Identity

If I were to ask someone from your school what makes you "you", how would they respond?

What if I asked someone from church?

Your parents?

Obviously the responses would be a little different depending on who was asked. These questions get at your identity. In a time when so many false identities are being presented for you to follow, it is important to recognize who you really are. I was asked durung my first few weeks of college (go JBU!) what I would like people to say about me once I graduated. There were many things that came to my mind. Did I want to be popular, respected (those two can be very different things), admired, desired, behind the scenes, upfront, etc? I talked about it for a while with my roomate (Gundy, for those of you who met him at CHIC) and we came to a similar conclusion that our identity must point people towards Christ. If our identity is found in Him, we receive a real sense of value. There is a lot of responsibility involved with it as well. I had a friend in high school that refused to put the Jesus fish on his car because they people might judge Christianity by his driving, he was being funny, but its sort of true. When people identify us as Christians, we do represent Him. We could really shock some people if we represent Him well. A few months ago I was with some students driving to Manchvegas from Nashua, we pulled up to a toll booth blaring music. The woman at the toll booth looked very annoyed as we pulled up, however, as we got closer and she realized we were blaring classical music her whole attitude changed. Its that kind of thing that can occur when we take our identity as Christians seriously. People might stop viewing the Church as judgmental and start seeing the real love that is should be present.

Ask yourself the questions at the beginning of this post.

If someone asks you who you are, does your identity go beyond your name?