How Does a Person Determine Their Identity?

How does a person determine his/her identity? It is popular to identify ourselves by the type of work we do or by our family relations. And in recent history, there have been new and creative ways of expressing a sense of identity that never would have occurred to our parents. Is society’s understanding of identity evolving?

King Solomon wrote in Proverbs 24:21-22, “My son, fear the Lord and the king; do not associate with those given to change; for their calamity will rise suddenly, and who knows the ruin those two can bring.” What is his point? Solomon is warning against becoming so wise in our own eyes that we drift from covenant bonds with God by rejecting the order He has established.

People sometimes get bored with what the Bible says and try to improve on it. If I wrote a column that was simply a string of Bible verses, that would not garner as much interest as if I published an article on someone’s ideas of how we could improve on what is in the Bible by modifying it. If there is a God who is holy and has revealed Himself and who has extended Himself in love to redeem troubled people, it is in our best interest to learn to love what He commands and promises if we wish to be satisfied forever.

So what does He say about our identity? First, Genesis 1:27 says that we are made in His image as male and female. The distinctions of each sex were made to show off His glory. Passages such as Psalm 8:3-8 and 139:13-17 marvel at the detail and honor evident in God’s creation of us. If we were to grasp this, we would relinquish attempts to make ourselves into something greater than God has designed us to be.

Second, Romans 3:23 says we have all fallen short of God’s glory. In other words, when sin entered the world through Adam eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the entire race descended from him became broken, but the results spill over into all of creation. For this reason we lack contentment and experience hard and sad things. Even if we get pretty good at defining the problems in this world, no one has yet succeeded at creating utopia. We need a supernatural solution.

Third, Ephesians 2:4-5 says, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) . . . .” God acted graciously to bring salvation through Jesus so that we might be restored to the path of knowing God and enjoying His glory. A man named Joel Beeke said it this way: “God gave the best He had for the worst He could find.” Our imaginations cannot invent a better identity for us than to be joined to Christ by faith and to be made like Him.