the way that we would like to think He is, because that's what makes Him perfect in us.
SPEAKER_00
So I think what you're telling me is that when we find ourselves getting into trouble and something is not right, something spiritual is not going on because we know the difference between the flesh and the spirit, and Paul taught walk by the Spirit, so there's a conscious thing. So what it sounds like you're telling me is that we go back and we try to figure out what's wrong in our perception about our identity. Usually when we're afraid or when we're living in fear, we're not living in full trust or dependency on that identity. Because we might think God's mad at us, we might think God's torturing us. Why is he letting this happen to me? And then we're reminded, as you said, what's my identity? And sometimes we just to me that's where scripture can be valuable. It's like, let's pull the living water out of the text and be replenished by this because my thinking is stinking. There's something wrong in my thinking. That's a lot of what Peter was talking about. It wasn't do more, it was the renewing of our minds, being transformed by the mind renewal. And so the mind renewal, as you expressed earlier, it's a process that's going on all our lives. It's all just building on what we already have. As Peter pointed out when he was writing that letter to these people, I'm telling you things you already know. And I'm going to continue to so that you remember them, because we will forget our identity in Christ in an hour if we're not in remembrance of this. And next thing you know, we're apologizing to God again and begging for forgiveness, for example. We're just worried about who we are before him.
SPEAKER_01
On this whole concept that you mentioned, faith for a new covenant believer takes a different perspective and that we're challenged in our life. But now it takes faith for me to say, I'm a new creature. I'm a new creation. It takes faith for me to say, I have a new heart, I have the mind of Christ. It takes faith for me to say that, especially when I don't feel like it. Especially when I'm frustrated with something that's happened in my life, and something that really rasined me is not a magic formula now. It's not a potion, it's a confession of who I am because my ears need to hear me say it because I believe it. And faith today is not like if I have the faith of a mustard seed die, I can, you know, move them out or whatever. Faith for us today is confession who we are. It's a reality that we sometimes struggle to walk in because we think that we see reality. But remember, Jesus said, hey, listen, I'm not dealing with the seeing here. I'm dealing with the unseen. I'm dealing with things that you have no idea about this kingdom of mine. That's where we are as new creatures, as new creations. We're in this new kingdom and we're learning how to manipulate it, how to live in it. It's a truth of confession that reveals God's kingdom in the earth today. It's tough, you know, when you're talking to somebody and you have a choice to say something spiritual or not about some situation because you believe it. Not because of, you know, it's the right thing to say or you know it in the Bible or anything, but because you believe it. That puts you in a spot where faith is required. That's the faith that moves mountain. That person might think you're crazy, right? You might more times than not. Exactly. Yeah, especially if they're a religious person, especially if they are a person who is self-righteous in what they know.
SPEAKER_00
That will offend them. To me, what you're describing is the knowledge that Peter was talking about in 2 Peter. What is supposed to get us through life and teach us godliness? If it's that powerful, why does it sound so simple? Exactly. Okay, we're gonna go home now. That's it. On the surface, it doesn't sound like anything. And if it doesn't sound like anything, it sounds like we need to look into this more, don't we?
