IDENTITY

Who are you? Who, who, who, who? This is the famous line in a song by the band with the same name, The Who.

According to Eastern religions, “you” are an illusion because the self is simply one of the last great illusions to overcome before you become enlightened enough to realize that you are really a part of some huge interconnected, divine blob that includes everyone else also. (I don’t think they use the term blob in their official version of this teaching.)

However, we are given a very different understanding of identity in the Bible. We are not one with God or nature or with each other. God was the one who gave Adam his name. He also renamed Abram to Abraham, and He changed Jacob’s name to Israel. God does not only assign us individual names, but he knows us from our mother’s womb. He knows every detail about our environment we are born into, our genetic make up down to the last strand of DNA, our thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs, attitudes, our favorite flavor of ice cream, and our favorite song. In short, God knows us better than we could ever know ourselves and certainly better than anyone else could know us.

Why then do we seem so willing to surrender our identity to those around us throughout our lives? We are willing to believe we are who they say we are. Depending on who “they” are, this common practice can be truly devastating to a person’s life. Even if “they” are loving and clear headed believers who love God and you, we are not to surrender this power to truly define who we are to “them.”

Here is another tricky one that you may have never thought of before. You are also unqualified to be the ultimate determiner of who you truly are. I know you are more familiar with your environment, genetics, thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs, attitudes, ice cream picks, and songs than anyone else(except God, of course). However, as profound as these things all are, even they do not ultimately define you. No, even your genetic make up DOES NOT define you. What does then? You ask. Ahhh….. I suspect you see where I’m going with this. Yep, God is the only true source of your identity. He gave you an identity, and He alone can fundamentally transform you into a different identity in mid stream like when he turned Jacob into Israel. Ultimately, we are guilty of doing the same thing that “they” do when trying to define our identity, we limit what it could be instead of pursuing God and discovering what He says it WILL BE. This is not to remove our role and responsibility in forming our identity, but we will never truly know the full purpose that God has for our identity until we release control of defining ourselves and allow Him to shape us.