People say when a person gets into their thirties they no longer care what people think of them. They just do them and let it ride! Well, I don’t know if that is what is going on, but I feel like a good majority of my twenties was in a sense fighting and warring with the idea of me truly being and showing others myself.
I discuss in my latest book (The Single Christian Woman’s Guide) about how sometimes we buck against the call of God for our lives when we don’t understand it altogether. Often, as young people we view the identity that God calls us to as rejection. If I commit all the way to my convictions given to me by God, I will be rejected or I will not fit in, and lastly I will end up alone.
Satan is good at painting a negative picture of us embracing our identity because he knows that our identity comes from our consecration, (willingness to dedicate ourselves to the purpose and call of God for our lives), which leads to our purpose and that opens us up to endless possibilities of seeing the hand of the Lord at work in our own personal and individual lives.
One principal that I learned a long time ago is that a consecrated life can get you places that others will not be able to go. To be consecrated means to be set apart for a specific purpose by God. Therefore, that purpose from God supersedes any and all plans, culture, desires, and such. All of these things: desires, plans, interpretation of culture must be submitted to God in the life of a consecrated believer.
When I was about 19, I learned a valuable lesson from dating a young man at the time. We were in an unequally yoked relationship. We were together often because we worked together, went out a couple of times, and he came to my house a couple of times and met my family. We considered each other friends, but it was clear that he wanted more. When he came to my house, I remember my brother asking me after he left if he was saved. It was because he was not saved that he could only get so close to me and eventually had to fall back altogether.
The lesson that I learned was that when we embrace who we are, it determines who can get close to us. This meaning that everyone is not going to be able to be in my close circle because it would require me to alter my consecration to the Lord. When a person knows who she is, she should embrace that identity not allowing any relationship to cause her to compromise from who God called her to be.
The final part of the lesson learned at 19 was the understanding of why Jesus Christ had to die in order to reconcile us to himself. Because God’s identity is that he is holy, and cannot deny himself; he did something drastic in order to bring us close to him. He took his most precious and only son, made him to die to pay for our sins, and gave us his son’s righteousness. Thus, when we trust in and rely on Jesus Christ for our salvation, righteousness, and wholeness, we then are bought up to the standard that allows us to be in fellowship with God. Off the chain, how God could do that.
We learn from God himself, the importance of not denying our identities, because God did not deny who he was, but bought up those who are willing to the standard necessary to hang with him. In a similar fashion, we as God’s children should allow those close access to us who are willing to come up to an appropriate standard. This includes friendships with males and females as well as romantic relationships.
The trouble with denying who we are comes in when we are around other believers who have a different level of consecration to the Lord, and having different levels of consecration to the Lord isn’t wrong. Some people have convictions about certain things because of the call of God on their lives that others do not.
For example, John the baptist in the Bible did not drink alcohol, nor cut his hair, among other things. While Jesus did drink wine. The consecration required for their purposes was carried out appropriately and they still remained on one accord with one another without feeling as though one or the other should change. However, in our culture when we perceive that we are different from our brother or sister, we feel a pressure to change ourselves. This should not be the case when we know that we are operating in our identities given to us by God himself.
This assurance and surety regarding our identities can only come from an intimate relationship with God. God will reveal his will for how he wants us to conduct ourselves. He often uses others in authority over us to confirm or reveal our identities and he will give us peace in our hearts regarding our identities as well.
From then it is up to us to embrace it or not. Because of the awkwardness of not fitting in, we often make the choice to deny who we are to fit in with others. The truth is there are several others out there just like us who love God with all of our hearts and willingly set ourselves apart in obedience to God for God’s glory, yet have the same fear that we are the only ones. If everyone adopted the ideal that they are the only ones who are weird, peculiar, and set apart for God; there would be no one living for God.
The thing is when we set our identities to the side, we set aside our purpose and every open door that the Lord had planned for us in that identity. It has been a part of God’s plan for my life for me not to have a boyfriend until I meet my husband. Of course, that makes me appear awkward or weird, and I could easily try to go out and get a boyfriend and cause all types of problems for myself, but that would take me off of the beat and path that God has for me, and I am not willing to do that. Instead, I make the choice to continue to embrace who I am and follow Christ
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