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Spirit-Led Identity Change
The previous chapter described the basics of both fallen human nature and a new nature in Christ. Though these truths are simple, the reality of putting them into practice can be difficult. This is especially true for those of us who have grown up in a world in which a large number of the movies, books, internet articles, and personal interactions we have experienced have taught us to view identity in a different way. We have unconsciously absorbed a gut feel for how life works, and this gut feel is often in conflict with God’s word.
When we choose to follow Jesus, we can feel disoriented. I remember times when I felt as if I no longer knew who I was. Following Jesus had given me a set of experiences that was so far from my gut feel that I wondered if I was losing myself. Part of me felt like a servant of God; part felt like the person I had been when I was younger; another part was just angry that I couldn’t find some way to bring my contradictory feelings together.
The easiest way to end the struggle seemed to be to return to living from my flesh. If I could just get back to who I had been, I might be able to forget the part of me that wanted to follow Jesus. …Yet I didn’t want to forget that part of me. I had experienced the touch of the Holy Spirit, and His love and work had become foundational for my life (1 Corinthians 2:1-5). I felt like the Living God had come into my life and was transforming me, and though that made my life more complicated, I didn’t want it to stop.
I had also studied the objective evidence that Jesus was who He said He was, and I found it convincing. So turning from Him would have required me to suppress what I knew.
Putting it all together, though following Jesus was disorienting, I didn’t want to stop doing it. I just wanted to do it in a way that didn’t seem so impossible for my emotions.
In this struggle, my temptations weren’t so much because sin’s pleasures enticed me; it was more that sin offered an easy medication for the emotional turmoil that came so naturally to me. Pleasures gave me temporary relief from the unpredictability my heart had experienced since I was young. I was grasping for some way to control my inner angst that didn’t require sex or drugs.
I chose to resist the temptation to turn back, and I pressed forward. I sided with the parts of my heart that I believed were from the Lord and found ways to avoid the rebellious parts – all while praying that God would fix me. Unfortunately, after almost thirty years as a Christian, that approach was unravelling. I described this time in chapter 6. The out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions was spinning painfully, and in spite of a great deal of diligence on my part, my emotions were rising up to demand a change.
Those who have written about Borderline Personality Disorder say that a part of this condition is that people with it have an especially difficult time with what is called “identity formation.”[22] It is where a person pulls together the different pieces of their personality into a sense of who they are.
Dysregulating emotions make this extremely difficult, because each set of emotions is so strong that it tends to become its own independent personality fragment. As best I can tell, this explains at least part of why my personality broke into warring factions while following Jesus. It was tough to settle into a Christ-based identity.
But even if I had this condition – even if I faced unique challenges – was it a valid excuse to sin? And would pandering to my weaknesses have helped? I saw no other good choice but to follow Jesus and hope for a transformation. Turning to sin might bring short-term relief, but it would have set the stage for a lifetime of even greater pain. It might even have dragged me into full-blown Borderline Personality Disorder. Without an anchor for my spirit and soul, who knows where I might have drifted?
I have said all of this because I want to be honest about the fact that my experience may be different than that of others. I have not heard many people describe their struggle for identity in the way I describe mine.
Differing experiences, however, do not mean that those who differ from one another have nothing useful to say to each other. God’s solution is the same for all of us. We must seek Him until we grow to know Him (Isaiah 55:6). We must take responsibility for our lives, repent from our sins, and learn to walk with Him (Isaiah 55:7). We must give up our own ways and allow Him to teach us His (Isaiah 55:8). All Christians are involved in this common pursuit, and we can all learn from one another, even from those who are quite different from us.
We must also learn directly from God and His word. My weaknesses required me to gain skills with my emotions that others seem to be able to get by without. And though I knew of no one on earth who could teach me those skills, that wasn’t an excuse to give up. I had no good choice but to learn what I could from others and trust God to teach me the rest. That was how I kept moving forward.
Unfortunately, people sometimes conclude that “who they are” makes it impossible for them to do this. They see their current state as an inescapable barrier to following Jesus.
When obedience seems impossible for us, two misled possibilities present themselves to us: 1) Maybe we have misunderstood God’s will, because He would never call for us to do something so impossible for us, so maybe we can cut corners on His requirements. Or 2) maybe we are spiritual losers who have no hope of obeying (apart from an unusual miracle that never seems to happen for “people like us.”).
If those were the only two options, it would make sense that we would either compromise or give up. There is a third option, however. 3) Maybe we are deceived about our lives, and we need to stand in faith based on what the Bible says (step 3 from chapter 4). Doing so will open the possibility that we can step out in faith and obey where we can while we trust God to meet us and enable us to do more and more over time (step 4 from chapter 4). He will gradually make us into people we never imagined we could be.
And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Doing this, however, will likely bring us face to face with our sinfulness. We may see that we are not the spiritual giants we hoped we would be, or even spiritually adequate people. And in seeing this, we will need to redefine how we judge ourselves. If we don’t, we might lose hope.
God’s answer is to learn to embrace the blood of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. Because He has paid the price for us with His blood, He has accepted us even while we continue to fall to our sins – and this holds true even when our experience seems to say that we will never change.
He gives us undeserved favor (which is what the Biblical word ‘grace’ means), and this enables us to embrace His high standards without wilting before their light. Where we might normally avoid anything that makes us look bad, in the security of His grace we find a new place of safety where we can face the truth. Any guilt and fear we feel are put into perspective by the fact that His love and acceptance are not based on our performance (step 1 in chapter 4).
In addition, we have the promise that His word and Spirit will transform us. We are not limited by our past failures or our present weaknesses. When it comes to doing God’s will, He will provide whatever we need.
In this place of safety and power, we can humbly and imperfectly practice His word. We embrace our abundant need for change without being overwhelmed by it. We become content with small steps that take us part way to our goal, trusting that God will lead us along whatever path brings us into His ultimate plan (Philippians 3:12-14).
We are eternally OK by the blood of Jesus.[23] Feelings of inadequacy and condemnation gradually recede as He meets us in our weakness and loves us there (Hebrews 4:15-16). Our experience of life is reworked as we behold His glory and He transforms us (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Allow me to give an example of this by expanding on the story I shared in chapter 6. As I wrote in that chapter, in the late 1990s my emotions had begun to unravel. A large part of this difficulty was because I was struggling with what remained of the sexual issues I described in chapters 3 and 4.
By this point, I had done well in my thoughts and actions for almost twenty years, but the emotional instability that had led to the sexual problems in the first place was becoming unmanageable. Since I was choosing to not medicate that instability with pleasure, I was falling into a state of rage.
Then in the year 2000, I became honest about what I felt before God, not just in my words but also in allowing myself to feel the intensity that was behind those words. I kept my actions under control, but I let the Lord know how upset I was. My prayers were not pretty.
I wasn’t sure how to tell the difference between my sincere cries for help and my anger against God, but I felt safe being broken and sinful because of what Christ had done. He died so I could come to Him as I was. And I had no other hope for escaping my weaknesses and failures besides Him. I came to the throne of grace for mercy and help in time of need (Hebrews 4:14-16).
As I honestly presented my feelings before Him, He met me by His Spirit. He spoke to me through the Scriptures, through dreams, and in other ways.[24] Then in 2002, I saw that I was like Job, demanding my day in court, trying to prove I was being mistreated by God.
Oh, that I knew where I might find Him,
That I might come to His seat!
I would present my case before Him,
And fill my mouth with arguments.
I would know the words which He would answer me,
And understand what He would say to me.
Would He contend with me in His great power?
No! But He would take note of me.
There the upright could reason with Him,
And I would be delivered forever from my Judge.
Like Job, I filled my mouth with arguments, but unlike Job, I didn’t expect that I would be delivered forever from my Judge. I had the book of Job to dispel any illusions of that happening. He thought he could argue his case before God and prove Him wrong. Obviously, Job was greatly mistaken. Knowing this, I asked God to help me see where I was wrong. I made it my goal to work with Him as He taught my emotions to make peace with His choices rather than demanding their own way.
Gradually, I found the grace to let go of my deepest hopes and dreams for emotional freedom. I had been angry because I felt I needed an emotional change that never seemed to happen. As I honestly laid all of this before Him, I embraced the fact that He was God and I was only a man. I couldn’t demand that He do what I felt I needed. If He chose for me to suffer from my pain and embarrassing sexual temptations for several more decades until I died, that was His right as King of the universe.
I found that as I sat before Him, grappling with a strange mixture of anger and submission, I gradually fell more in love with Him. Here I was almost accusing Him to His face, and yet He held me close and comforted me. His involvement eased the pain in my heart, and little by little I slowly made peace with whatever fate He had chosen.
I was beholding His glory, and He was transforming me from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). Then after several months, in 2003, He brought a significant breakthrough that relieved a good deal of my sexual temptation. He gave me a big piece of what I had previously wanted to demand from Him. It wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but it was what He had chosen – which was better than what I had hoped for.
I doubt this breakthrough could have come if I hadn’t first surrendered my desire for emotional freedom to Him. The act of grieving my pain and slowly giving up my demands paved the way for a heart-felt identity change. I was honestly facing my emotions, accepting them as valid parts of me. I learned to feel their pain without caving in to their demands …which helped me to gain the maturity to handle them …which increased my ability to find Him in the middle of their turmoil …which allowed me to better focus on what He was doing rather than being upset about what I felt He wasn’t doing …where I discovered that what He was doing had been designed from the beginning to bring His version of freedom.
The irony of all this was that my immature emotional demand that He meet my needs according to my plan had been a roadblock to Him actually meeting my needs. Yet I hadn’t known how to change my heart, so for years I had pushed my emotions from my consciousness. When the Holy Spirit led me to bring them front and center as a part of my relationship with Him, admitting that I didn’t know how to change them, He gave His answers.
My point in all of this is that through a relationship with Jesus our experience of our identity can change. This is true even if our heart, at first, doesn’t know how to handle the process, and even if the process takes decades. Our struggle may require much more time and devotion than we expect, but He knows how to bring a Spirit-led identity change.
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