People everywhere are struggling to “find themselves.” Their insecurities lie just beneath the surface. Most are defined by how others see them and by their achievements, such as how their career is progressing, how much stuff they have, etc.
We need to understand that if we fail to find our identity in what God says about us, we will find it in something else, and it will at best fall miserably short of His intention and purpose for our lives. At worst we’ll get sidetracked completely and live exactly the opposite of the way He intended. Our true identity needs to be defined by our Father. It is He who understands us better than we could ever understand ourselves. He sees our beginning and our end, and it is He who knows what He has called us to.
In fact it was God who ordained us to even look like we do. He “knit” us together from conception. We are not a mistake. The way we look is just how He wanted us to look. Psalm 139 puts it so beautifully:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depth of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (vs. 13-16).
God designed us according to His good pleasure, and we are part of the wonderful work that David refers in this Psalm. When we were just a bundle of cells He already knew the number of hairs on our head and what our features would look like.
I have a problem with thought processes that undermine our identity as the center of God’s creative plan. I struggle with new evolutionary ideas that make people feel like they are just the circumstantial product of a cosmic burp. The trending worldview at the moment is that we are the result of a speck of dirt exploding and billions of years of minor adaptations. The more time we add to our “history” the more “anything can happen.” We have forgotten that history is His story, and that we are at the center of it. Evolution has done incredible damage and has completely undermined our identity as being intentionally created in the image of God, and I have a problem with anything that tells me that we are less than what we really we.
God knew us before he made us. He actually intentioned our birth with His purposes in mind. This is a really big deal. In the grand scheme of time, He saw me before I was conceived, and He had a plan and a purpose for my life. Before I knew I existed, He knew me. Before my parents had any idea they were going to have a son, He knew me. Before the world was created, He knew me.
We need to also understand that the plan of God for our lives is beyond belief. It’s actually laughable. Sarah laughed when the angel told Abraham that his wife would have a child within a year. The plan was preposterous and beyond Sarah’s wildest dreams. Still it was the plan of God for their lives. So it is with our lives. If God unfolded His full intended plan for your life or my life it would blow us away. We’d likely laugh at it. Certainly others would laugh at us, if we shared with them what God had in store for us.
Think of any person in the Bible. Go ahead…get someone in mind.
I’d be willing to bet that the person you have in mind lived a life that was beyond belief for his or her time. I would suggest that their contemporaries laughed at them if they spoke about God’s plan for their lives.
Let’s think about this. Noah was asked to build a boat to prepare for an event that was beyond people’s imagination. It had likely never even rained before, and Noah was meant to build an ark to withstand a FLOOD and he was to put animals of every kind in there. I’m pretty sure Noah’s friends wrote him off when he told them that he was building a boat in the desert because water was going to fall from the sky.
Andrew Mullek is the author of He Used A Stone, which is available for free download on amazon. Link
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