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Spirit-Led Identity Change
<page 3>Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
Nancy (not her real name) was my best friend between 1974 and 1975, during my senior year of high school. We were an unlikely pair. I was a six-foot-four-inch tall basketball player; she was close to five foot tall and didn’t do sports. I was from a middle-class family which stressed hard work and diligence in school. She was from the poor section of town. Her mother had died when she was young, and her father drank too much.
What we had in common was that we were both on fire for Jesus. We bonded over our desire to serve Him with our whole hearts. We organized prayer meetings in our high school and shared about Him with whoever we could.
After high school, we drifted apart. I went to college; she stayed home; I got married; she remained single. Though neither of us lost our zeal for the Lord, I could see that Nancy struggled with her walk with Him.
There were difficult episodes when other Christians tried to help her with ongoing problems in her life. She sometimes left churches and joined new ones. Over time, she gained the reputation of being someone whose zeal for God did not translate into a practical walk in which she overcame certain sins. She was kind and compassionate, but for some reason the transformation 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 speaks of didn’t happen in parts of her life.
Fortunately for me, that transformation occurred in high school and college. I had struggled with sexual temptations, and my life was headed toward trouble, but by God’s grace I had changed directions. I found answers to the sins that threatened to dominate me. (I have written about them in depth in The Exchanged Glory Series, so I will not get specific about them in this book.)
I wished I knew of some way to give Nancy the ability to overcome, but I wasn’t sure how to help. By this point, we no longer had much contact with each other, and I wouldn’t have been sure what to say if we did.
Looking on from a distance, it seemed that Nancy remained, in many ways, the same person I knew in high school. She worshiped, loved God’s presence, prophesied, and talked about Jesus with whoever she could – and yet she continued to fall to many of the same weaknesses. In time, she developed a ministry of helping the down and out. She spoke about God’s love and mercy which comes to us in spite of our failures.
One day when we were both in our early fifties, I ran into her at a Christian concert. We talked about the old days and nostalgically reminisced about what God had done in our youth. It was a good evening, but when it was over, I considered how grateful I was that I had faced my problems and found God’s grace to overcome them. I could see that Nancy hadn’t done that, and I was saddened by what she had lost in the process.
<page 4>After returning home from the concert, Nancy passed away that night and went to be with the Lord. I didn’t learn the cause for her death, but I suspect that it was from conditions related to obesity. I couldn’t help but remember the time we had spent together just a few hours earlier. God seemed to be speaking to me about the value of what He had taught me. It had been worth the difficulty.
In some areas of her life, Nancy couldn’t seem to gain God’s wisdom to become the person He had called her to be. It was as if she was trapped in who she felt she was, and nothing she did changed that. She was sincere in her faith, but it never translated into practical actions that addressed her lifelong problems.
I have written this book in the hope that I can help any of us who struggle with similar weaknesses. Jesus has helped me to become a different person. My identity, or as we might say today, my “authentic self,” has been rearranged. There are still parts of me that are the same. My unique giftings and personality have stayed, and I still have similar strengths and weaknesses – but my thought patterns, decisions, and emotions have been transformed.
When I was young, my view of life was similar to Nancy’s, and this had played a significant role in the areas in which I was trapped by sin. In order to escape, I had to go through a process where all that I thought I knew was rearranged. There were times of facing my inner deceptions and persevering until God showed me what to do about them. There were decades of making tough decisions, even when those decisions didn’t seem to change me on the inside. I had to grab hold of what God was giving me at each step of the journey and slowly, often painfully, build a new life.
It was so frustrating that it broke my self-confidence and made me willing to take an honest look at what the Bible really had to say. I humbled myself and accepted truths that contradicted my views, which was so difficult and frustrating that I sometimes broke down into emotional outbursts in my prayers. The Author of the Bible called for me to act against the person I felt I was, and then I didn’t feel like He gave me the support I needed to pull that off. It infuriated me! I had to learn to grieve over the realization that His ways were not mine, and I had to accept what at first seemed to be an impossible process that changed my deepest inner makeup.
Through it all, my identity was transformed. It was more than a theological process, although theology played an essential part. Along with correct ideas, I found a relationship with Jesus that rearchitected my inner being. He reached deep into my mind, will, and emotions and brought adjustments. I slowly learned (and am still learning) to think, act, and feel like the person He has created (and recreated) me to be.
I will do my best in this book to share the way in which this happened. I will challenge broadly accepted cultural ideas about human identity. We live in a time when the idea of being our “authentic self” has become a measuring rod – a sort of a new “law” by which we judge right and wrong. We think, “If it is who I am, then it must be right for me!”
The thought of requiring someone to act against who they feel they are, even for God’s sake, seems almost “sinful” – as if we are being dishonest with ourselves. We idolize parts of our hearts as if they are the will of a divine being thundering from heaven.
In this book, I will tell how God led me to challenge this view. He saved me from a life that would have been tragically different from the one I have lived. I was headed for a disaster, all in <page 5>the name of being true to myself, but He led me on a path that confronted me to the core of my being.
The first eight chapters of this book spell out in a good deal of detail what it means to be led by the Holy Spirit. Without the insights presented in these chapters, I never would have escaped from the fallen natural identity that captured me. I didn’t take to being led by the Holy Spirit easily; I gradually learned it through studying the Bible, trying to put it into practice, falling short, and seeking God for how to do better.
In chapters 9-13, I share some thoughts on identity. It is often difficult for those of us who have grown up with one view of ourselves to change to another. Our emotions can be so wrapped up in what we believe that disagreeing with them can be frightening and mystifying. God, however, knows how to transform us.
Finally, in chapters 14-17, I will share from Matthew 5:3-12 a snapshot of what a healthy identity looks like.
I pray that this book will help you to experience God’s transforming power that produces a Spirit-led identity change.
Bill Cadden
2023
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