Have you ever been a part of a sports team that wears jerseys with labels on them? Usually a jersey has a team name, logo, and your player number. Some also include your last name and maybe a sponsor name and logo. NASCAR driver uniforms have, perhaps, the most labels of all. We, too, can wear lots of labels, and I’m not talking about clothing company logos. These labels give us identity, but they are not our identity.
What are our labels? Dad, Mom, Grandparent, student, sports player, sports team supporter. Those are positive labels. Sadly there are negative ones too. Failure. Divorced. Sinner. Victim. Criminal. What labels do you wear?
But those labels are not our identity. Instead as we have seen, we are children of God, adopted into his family, made alive to new life in Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, citizens of the Kingdom of God. Let’s allow those identities to inform us and motivate us.
Let me conclude with this reminder from Ephesians 5:1: “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Throughout this Identity series I have been asking you to reflect on who you are, who you REALLY are, who you are in Christ and what that means. It should change how you carry yourself. It should change how you walk into situations. It should change how you relate to co-workers, to family members, to neighbors. We are heirs of the King. We are adopted children of the living God. We have access to all of who he is. He wants to be in relationship with us. We have the Holy Spirit living in us, and we should be desiring to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to be walking in step with him. We should desire to be guided in thought and deed by our identity with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and this past week we were reminded in what Kingdom we have our true citizenship. We have been reminded of where our heart should be turning to for guidance and direction about how we view the world, how we view people, and how we make choices in life.
Commit to stepping into your real identity, to remembering whose you are in a more significant way, to saying “Yes, I carry the Holy Spirit with me, I am an adopted child of God and I want it to change how to make decisions.”
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Amen. Our identity is not found in what we do, but who we are in Christ. All of us do take on many roles, but our foundation is found in the Lord. Otherwise, we lose our self-identity. Blessings!
Agreed! We can get so caught up on how people label us, fixating on what amounts to a false identity. When we are actually made in the image of God!