Not ashamed

You have worked through five things that are true of you. You are new. You are free. You are clean. You are his son. And you are royal, with the Spirit himself as the pledge that the inheritance is coming. None of them depend on how you feel on a given morning. They depend on what Jesus did, and he does not change.

The enemy's whole strategy with a new convert is to make you doubt your identity. He tried it with Jesus in the wilderness: "If you are the Son of God" (Matthew 4:3). He will try it with you. When he does, you now have verses, not just feelings. Paul, in a Roman cell, could say: "I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day the deposit I have entrusted to him." You have handed your life to someone who does not lose things.

Jude told the church to "contend for the faith that was once and for all handed on to the saints." That faith is what you have been studying: "the basic teaching about Christ", the foundation Hebrews 6:1-2 describes. Keep contending. Go back through any chapter as often as you need. Teach it to someone newer than you, because nothing settles a truth like explaining it.

And keep doing what the first church did. Devote yourself "to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). You are washed by the blood and sanctified by his Spirit. You have absolutely no need to be ashamed.