Identity – Sunday, February 28, 1982
There is a question that haunts every human being, and it is “Who am 1?” Sometimes it wears other faces like, ” Am I competent? Am I loved? Am I worthwhile?” But it rarely disappears altogether. And it is a question we each ask as life brings us our varied situations.
But in that ongoing struggle to find ourselves and feel good about what we find we are likely to make some mistakes. One is to define ourselves solely by what we do, and what we do is transient as the wind as life forces unsuspected changes on us. One day we are children, the next day adults. One day we have a certain job, the next day technology has rendered it obsolete. One day we can handle a task competently, the next illness or increased responsibilities make us lose control.
Others of us jeopardize our identity by basing it on how others respond to us. We stand vulnerable and afraid upon life’s stages, waiting for applause and if it doesn’t come, we are crushed and broken. “I am only who you think I am,” we say with pleading eyes, the center of our lives in the careless hands of others.
Discovering who we are, by our own definition, may be life’s most important task. Vincent Van Gogh said, “Sometimes I feel more like myself.”1 And feeling more like ourselves, may be the best safeguard against misery. Nothing is more painful than feeling lost, doubting our abilities, being at the mercy of another’s view of us.
That is Satan’s best tool against us, and it is the same tool he tried to use against the Savior when Christ had been fasting forty days upon the mount. How subtle for Satan to suggest to Him, “If thou be the Son of God command that these stones be made bread.”2 That taunting “If.” The temptation was not just to His hunger. Far more it was to His identity to make Him doubt He was the Son of God.
The same tool is used to defeat us. We hear, “If you are worthwhile.” “If you are a good person.” “If you are who you think you are.”
But we can defeat that taunting “If’ and the best place to do it is on our knees, the Lord revealing to us who we are and always have been. We are myopic, caught here in the darkness of mortality, but He can see. And His view is the long view. “Who am 1?” we asked, and the world gives mixed answers. But the Lord will affirm that we are each different and each, like the rest of His creation, “good.”
1 As quoted in The Creative Process, Ghiselin, Brewster, Ed. Mentor Book. Pg. 54.
2 Matthew 4:3
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February 28, 1982
Broadcast Number 2,741