What Is My Identity in Christ? — Owen on the Indwelling Christ
⏱ 13 min read
There is a question the Christian woman keeps asking, sometimes for years, before she finds the language for it. What is my identity in Christ — and why does it not feel as steady as the verses say it should? She knows the answers. Beloved, chosen, redeemed, hidden with Christ in God. She has heard them since the youth group of her teenage years. The answers have not, somehow, settled into the centre of her in a way that holds when the week goes hard. The identity is doctrinally clear and existentially thin, and she has begun to wonder, quietly, whether the thinness is her fault.
This is the question John Owen — the seventeenth-century Puritan whose three volumes on the Christian’s communion with God are, by common consent, the most patient and probing English-language work ever done on this question — was writing for. Communion with God, published in 1657, is the long unhurried walk into the gap between knowing your identity in Christ and resting in it. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a similar slow form into daily companionship, if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The question what is my identity in Christ deserves a slower reading than the bullet-point version it usually gets.
Owen’s answer, when he gives it, is structural and almost startling. He says the identity you are reaching for is not located inside you at all. It is located in Three — the Father’s eternal love, the Son’s purchased grace, the Spirit’s continuous communion — and the work of the Christian life is not to manufacture the identity but to enter into communion with each of the Three, one at a time, until the identity that has been true of you the whole time slowly becomes the felt centre of you. The identity is older than you. It will outlive your performance. It does not shift when the week goes hard. (For the woman who has been told her need for rest is itself a failure of devotion, what the Bible says about self-care walks the scriptural grounds underneath what Owen is about to say.)
The first passage: the Father seen as love
“Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Owen is naming, in the sober language of a seventeenth-century divine, the precise modern problem of identity in Christ. The Christian woman cannot abide in her own spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. The word want in seventeenth-century English means lack. The soul cannot stay with God because it has not yet seen Him as love, has not had the insight settle in deeply enough that it is the first thing the soul knows about Him. The soul has been knowing terrible majesty — the awe, the holiness, the unsearchable greatness — and majesty without tenderness is a thing the soul will visit but cannot dwell with. Their spirits are not endeared. That phrase is the diagnosis of a hundred Christian women’s dry seasons. The spirit is not yet endeared. The being-loved has not yet become the first thing she knows.
This is the part that re-arranges the whole project of Christian identity. You have been told who you are in Christ in a hundred ways — chosen, redeemed, accepted, made new — and the telling has not produced the endearment. Owen explains why. The endearment does not come from the telling. It comes from the slow gazing — would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old. The verb is eye. The practice is to look at His tenderness toward you long enough, slowly enough, repeatedly enough, that the looking changes the way the soul holds itself. The woman who has looked, daily, for months at the Father’s tenderness toward her begins to walk through her week as a woman whose spirit is endeared. The one who has only been told is the one who knows the answer and cannot rest in it.
Eternal, free love. Owen places those three words at the centre of the first notion the saint should hold of the Father. Eternal — older than you, older than the universe, older than any failure or success of yours. Free — given without precondition, not earned, not contingent on the consistency of your devotional habits or the kindness of your mood. Love — not approval, not tolerance, not even mercy in the narrow sense, but the actual settled inclination of the Father toward you, of the same quality as His eternal inclination toward the Son. The identity you are reaching for is anchored in love of this kind. The performance-based version is anchored in love you have to keep earning. Owen is dismantling the second and offering the first. (For the woman who is at the beginning of this and does not have a page to write the first sentence on, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin is the gentle starting point.)
The second passage: the comfortable persuasion
“To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
This is the sentence that, if you keep it near the page for a year, will do quiet work on you. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Notice the precision of Owen’s verbs. He does not say God in Christ has saved him. He does not say God in Christ accepts him. The verbs are stronger and softer at once: loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him. The Christian woman has been taught, often, that God accepts her — the legal language of justification, the courtroom transaction, the verdict of not guilty. The legal language is true and necessary. Owen is saying it is not the whole of the identity, and it is not the part that endears the soul. The endearment comes when the soul understands not only that God has acquitted her but that He delights in her, that He is well pleased with her, that His thoughts toward her are made of tenderness and kindness. The legal verdict is the floor. The delighted love is the room you actually live in.
This is the part that, for many modern Christian women, has been the missing piece. You have been working at justification — the not guilty — for so long that you have not yet entered into the delighted in. You have been confessing sin diligently and never quite arrived at the gladness on the other side of confession. Owen is saying the gladness is the point. The confession is not the end of the transaction; it is the door into the room in which the Father is already smiling at you. The smile was there before the confession. The confession was the small humility that let you finally walk into the room.
A comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections. That phrase is doing surgical theological work. The word comfortable in Owen’s English does not mean cosy. It means strength-giving, fortifying, that which comforts in the sense of making the soul stronger. And the affecting it throughout means the persuasion is not held only in the intellect — it reaches into the faculties and affections, the deepest layers of the self where the actual identity lives. Owen is not interested in a Christian woman who believes the doctrine and does not feel it. He wants the persuasion to affect — to reach, to move, to change the weather of the inner room. The identity in Christ is not a thing the mind agrees with. It is a thing that, when received, moves through every faculty of the soul.
An inexpressible mercy. Owen ends the passage with the recognition that this kind of persuasion cannot be produced by the soul; it is given. The mercy is not the forgiveness of sins. It is something more interior — the gift of the felt sense that God in Jesus Christ delights in you. The forgiveness has always been objectively true. The felt sense is a separate gift, given when the Father chooses to give it, often after long seasons of dryness. You cannot manufacture it. You can only ask for it and wait for it. The asking and the waiting are the practice. (If the long silence has been the recent shape of your walk, a beginner study Bible for women is the quiet companion for the woman starting back at the beginning without embarrassment.)
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow asking and slow waiting. A short passage each day, room for the response Owen names — the comfortable persuasion slowly settling — and no demand that you produce the felt sense yourself. The asking is yours. The arriving is His.
A somatic for the comfortable persuasion
Pause here. Owen’s seventeenth-century vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where the comfortable persuasion often begins before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put one hand lightly over the centre of your chest, where the sternum sits. Take one slow inhale through the nose. On the exhale, let the hand feel the slight rise and fall of the chest. Now, on the next breath, do not think the words but instead hear them, slowly, in the quiet of your mind: He loves me. He delights in me. He is well pleased with me. His thoughts toward me are made of tenderness and kindness. Each phrase on its own exhale. Not as something to perform, not as a thing to feel. As a slow rehearsal of what Owen says is the saints’ first notion of the Father — said in the body, where the felt sense has its home.
Do this three times. Then take the hand away and continue reading. If nothing has shifted, that is normal. The comfortable persuasion is His to give. The rehearsal is the small daily preparation of the soil. Owen took years to arrive at the felt sense he is describing. The slow body-rehearsal is one of the practices that lets the soil be ready when He chooses to give it.
The third passage: the bosom of God
“The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
This is the smallest of the three passages and the most concentrated. Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The image is older than Owen — it is John’s, from John 1:18, where the only-begotten Son is in the bosom of the Father — but Owen is doing something tender with it. He is saying that the same place the Son is, the soul brought by faith through Christ, and by him is also. Into the bosom of God. Not on the porch of the Father’s house. Not in the front room. Not even at the family table. In the bosom, which in the older English meant the chest, the place where a child is held against the parent’s heart. That is where Owen places the identity of the Christian woman. Not as a theological fact about her on a register somewhere. As an actual location of the soul. In the bosom of God.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that, if she lets it, will reorder her sense of where she lives. You have been trying to reach a place that you have already been brought into. The reaching has been the failure. The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God. The verb is passive. You did not bring yourself. You were brought. The being brought is the work that has already been done for you. Your part is not the bringing. Your part is the resting in the place you have been brought into. There reposes and rests itself.
This re-frames the whole question of identity in Christ in a single clause. What is my identity in Christ? Owen would say: it is the identity of a soul brought, by Christ, into the bosom of the Father, where she now reposes and rests. Not a list of attributes. A location. The attributes — beloved, chosen, redeemed, hidden with Christ — are descriptions of what is true of a soul who lives in that location. They are not the thing you reach by checking them off; they are the natural language of a soul that has, by slow degrees, settled into the place she has already been brought into.
There reposes and rests itself. That is the verb of identity. Not strives. Not performs. Not proves. Reposes. The seventeenth-century word for takes its quiet place and stays. The identity in Christ that Owen is naming is the identity of one who has, finally, taken her quiet place against the Father’s chest and stayed. The week will still go hard. The performance will still wobble. The reposing will not be undone by either, because the location is not contingent on either. (For the practical daily form of the soul that has begun reposing this way, how to bible journal for beginners is the gentle introduction to slow scriptural reading without academic pressure.)
What this identity will look like over a year
Owen’s Communion with God is hundreds of pages long, and he is explicit that the identity he is describing is entered slowly. The first month feels like learning a new vocabulary. The third month, the vocabulary begins to feel less foreign. By the end of the first year, the soul that has been daily gazing — slowly, briefly, often only for five minutes at a time — at the Father’s eternal, free love and the Son’s purchased grace and the Spirit’s continuous communion has moved its centre of gravity. The performance-anchor is still there. It is no longer the primary one. The new anchor is the slow, settled recognition that the identity has been true the whole time, that it was given before you knew to ask for it, that it does not shift when your devotional consistency does, and that the what of what is my identity in Christ is not a list of attributes you have to live up to but a location in the bosom of God that you have, in Christ, already been brought into.
The waves will still come. The reposing will hold differently. (For the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series, see who am I in Christ — Murray on abiding identity and what does it mean to be a child of God — MacDonald on sonship.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the slow gazing Owen names — the small daily eyeing of the Father’s eternal, free love until the comfortable persuasion settles, by His mercy, into the centre of the soul.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Owen’s slow vocabulary — eternal free love, comfortable persuasion, the bosom of God — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question what is my identity in Christ is, at last, ready to stop being answered and start being lived.
