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One of our great difficulties, after we know who we are, is that under satanic pressure we so soon forget our position. For although Satan knows what Christ did to him at Calvary and through the Resurrection, and realizes that as a part of Christ the believer is his master, he still carries on a guerrilla warfare against the Church through the use of subterfuge, deception, and bluff.

While guerrilla warfare is illegal, it is still warfare and must be faced and overcome. God could put Satan completely away, but He has chosen to use him to give the Church crucial training in overcoming. Otherwise, there would be no more warfare of any kind. We are in apprenticeship for our place with Christ on the throne following the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The crown belongs to the conqueror, but without an adversary there could be no practice in overcoming.

Thus, when God permits Satan to throw his black mantle over our spirits, we tend to forget who we are. We are like the man James tells us about, who looks at his face in a mirror, and looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like (James 1:23-24). We forget that we are actually a part of Christ and that Satan is subject to us. We unconsciously lapse into our old life of fear and defeat, seeing ourselves as we were and not as we are.

We must constantly remind ourselves and affirm that we are in Christ — and because Satan cannot touch Christ, he cannot touch us. “No one who has become a part of God’s family makes a practice of sinning, for Christ, God’s Son, holds him securely, and the devil cannot get his hands on him” (I John 5:18, TLB). Satan wants the believer to forget that he is risen and exalted with Christ, that he is now, in his spirit, united with Christ on the throne with all enemies under his feet. If we are held in bondage to demons of fear, sickness, disease, or limitation of any kind, it is only through ignorance of what Christ has done for us, or by forgetting who we are in Him.

We can constantly remind ourselves of our identity by affirming:

Because I am a part of Christ, “accepted in the Beloved,” I hold the same place in the Father’s bosom as Christ does. Because I am a part of Him, the Father loves me as much as He loves Christ (see John 17:22-26.) Because I am a part of Christ, I have His wisdom — because He is made wisdom to me. (See I Corinthians 1:30.) Likewise I have His righteousness. My righteousness is as good as His in the eyes of the Father because it is His righteousness. Because I am organically a part of Him, because Head and Body are one unit, all that Christ is and has is accredited to me.

It is the Father’s purpose to make all of the sons as nearly like the Son as it is possible for the finite to be like the Infinite, first in character and then in privilege and power. It is to be not only legal and theoretical, but in essential reality. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And so we should not be like fearful, cringing slaves, but we should behave like God’s very own children… And since we are his children, we will share his treasures — for all God gives to his Son Jesus is now ours too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering” (Romans 8:14, 17, TLB).

From Destined for the Throne by Paul Billheimer