Since I have been on the race, the Lord is constantly teaching me new lessons and broadening my perspective on life. One theme that is common on the race is identity. It’s this concept of finding ourselves, conquering our insecurities, and walking with boldness- securely rooted in who we were created to be. However, something the Lord showed me this month was while our identity is a huge part of our journey with the Lord, it’s not meant to be the object of our pursuit.
Sometimes we get so caught up in finding ourselves that we stop looking for God. The object of our pursuit is not our identity, it’s the Lord. And it’s in the process of seeking His face and His heart that we find our identity.
“For in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form, and in CHRIST you have been brought to fullness.” Colossians 2:9-10
After all, if our identity is in Christ, it’s not something we need to pursue apart from pursuing Him. If we want to know who we are, we must stop looking at ourselves in the mirror and start looking at who He is instead. In 1 John 3:1-2 it says,
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.”
Therefore, if the world can’t fully know us unless they know Him, how can we then know ourselves if we don’t bother to know Him either. We will always be searching for our identity if that is the only thing we are searching for.
We have this tendency to take a microscope and analyze our lives. Is it possible that we can be so introspective that we are actually just self-absorbed? Could you imagine what life would look like if we actually kept our gaze on the Lord. If we stopped looking down at ourselves and looked up for once. Where we choose to fix our eyes will determine our perspective, and if we only choose to look at ourselves, our perspective will be limited.
It’s so easy to go through life as self-serving Christians. We are so focused on figuring out where we should live, work, go to school, go to church, what we need to do better at, what we are good at, what our “ultimate” calling is etc. But God isn’t waiting for us to find all of our answers to move. He doesn’t need us and He will move with or without us. We can either dwell on all of these questions we think are important to our own lives and remain focused inward, or we can lift up our heads to gain a heavenly perspective. The Holy Spirit is always moving, and when we start fixing our eyes on the Lord, our focus begins to change. We start asking God questions like, “What is your heart? Where and how are you moving right now? How can I come alongside you for your kingdom today?” It becomes more about where we are now and being engaged where our feet are in the moment instead of something in the future that can’t actually be touched yet. We were designed for intimacy with the Father and to bring the Kingdom wherever the Lord has us in the moment. It’s in the moment that we experience Him and join Him in what He is doing. So instead of finding ourselves, conquering our insecurities, and walking with boldness- securely rooted in who we were created to be; let’s just seek Him and let the rest unfold in the process. It’s all about Him. All of it- always.
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. “ Acts 17:24-28
