I felt in my studies and preparation for the coming week of this new Youth Ministry we’ve kind of jumped into at church, I wanted to explore the concept of identity. It really is a concept that is hard to grasp no matter how many times you hear or read about it, so I thought I would just flesh out a little bit of what I’ve learned from this first week’s experience.
1. I’ve always said that our own eyes are not necessarily the best eyes with which we can look at ourselves or even at others. We all wear difference lenses through which we perceive everything around us. There is the element of our cultural lens, but beyond that is our personality. An overly negative view of the world is no more realistic than an overly positive view. What does that have to do with identity? Part of our discovery about who WE are, a large part in fact, is about finding out who God is. It is hard to see as another person sees if you don’t know that person. But, as was mentioned in Eric Mason’s study on Identity, God is the sculptor, and the rock can’t necessarily know what it will become until the sculptor removes everything that is NOT us. We cannot see who we are until we look through the sculptor’s lens, which requires knowing who that sculptor is.
2. It’s not who we think. Eric Mason’s study also touched on 1 Samuel 16 and got me to thinking about not only this lesson, but other people I’ve been studying about with Audrey. 1 Samuel 16:6-7 says, “ 6 So it happened, when they had come, he looked at Eliab [the eldest son] and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before Him.” 7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees; for man looks [b]at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
Who we are, and who others are, is rarely who we think. There’s something about identity that often we try to shape ourselves according to what’s “normal” or expected, and yet God rarely uses the person expected to be used. David wasn’t the biggest, Jesus was fairly plain-looking. Yet if I as a leader, or if each person as a friend and Christian, were to see what God sees in each person, the potential and hope and love that He has, what could that spark in that person?
I’ve so much more to study on the topic and we’ll be taking this in a variety of directions, but I wanted to finish with something that just clicked tonight:
3. How many of these “chosen” people do we see in the Bible saw themselves the way that we see them now? If we look at each story of a leader we see people flawed, filled with doubts and weaknesses. However, their identity was greater than a personal identity, greater than just trying to figure out “Who am I.” Few of them, if any, knew their function in the larger scheme of things, but they now have a historical identity, each unique in their characteristics and in how God used them. So I would say this is our starting point:
Our identity starts with God and his purpose for our lives. He is the sculptor, the composer of our lifesong, and we are the masterpiece. What has to get out of the way for our true selves to be revealed?