A NEW REALITY
Have you ever been so sure of something about your life or yourself that you didn’t even have to think about it, where the “knowing” was just a part of your reality? Or, have you ever connected with something so deeply, such as with knowledge or relationship itself, that it felt like it was actually a part of you, rather than something external or separate?
Have you ever had any one of those very things ripped from you, tragically and shockingly, as though to reveal that those very things were not at all what you ever thought or believed with such confidence that they were? Was your reality stolen before your very eyes? Did that “stolen-ness” become your new reality, and have you come to understand that reality itself can no longer be defined the same way at all?
IDENTITY TRANSCENDS BIOLOGY
If you resonate with the above in any way, then you understand what it’s like to have an identity, perhaps without even associating with that word, and you know what it’s like to lose that identity, standing mentally naked before a world you no longer understand or relate to.
Our identity was never meant to be shaped by the world, by society or culture. The fact is, identity runs far deeper than culture or societal norms, anyway. Our identity isn’t something we’ll find on a DNA test. We can’t trace our identity the way we can trace biological entities. We can know this by the way we still have our beliefs and perspectives, our morality and our very understanding of reality without ever involving blood or DNA.
FAITH-BASED REFLECTION
Sometimes I’ll recall the way I used to think while I was an unbeliever. The purpose of the recall is to examine where I am at the time of reflection in relation to where I once was; to examine myself internally—spiritually, mentally and emotionally—and to reflect on the way my faith life has moved me this way or that.
My identity, particularly while I was an unbeliever, was rooted in finding the feeling of being loved. I’m not saying every unbeliever’s identity is rooted in that grounding, but mine certainly was. My wound was feeling unloved, lost, and unimportant as a result my parents’ divorce, other personal relationship wounds, and many difficult changes that took place in my adolescence. Much loss.
ONLY THE SPIRIT CAN DETECT IT
Loss is actually a relevant and sobering reminder that we do indeed have an identity, and that the nature of identity has nothing to do with biology. It has to do with the soul, which also is not detected in DNA, blood work, or any other man-made enterprise designed to see what the human eye cannot. Our identity is so complex and esoteric that nothing can pick up on it but the spirit, itself.
PLIABLE AND SURE
Our identity, when it’s not rooted in Christ (as I came to discover later on), can be sure as metal but still pliable if hot: it can be bent out of its original form by constant badgering. And then even further is that when cooled, its new shape is permanently ossified.
When trauma, sin and rebellion bends us out of our God-given identity, many of us tend to cool while in our devastated state. Our previous identity seems gone and shattered as a result of worldly warfare (trauma and suffering), and now we’re trying to find out who we are after we were already someone to begin with.
HEALED AND REFINED
The world would have us believe our identity isn’t given to us, but that we choose it for ourselves. And the ironic part of Christianity is that (spoiler alert) our truest, most fulfilling identity is discovered when we use our God-given gift of free will to be humbled by the truth of Christ in faith, and ask for our damaged identity to be healed and refined by God into what He predestined before the world was ever formed (Ephesians 1:4); before we were ever knit together in our mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5).
How many of us have let ourselves be cooled into the shape of a torn, traumatized, misery-stricken individual? How many of us live inside the mentality that this dreadful manner of existence is our final form? That’s only the devil talking to you.
FIRE WITHOUT FAITH
If all the hot metal needed was to cool to retain its new damaged form, then to be refined again we must be willing to be placed in the holy fire of God to reshape us further into what He created us for in the first place; to chip away what the world has added to us in vain.
God’s refining fire, when we’re not seeking Him, feels like an unfair life of challenge after challenge, attack after attack, always thinking the world is just unfair and life is just hard. But really it’s God trying to redirect our attention solely back to Him so He can prepare us to be the people He’s called us to be in His Kingdom.
DYING TO OURSELVES POINTS TO A DEEPER IDENTITY
Broken, misshapen people don’t make it into His Kingdom by continuing to listen to a broken world that keeps them broken. We find His Kingdom by desiring the Lord before anything or anyone; by following the narrow gate and by humbling ourselves to be empowered by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 7:13-14).
When Jesus told us we must die to ourselves, to pick up our cross and follow Him, that to lose our lives for His name’s sake is to gain it (Matthew 16:24-25)—all of this points to our identity. We die to our world-based identity to become alive in His Kingdom-based identity.
PRACTICING LIVING LIKE KINGDOM CITIZENS
We die to our trauma and to the shattering of an identity that we thought was actually us, to then become alive in God’s healed version of who we are in Christ, prepared and aimed at blessing others in the name of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:22).
We die to our flesh so we can live by how the Holy Spirit moves in and through us. The only way to truly live is to recognize how living for the thrills and ecstasies of a dying world is killing our soul, but to live for an eternal Kingdom is to seek and practice living like citizens there while still physically here; to prioritize a life not yet fully realized by placing our faith in knowing Jesus Christ has gone to prepare a place for us, that where He is we will be also (John 14:3).
ENTITLEMENTS AND REMINDERS OF PURPOSE
The experiences that led us to understand our need for Jesus’ healing are reminders of a fallen world, which can work as an incentive to feel entitled to believe we deserve good things as a result of having experienced bad things, or oppositely, those painful experiences can be reminders that the world we live in is temporary and its purpose is to guide us to desire to see God working in us and our lives, and to learn to desire and seek God first.
Putting it differently, our pain is either going to push us towards feeling like the world owes us, or it’s going to motivate us to seek out God (whom the world tells us doesn’t exist, or that if He does exist that He isn’t to be trusted) who the Bible tells us has a plan to “prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11) The Bible says God is to be trusted, that He does exist, and that it’s actually the devil who would have us believe the opposite in order to manipulate and influence us to live a life that leads to eternal destruction.
WE WERE WARNED
Which perspective will we embrace as our identity—that pain is evidence of God’s nonexistence or divine corruption, or that suffering is a reason to seek God more because we’ve been warned of an adversary who prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8)? Either way, our identity will eventually cool in place, and our life’s fruit will reveal to the world who we worship.
Eventually, everyone will know if we died to ourselves, or if we clung onto lies and subtle deceptions for our own sake.
INHERITING WHAT WE DON’T DESERVE
In contrast, living a life of seeking God first prepares us to bring into eternity all that we grew into through faith in believing that the most real of all realities is to be with the God from whom we all come; choosing the name of Jesus Christ who died to pay for our sins so that our identity could inherit everything it didn’t deserve through the favor of God through grace.
That’s the Christian identity. But have have to die to ourselves before we’re ready to embrace it as our own.
THE PART OF US WHERE GOD BELONGS
We are called to more than suffering in this life. We are called to encompass an identity transcendent of anything the world could ever offer, and we’re called to this simply because God is loving, merciful, and full of grace. The fact that He sent His Son to take our place explicitly revealed those very attributes! We only need to say yes to His invitation so we could become whole in Him, emptying ourselves of a life that is actually consuming the part of us where He belongs.
RIDDING OURSELVES OF WHAT’S FAMILIAR
By putting on Christ, we rid ourselves of who or what the world is telling us we are, even in the face of hatred, opposition, demonic oppression, and the principalities of darkness in the unseen realm (Ephesians 6:12). We rid ourselves of an identity that tells us we are ashamed, hurt, afraid, or that we should live whatever way we want to, and we are to step into an identity of forgiveness, grace, love, humbleness, compassion, and purpose.
Only by ridding ourselves of the familiar and the comfortable do we have the space in our spirit to embrace what God has to fill us with more of Himself.
THE CHOICES THAT MAKE US MOST LIKE HIM
To truly live while we’re here on this earth, we have to make the choice, daily, to die to who we want to be in this world in order to live into what God wants for us to be, for Him.
We have to do this repeatedly, day after day, decision after decision, so we can have the mentality and heart posture of someone ready to glorify God with every fiber of our being for all eternity. This doesn’t mean we must be perfect here and now, because that’s impossible. Besides, we wouldn’t need Jesus if we could be perfect. But we need Jesus because we’ll never be perfect without what God can do in us through Him.
IN JESUS WE FIND OURSELVES THE WAY HE INTENDED
When we rid ourselves of the identity the world gives us (or when God allows it to be taken away), we learn to be tired of living in a manner where the world distracts us from recognizing God’s gifts and blessings surrounding our every day life. We grow tired of holding onto the past when God already knows the future and is ready to walk us through to the very end. When we’re so tired, and once we’re so fed up with a broken world trying to feed us crumbs, we fall to the foot of the cross in our hearts, where Jesus tells us He will give us rest.
Why listen to a world confused with its own identity when Jesus is more sure of who we really are than we are of ourselves? If we are genuinely seeking truth, we’ll end up finding the presence of God, the intercession of the Holy Spirit, and the light of Christ. There, we will find our identity unbroken, in its fullness, replete with purpose, value, and eternal life.
I pray this truth would become illuminated in every one of you, in the name of Jesus, amen!
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