Who Am I?

Imagine you are at a funeral. Family, friends, colleagues, and church family have all gathered. But the funeral is yours. What would these people say about you? More to the point, what would you want them to say?

Think about it honestly. What kind of husband or wife, father or mother would you want their words to reflect? What kind of son, daughter, friend, colleague? What character would you want them to have seen in you? What difference would you want to have made in the lives of the people sitting there? To live on purpose is to spend your days steadily closing the gap between who you seem to be right now and what those closest to you will one day truly say about you.

And to live on divine purpose is to care less about what any person will say and most about what God — the most significant being in the universe — has to say about you. No one is here by accident. God had a purpose for every life. And you will never be satisfied until you are living out His purpose for yours. To get there you have to answer three questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Everything begins with the first one.

Where you cannot find yourself

Socrates famously said, “Man, know thyself.” The trouble is, he never told us how. Another voice says, “To thine own self be true.” But which self? What I think of myself in the morning is often different from what I think at night. The me I am with one person feels different from the me I am with another. So which self am I supposed to be true to?

God has not left us to guess. In Romans 12, Paul gives us a road map. And he begins with a warning: do not be conformed to this world. The Message calls it conforming without thinking. So before we find the right place to look, let me show you three wrong places.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Romans 12:2 (NKJV)

First, you cannot define yourself by your genes. “I have a temper because it runs in my family. It is just how my people are.” You are more than your DNA — you are a spirit being having a human experience. You must not let something one hundred percent outside your control decide who you are.

Second, you cannot define yourself by your upbringing. As wonderful — or as broken — as your parents and teachers were, they were not perfect. “It is the way I was raised. My home was poor. My father was absent.” That may explain some things, but it does not get to name you.

Third, you cannot define yourself by your current environment — your job, your marriage, your address, your status. What happens when you lose the job, or the marriage ends, or the applause dies down? The young actress Maisie Williams once spoke about fighting constant depression because she had confused herself with the character she played. If your identity rests on any of these, it can vanish overnight.

Look to your Maker

If not your genes, your upbringing, or your surroundings — then where? You look to the One who made you. No one knows a thing better than its maker.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:10 (NKJV)

You are God’s masterpiece. When Socrates said “know thyself,” he was really pointing us back to our Maker, because only the Maker knows what a thing is for. And it is our failure to do this that leads to abuse — both the abuse we accept and the abuse we hand out to ourselves.

Look at the people God got hold of. David marveled, “You knew me before I was born; the things You wrote about me are too wonderful.” God took His time making you — giving this one a quick mind, that one a laugh that fills a sad room with joy. To Jeremiah He said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Jeremiah felt unqualified, and it changed nothing, because an identity rooted in what God says about you will never move.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you.

Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV)

God came to Gideon — a washed-up farmer hiding in a winepress — and called him “mighty man of valor.” Gideon protested that his clan was the weakest and he was the least in his family. God ignored the protest. When you blame the gap between who you should be and who you seem to be on your genes or your family, God ignores that too. Paul said, “I am what I am by the grace of God.” John the Baptist, when the religious leaders tried to name him something grand, simply said, “I am a voice.” Each one located himself in the word of God rather than in the mirror of the world.

Spinning a cocoon

So you have looked into God’s eyes and glimpsed who He made you to be. Then you look at your actual life and it seems miles away. What do you do? Do you go find twenty-one rules to fix yourself? No. There is only one action, and it is simple though not easy: change your thoughts. Paul says as your mind is renewed, you will be transformed. That word for transformed is where we get metamorphosis.

Think of the caterpillar. When it is born it does one thing — it eats and eats and eats. Then it finds a branch and, out of everything it has taken in, it slowly spins a cocoon, day after day, and climbs inside. And there, hidden, God begins to transform it. Biologists say the caterpillar’s cells all but dissolve and a recreation happens. Days later the cocoon breaks open and out flies a butterfly. Notice: the caterpillar did not change itself. It was changed. You cannot change yourself either — only God can produce in you what God has already thought about you. But you can cooperate with Him by changing how you think.

Your thoughts are the gateway to God’s plan for your life. They will either let God in or shut Him out. This is why when Jesus began His ministry He called people to metanoia — change the way you think. And it does not stop with you. What would happen if you began to think of your husband not by his genes or his current behavior but by who he truly is in God? What if you spoke to that stubborn child the way God speaks of them?

How to renew your mind

So how do you spin the cocoon? Let me give you the steps the caterpillar teaches us.

• Immerse yourself in the good word of God. Not every verse is about you — some words are spoken to the enemy, some to the wicked. Find the good word God has said over you and feast on it. Read it, listen to it, meditate on it, morning and night. You do not need to understand it all; you do not know how milk becomes muscle, and it still nourishes you.
• Confess it. Speak those words out loud, because you cannot speak without thinking. When you say “God loves me,” you force your mind to think it. Speaking is how a thought becomes truly yours.
• Practice it on others, and repeat. Begin to see and speak of people the way God sees them. Then do it again, and again. The difference between greatness and average is repetition — which is exactly why the enemy fights to keep you from steady church, steady Bible study, steady practice.

This is how you move from what you appear to be now to what you were always meant to be. Not by striving to reinvent yourself, but by letting God do the reinventing while you keep feeding on His word about you. Suddenly things start to reorient. Doors you did not knock on begin to open. What looked impossible begins to give way. Metamorphosis is happening — you are not changing yourself, you are being changed.

So write it down: what you would want them to say at that funeral. Then start closing the gap the only way it can be closed — by believing that right now, in God, you already are that person, and letting your renewed mind catch up to the truth. Who am I? I am who my Maker says I am. Begin there, and let Him make the butterfly.