Identity Part 3: Fighting for Your Identity

So here's what I challenged my students to do this week, and I'll invite you in on this as well.

Take a note card or a journal with you for the next 2-3 days, maybe longer if you need it. Begin to really listen to the voices in your head and write them down. What are the doubts or fears or judgments or anxieties or burdens that they speak to you? Jot all of them down over the course of the next several days. Begin to be in tune to the stuff that goes on just beneath the surface that actually drives more of your life than you currently are aware of. Bringing that stuff to the light is the first step towards being able to live truly freely.

After a couple of days of capturing these voices on paper, step back and evaluate them. What do these voices tell you about what it takes for you to be valuable or successful? What are the places of particular anxiety or pride or stress? Are there some repeated patterns? What are the names that you've given to yourself? Where do those names come from?

Looking at my voices, it's not that my identity is in one particular place, it's that it's clearly based in how I perform, mostly in relation to people. That's where I'm tempted to draw my identity from. So your voices might not point you to the specific place where you're currently drawing your identity from, but they will reveal to you perhaps the bigger pattern that needs to be addressed.

After several days of capturing these voices in a journal or on a notecard, and once you've done some initial evaluation of what that might mean, it's time to look at Scripture. The Greek word for "repentance" in the NT means literally "to change your mind." This is what needs to happen. The Lord needs to change your mind about who you are and what voices get to define you.

Read Romans 1-8 and all of Galatians, and make a new list: write down all of the names and titles that God gives to his people. What does the Scripture say about who you are, now that you are in Christ? These are your new names, your real new names, that have been offered to you free of charge in your union with Christ. This is your identity. All you have to do is live into that list, and ask the Lord to help you let go of your current list. To put off the old self and put on this new self, as Paul often puts it.

I'm praying for my students now as several of them have told me that they're doing this exercise this week. Praying that our identity found in Christ might free them (and me) to live life the way that we all intuitively long for but so few of us actually find.