God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Exodus 3:14
First things first: Happy Easter! Christ is risen! Hallelujah! Thanks be to Jesus, Who through the cross and the tomb secured for us passage into new life! Amen and amen!
Faithful as Father God is to bring us completely into that new life (Philippians 1:6), Holy Spirit has been doing another deep identity surgery in me. We’re thirteen years into our journey together, and redeeming soul corners stuffed with things from further and further back in time. So by now, I more or less expect Him to keep at it while I try to hold as still as possible. (Not quite a Proverb, but someone said once that while we can’t speed up His work in our life, we can sure slow it down!) I’m getting the hang of it, slowly… In this vein, I’ve been pondering a phrase Holy Spirit gave me about our invitation as believers to be who we are.
What strikes me about that phrase is its analogy in Father God’s name for Himself, “I am Who I am.” This name is not a tautology; it captures eternal truths. God—the Father, the Christ, the Spirit—has always been and will always be. He is completely consistent and unchanging in His nature from beginning to end (James 1:17). There is nothing in His character that requires remediation, explanation, or defense. In His actions, He is so perfectly good, perfectly just, and perfectly loving that far from being described by goodness, justice, and love, He is their definition Himself. He has no account to give and no one to give it to.
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
John 3:3-4
Not so with mankind. Even before birth, Father God’s creative intention over our lives is marred by sin. We spend the first half of our lives being who we are not, to varying degrees: we fashion an amalgam of masks and defense mechanisms from the fabric of our families, the colors of our cultures, the threads of our traumas, and then we put it on for the world and call it by our name. The world skews the desires God puts in our hearts toward idolatry and we misuse the skills God gives us. It takes the whole second half to come to terms with ourselves and God, to receive Holy Spirit’s loving deconstruction, His gentle washing, and finally His ecstatic unveiling of His Bride. That is being crucified with Christ, to die to our personalities, our desires, our gifts—to die to every way we define ourselves, only to find the truest, most alive thing about us is Christ-in-us. It’s a process of both self-acceptance and detachment that leads to self-forgetfulness and other-centered love.
What gift, desire, or aspect of your personality do you consider central to who you are?
I am coming to understand what Jesus said to Nicodemus about entering the Kingdom. We are invited to become again like babies in the womb: to be loved, protected, nurtured, and growing—without fuss or striving, shame or inhibition—in a continuously dependent state and freely receiving from Abba, the Author of Life. We are invited to become like God in that we fully own who we are (humility) and give others the freedom to fully own they are—without requiring sameness (love). To rejoice that the more His collective Body grows in freedom and love, the more fully Jesus is glorified through us, a witness to “a creation waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19). To be who we are, for the sake of a world desperate to know what it is to be human and fully alive.
I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with her mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Psalm 131:2
Fire and Whisper 