“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1: 4-5
Who are you?
It can be the most daunting question.
You start to answer with an explanation about your job. “Okay that’s what you do but who are you?” Your stomach drops and you begin to describe your relationships—a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a friend, an athlete, an artist, a singer, a writer, etc.
“But who ARE you?”
With a deep sigh, you confess, “I don’t know who I am.”
Ah, finally we can start.
It takes humility AND courage to begin this journey. It takes willingness, persistence, and resilience to dig deeper and deeper in order to capture the very clarity of who you are.
This is so that you can see yourself the way that Papa God sees you and discover what you were born for. You will find your place at the Father’s table among the 7.8 billion people in this world.
The world has been labeling you your whole life, trying to fit you into a box and even labeling you by your sin. But faith has given you a new name!
One of my favorite authors, John Eldredge, said, “I dare say we have heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor.” What he’s describing here is what if your starting place was glory and not sin?
Imagine yourself living your life, knowing the uniqueness and the rarity of you, living a lifestyle of glory in everything that you do and everything that you say and people seeing who God is because you reflect His image.
When you realize how valuable you are, you add value to everybody else everywhere you go! You are an amazing miracle that the world around you is waiting to see revealed. How does it feel to imagine walking into a room full of confidence, head held high, because you know your value?
But beloved, many voices will try to tell who you are. And your circumstances will try to inform you of who God is.
It is crucial that you carve out time to attune your ears to your Father. In order to know your value, you need to spend time asking the Father how he sees you and listen.
Listen to your Father sing over you. Listen to the conversation the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are having about you, about how much they love you, what they adore about you, and what they like about you. They are a healthy family. Listening in on their conversations about you is not scary because they are not speaking ill of you, betraying you, or cutting you down behind your back.
When we are talking about God, the word “God” is the word “Elohim”. It’s a plural word. So Genesis 1 says “In the beginning, God…” In the beginning, there was a Father, there was a Son and there was a Holy Spirit. In the beginning, there was a family and they had this brilliant idea to make man in their image.
God is love and his love is the very super glue that you find in the beginning. You see the way that the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Spirit, the Spirit loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. They are totally one.
You will find from the division that you feel, perhaps in your mind or in your heart, it is going to be changed when you realize that at the family table, in the beginning, you were there.
When you are entering into this beautiful dance of love; when you love you the way that Papa God loves you, just as He did in the beginning, you’ll see that honor is what love looks like. The way the Father honors the Son and the Son honors the Spirit; the Spirit honors the Son, and the Son honors the Father. That’s how the Father also honors you. It’s actually what you are in glory.
Before sin came in, before there was any shame, before there was any guilt, before there was anything, there was this perfect love. You were formed in that perfect love and part of the journey to identity is for you to gain clarity about the original intention of what Papa God has for you.
Who are you?
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