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March 23, 2026

Your Identity in Christ

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, and happy day. This is Dr. MaryAnn Diorio, novelist and life coach, welcoming you to Winning with the Word. Today, we’re going to be talking about a topic that is very dear to my heart, and it is your identity in Christ.

Do you know that knowing and understanding and grasping your identity in Christ is foundational to living the abundant life that Jesus Christ died to give you? Yes, He died and rose from the dead so that you might have life and life more abundantly. Isn’t that what He said in John 10, verse 10? “I have come to give you life, and life more abundantly?”

But if you look around, most Christians are not living the abundant life. They are living defeated lives, lives of anxiety, worry, fear, sickness, all kinds of evil things from which the Lord Jesus delivered us. But the key is that we have to learn first who we are in Christ, and then we have to learn how to live above the circumstances of life. That is the way Jesus lived when He walked the earth. And Scripture says, as He is, so are we.

On this earth, we are like Jesus. We are to live as He lived, operate as He operated, according to the spirit and not to the flesh. But you see, my friend, most people do not live that way because they do not know who they are in Christ.

Maybe you are one of them. I used to be one of them. But I got into the Word, and I began to see that I had believed some lies that were holding me back and keeping me from living the abundant life.

So today we’re going to talk about how to live that abundant life. And it starts, first of all, with knowing who we are in Christ. If you have your Bibles, I’m going to read a passage from Psalm 139, which is a Psalm that David wrote.

Godʼs Design

And in that Psalm, there is a passage that starts at verse 13, and it goes to verse 18. And it is a foundational passage about who you are. I want you to read this and take it to heart. Listen carefully to what the Lord is speaking to you. As you read it, picture God speaking directly to you. I’m going to be reading from the New Living Translation.

“You made all the delicate inner parts of my body and knit them together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex. It is amazing to think about your workmanship. Your workmanship is marvelous and how well I know it. You were there while I was being formed in utter seclusion. You saw me before I was scheduled, or excuse me, before I was born, and you scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book. How precious it is, Lord, to realize that You are thinking about me constantly. I can’t even count how many times a day your thoughts turn toward me. And when I wake in the morning, You are still thinking of me.“

Let that sink in. Let’s go back and take this verse by verse.

“You made all the delicate inner parts of my body and knit them together in my mother’s womb.” Do you know that God was there making you inside your mother’s womb? She was giving her body so He could create your physical body.

But God was creating your spirit and your soul at the same time. He was putting together all those physical parts of your body in utter seclusion, it says, hidden from anyone else. It makes you look at a pregnant woman with a great deal of respect and honor and awe to think that inside of her, God is creating a human being into whom he breathed a spirit and a soul.

And you were one of those human beings. God knit you together in your mother’s womb. He made you wonderfully complex. You’re a complicated person. I think you know that without my telling you. We are all complicated, aren’t we?

There are so many parts of us. Just looking at the human body is amazing. My husband is a retired physician, and when we discuss the human body, it is fantastic.
How God put it together. And for a physician who has studied the body and seen its inward parts, it’s even more stunning and awesome.

“Your workmanship is marvelous, and how well I know it. You were there while I was being formed in utter seclusion. You saw me before I was born.” Do you know that God has always wanted to create you? You were in His mind before you were in your mother’s body. You were always in His mind because God is eternal. There is no time with Him.

And the Word says here He scheduled each day of your life before you began to breathe. So you came with a ready-made calendar, right? God created and scheduled each day of your life. What does that mean? That means, as the Word says in another passage, that He ordained you to do good works every day of your life. He made you for a good purpose, to do good things.

And He had it planned that way way back then. He had already planned for you to have days filled with good things, and for you to do good things every day.

“Every day was recorded in Your book.” Do you know God has a book for you? Your mother may have a photograph album for you, or a scrapbook, but God has a book for you too. And in that book is written everything about His plans for you.

Every day of your life is recorded in that book. And God keeps a record for you. Don’t you want good things to be recorded in that book?

I do. But like everyone else, I have some bad things recorded in that book, which I regret, which I did before I knew Jesus. But God is merciful and forgiving, and He wipes away all our sin.

How precious it is, Lord, to realize that You are thinking about me constantly. I can’t even count how many days Your thoughts, how many times a day Your thoughts turn towards me. And when I waken in the morning, You are still thinking of me.

Do You realize that the Lord is thinking about you every moment of every day? You might say, well, how can He do that? Doesn’t He have to think about other people?
Well, that’s the thing about God. He’s everywhere and can do that. He’s God, and He can do that.”

And He thinks about you all the time. He cares about you. In Zephaniah 3, verse 17, the Bible says that God delights over you. He sings over you. Imagine that. But maybe that’s not the picture you have of God in your heart. You know, children get their image of God from their earthly fathers. And perhaps you had a very difficult situation with your earthly father. Perhaps you didn’t know your earthly father. Perhaps He was absent from your life. Perhaps you were abused by your earthly father. But whatever the case may be, what really matters is that you now have a Heavenly Father who is a perfect Father.

Our human fathers were not perfect. That was hard for us to believe. I know it was hard for me the day I recognized that my parents were flawed.

But that’s part of growing up, isn’t it? But you have a Heavenly Father Who loves you deeply, Who cares about every detail of your life, and Who is waiting for you to come to him and talk with him every day. And I’m speaking to you, dear fellow believers, so many times we become so busy that we forget God, and yet He’s waiting there, longing to hear our voices, longing to talk with us.

So part of our identity in Christ is to recognize that if we are born again, we are now righteous. What does that mean? It means we are in right standing with God. It means that He no longer counts our sin against us, because we are in Christ, and Jesus paid the price for our sins. But if you pay attention to what Christians say, as I like to do, so many of them do not understand this concept. They walk around saying things like, well, I’m just a sinner saved by grace, or I’m a worm, or I am just inferior. I am not worthy. Those kinds of things applied before we were born again. But once we accept Jesus Christ, we become new creations.

The Bible tells us that if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, a new creature. He is new on the inside. Old things have passed away. All things have become new. Therefore, perhaps I can explain it this way. When we were sinners before we were born again, we were plugged into sin and everything that goes with sin.

It’s like putting a plug in the wall. When you put a plug in your outlet on the wall, electricity flows through and lights your lamp when you turn on the switch. So what comes out of that, into the plug and into your lamp is electricity.

Well, when we were plugged into the old nature, the sin nature, all that could flow into us was sin. You might say, well, why? Because of the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

You know, before I got saved, I used to get angry at Adam and Eve, and I used to tell God, why do I have to pay the price for what they did? I don’t even know them. And now I laugh at it, and I’m sure the Lord laughed at that time.

But you see, this is what happened. Adam and Eve were created perfect, and they lived in a perfect environment. But God gave them a command not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, and that tree was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God did not want them to experience evil. He wanted them to eat of the Tree of Life, and they would experience only life. That was God’s original plan for them.

But He gave them a free will, and Satan came along, and he posed the question to Eve that he is still posing today to people everywhere. And that question is, did God really say? What did Satan do?

He planted a seed of doubt in Eve’s ear and in her heart. And she chose to believe what Satan said over what God said. Big mistake. And Adam did the same thing. And he could have stopped her, but he didn’t. He put her above God, which is something a husband should never do.

______ure, a nature from which life had departed. In other words, they pulled the plug out of life, and they plugged themselves into sin. God put them out of the garden. It was a great act of mercy. Why? Because if they had remained un-eaten of the Tree of Life, they would have lived forever in a corrupted nature.

There would have been no hope of salvation for them. Look how good our God is, how merciful! So Adam and Eve passed on only the sin nature, and that’s what we received.
So when we are born into this physical earth, we are born unplugged from God. A lot of people call it original sin. We are born unplugged from God in a state of sin.

Now, the important thing is that we need to switch plugs, but we often don’t do that until we are at the end of our rope. Now, Jesus saw that man was now in a bad state. He couldn’t ever save himself, and he was stuck.

But God loved us so much that He sent Jesus to take the punishment for sin in our place. You might say, well, why couldn’t man pay the price? I’ll tell you why.
Man is not perfect. He was not perfect. He was in a sinful state.

God is perfect. And the price to be paid to a perfect God has to be a perfect price paid by a perfect person. And Jesus Christ was the only perfect person to pay that price.
But you see, he had to become a man. Now, when he came to this earth as a man, he was fully man, but he was also fully God. So as a man, He could be our substitute.

Gift of Salvation

He represented us in paying the price to God. As God, He was perfect and could pay the perfect price. And that’s exactly what Jesus did. Then, after He rose from the dead, He offered this gift of salvation for which He paid the ultimate price. He offered it to us as a gift. And all we have to do is receive it.

Now, lots of people try to earn their way to receive the gift of salvation, to go to Heaven. But it is impossible, dear one. And, you know, I believed that for a very long time. I believed that I had to do good works to earn my way to Heaven.

And one day, when I was in my late teens, I asked a priest, “How will I know if I have done enough good works to get into Heaven? Because I was thinking, imagine if I get there and miss it by one. What a tragedy that would be.

Well, the priest said to me, “You can’t know until after you die.” I looked at him stunned.
I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me! I am not willing to take that risk. That is too scary.”Because if I find out after I die that I’ve not done enough works and I didn’t make it, there’s no turning back. Well, that really, really troubled me. And I began to seek answers from the Lord.

I said, “Lord, I’ve got to be missing something here because this doesn’t make any sense.” And remember, I wasn’t saved at this point. I knew there was a God. And the Lord started sending people to me to tell me about being born again. Now, this is all part of our identity in Christ. Okay, we’re still on topic here.

And the first time I heard that term, I didn’t understand what it meant. But as I heard more and more people talking to me about being born again and encouraging me to read the Bible, I did just that. I got a Bible, and I opened to Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 8 and 9.

My friend, salvation is a gift, a pure gift. And once we receive it, we unplug from the sin nature, and we plug in to righteousness, which is the nature of Jesus Christ.

Now, if you were born again, you have Christ inside of you, and you have everything He is. As He is, so are you in this world. Well, is Christ sick? No. Is Christ worried? No. Is Christ anxious or fearful? No. Then you need not be either, because that’s part of your old nature.

That’s part of the nature that was plugged into sin. Sin has consequences. Those consequences and effects are worry, fear, anxiety, hopelessness, despair, anger, every evil thing comes from sin. That is the root. And when Jesus died for you and me and rose from the dead, He removed evil from the root. That’s why we are new creations.
We have a new source now. That source is not evil. That source is the life of Christ.
And everything He is, we are. But the problem is we have to believe that. We have to live it out by faith.

“to your spirit. I like to picture an oasis there with water, and Jesus is sitting there, and I go and sit beside Him and I speak with Him, and I draw from Him what I need.
He will give you whatever you need. Freedom is inside of you. Freedom from fear is inside of you in Jesus.

Freedom from worry. Freedom from sickness. Freedom from financial problems.
It’s inside of you in Jesus Christ. And that’s what we need to learn to understand about who we are in Christ. We are no longer the old person we were.
We have unplugged from that. Jesus unplugged us from that when He gave us the gift of salvation that we accepted. Now today, there may be some of you watching this program, who really don’t understand what it means to be born again, who have never accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior.

Call to Action

If that’s where you are, I want to invite you to make the decision today to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord. Just pray this simple prayer with me. If something is staring inside you and you’re thinking, Dr. Mary Ann, I want this istening to what Dr. MaryAnn has been saying, and my life doesn’t look like the abundant life you want me to have, but I want that life, and I get that life when I get You because You are that life.
So I invite You now to come into my life. I repent of my sin. I turn away from evil, and I receive You now as my Savior and my Lord. Make of me what You created me to be. Amen. If You prayed that prayer, welcome to the family of God.”

Write to me at drmaryann at maryanndiorio.com, and I will send you a free PDF booklet titled After You’re Born Again. And this booklet will help you to begin your walk with Jesus Christ. I also want to share with you another book that I have written, and it is called You Were Made For Greatness.

I don’t know if you can see that up there or if it looks backwards. But this book is all about your identity in Christ, who you are in Him. In the pages of this book, you will learn how to experience Jesus Christ as the Source of abundant life living. ” “ible, I urge you to get yourself a Bible. It’s the most important book you will ever own, and you will ever study. Read it. Study it. Find a good church that teaches the Word of God without compromise and attend regularly. Especially as these days grow darker, the Lord commanded us not to forsake assembly and gathering together, especially as the days grow darker, and they certainly are.

We will be discussing more of that in the future in relationship to our identity with Christ. Until next time, remember that God loves you just as you are and just where you are. And He doesn’t want you to stay that way. He wants to help you to grow in Jesus Christ. And as you study the Word and pray and fellowship, you will find that you are beginning really to win with the Word. And winning with the Word is my goal for you, because only through the Word of God can we truly win at life.

For additional resources, I invite you to visit my website at maryandiorio.com. That’s maryandiorio.com. And don’t forget to write to me if you were born again today.”“The Bible says that when one person comes to Christ, all the angels of heaven are rejoicing. So if you prayed that prayer today, the angels up in heaven are having a party over you. So remember that God loves you, I love you, and Lord willing, we will see you next time.

Copyright 2026 by MaryAnn Diorio, PhD. All Rights Reserved.