Only God Defines You

Your problems don't define you.

Your achievements don't define you.

Only God defines you... and He loves you.

I tweeted this earlier tonight. This is the first tweet I have ever written of the over 5000 that almost made me cry.

People build their identities on a variety of things. Some define themselves by their work. Or their role in a family: mother, father.

Some define themselves by some sort of brokeness in their life. An addict, a drunk, divorced.

But, these identities are only surface. There is a deeper identity that we all have - this identity is drawn from the One who Created us.

God created you. Only He has the power and authority to define you.

God is love. His very being is love. So when he chooses to define you - he defines you as an object of His love.

You are the beloved of God. You are a child of God.

In the book of 1 John, John writes,


"See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God!
 And that is what we are!"

That is what you are:

A child of God upon whom the Father has lavished His love upon.

You are not your job.
You are not your family.
You are not your clothes.
You are not your money.
You are not your house or your car.

At the core of your being is a child. There is a child inside of you. And the One who gave life to that child, loves you.

We get into all kinds of problems when this central image and identity gets distorted through pain and insecurity.

Someone who is not loved seeks love and affirmation through other means. The tragedy of human life is that no earthly thing can meet the love the Father can only supply.

The human soul is a fragile thing - easily scarred by bad people. Easily injured by anxious earthly parents who over protect or fail to provide what we need to be whole.

The most important thing I have ever discovered in my life is that God loves me. That is a truth that changed my life and continues to form and re-form who I am - despite all the troubles and sorrows that have entered my life - that one Great Truth has never changed.

God's love is fierce, strong and never ending. In the life, we experience it in varying degrees. But one day we will move out of our physical body into another realm. We will die. Dying for the Christian is like going through a door into another place. A place where what John wrote about will come to rest at the depth of our being.

I pray and hope that many many people will begin that journey into the very heart of God by grasping his defining paradigm of who we are : the beloved.