An Unchanging Identity
ICS Daily Devotions
Judges 6:12,15 (NKJV) And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valour!”…So he said to Him, “O my Lord, how can I save Israel? Indeed my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”
Many of us have allowed the world to determine our worth. We range from one extreme to the other: strong self-ego to under confidence. Based on Gideon’s reply to the angel of God, he belongs to the latter.
Someone with a strong self-ego will typically be well-educated, from a good family, have lived the good life and reached the top of the corporate ladder. However, their challenge will be when their circumstances change, and they no longer find themselves in that category or class of society. When they experience inconsistency between their circumstances and their self-image, they will fall back on their historical self-perception, rather than let the new information change their perspective. They may experience an identity crisis.
Gideon looked at himself as coming from the weakest clan and the least looked upon in his father’s house. The wrong voices may have moulded his thinking and self-worth, thus creating a wrong identity for him. This is why he was hiding in fear and threshing wheat at the winepress. Gideon lacked the confidence that God was able to use him.
Because our own identity is earned or achieved, we will feel a sense of loss or failure when our situation changes and struggle to adjust. Because we often identify ourselves more in our “doing” than in our “being”, we tend to package ourselves with our looks, physiques, family background, academic excellence, people we connect with, the company that we work for, our possessions and lifestyle to boost our worth to others. However, when any of these is taken away from us, we will feel worthless.
This kind of self-image has been formed by what men say about us and their affirmation. Because we live in a fallen and broken world, there will never be a perfect self-image created by ourselves and the people around us. We will fail and people will fail us.
The “Midianites” in our lives that we are trying to overcome are our “old man”, or our identity based on our sense of self-worth. It could subtly become a “god” in our own sight which we are proud of until everything that we hold dearly crumbles. It is the wrong foundation for our identity because it is temporal, or what the Bible calls “sinking sand” which will not hold us up in a storm.
In contrast, because the identity in Christ is given to us freely, it can never be taken from us.
Judges 6:16 (NKJV) And the Lord said to him, “Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat the Midianites as one man.”
Sermon Series: How to Do Well in Your New Identity?
