Therefore, unless a person is making progress towards Christlikeness, he cannot be called a Christian. He may have been in the church for quite a while; that is not the issue. The issue is how much of the church has he allowed Christ to form into him? The answer to that question describes a church-goer's current identity. Even though positionally, scripture says you are seated with Christ in heavenly places, far above principalities and powers (Eph 2:6), your walk with Christ determines your spiritual estate at any particular time.

In 1 Samuel 13:13-14, we read the story of the rejection of Saul by the Lord. In that statement by Prophet Samuel, we find God giving a tlint about the replacement he had found for Saul. How did God describe that replacement?

And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the LORD thy God, which he commanded thee: for now would the LORD have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever. But now thy kingdom shall not continue: the LORD hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the LORD hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the LORD commanded thee.

1 Samuel 13:13-14
In other words, the man whom God has chosen to replace Saul was the man after God's own heart. We later learnt that this was David, but what mattered to God was the heart. David's qualifying mark should interest us as we look for the true meaning of the Christian identity. David was not perfect, definitely, but he was certainly under construction. And he was yielded to the Builder, unlike the rebellious Saul. We saw a classic example of this state of the heart in their