Learning your identity is a crucial first step, but it's only a step. You can know who you are and still fail to do anything with it. This realization led me to study 1 Peter 5.1-11 intensively, as well as sharing my name and it's meaning with my brothers, before taking a pledge I had written, challenging myself to be who God had called me to be.
However, the thing that really led me to realize the need to embrace identity came from the second Bible story I focused on throughout this process. Below is more of what will be in my book, so again, no one take it.
Samson was a judge of Israel, blessed with divine strength so that he could free his people from their Philistine oppressors. This was a man who was so gifted, but who wasted his gift and never lived out his calling. It's a tragic story with a depressing ending that I don't want to emulate at all. The saddest part is that the tragedy of Samson could have been avoided had he embraced his God given identity.
Samson was given an identity from God before he was born. "Then the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, 'Behold now, you are barren and have borne no children, but you shall conceive and give birth to a son. Now therefore, be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing. For behold, you shall conceive and give birth to a son, and no razor shall come upon his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb; and he shall begin to deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines.'" (Judges 13.3-5)
Before his birth, before his parents even knew about him, Samson was given an identity from God. He was to be a Nazirite, set apart for God, who would deliver Israel from their enemies. He would grow up knowing who God had said he was, and why God had put him on this earth. He knew who he was and what he was here to accomplish without ever doing anything. But the story of Samson goes beyond that, and before he ever had to fight a Philistine, God showed him that he had what it took to do so.
"Then Samson went down to Timnah with his father and mother, and came as far as the vineyards of Timnah; and behold, a young lion came roaring toward him. The Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily, so that he tore him as one tears a young goat though he had nothing in his hand; but he did not tell his father or mother what he had done." (Judges 14.5-6)
On his way to Timnah to meet his future bride, Samson is attacked by a lion. In a moment when most people would panic (to say the least) Samson, empowered by God, steps up and tears the lion apart with his bare hands. God had not only given him a clear identity, but the tools to live out that identity. He had it all, and he wasted it.
"But he did not know that the Lord had departed from him. 21 Then the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze chains, and he was a grinder in the prison... Then Samson called to the Lord and said, 'O Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.' Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, and braced himself against them, the one with his right hand and the other with his left. And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines!' And he bent with all his might so that the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he killed in his life. " (Judges 16.20a-21, 28-30)
Samson wasted his gift, and his death accomplished more than his life. He died with the enemies he should have driven out of the land. This guy had it all, but he refused to embrace who God created him to be.
Let us not commit the same error as Samson. Let's not wast our lives, but let us instead embrace our identity so that we can fully live out who God has called us to be.
Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11
TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!
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