Learning to see as God sees begins with who we are. Each one comes back, in some way, to the same truth: you don’t see things as they are; you see things as you are. What follows are six questions on identity, perception and the new creation, with my answers.
How Does Your Identity in Christ Change Your Perception?
We see through ourselves. If you have been rejected, you will see people as a threat. You will see people as those who don’t love you and don’t want to be around you. As written in Proverbs 28:1, “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
Unpack that for a minute. The wicked flee when nobody is even chasing them. A wicked man is in the street and sees a police officer going about his business, and he starts running. Why? Not because of the police officer, but because of himself. His own identity causes him to run. In so many circumstances, how we see ourselves affects how we see every situation. We talk about imposter syndrome; if you don’t think you are worthy of being somewhere, or capable, you will act that way.
When I help people learn to teach and preach, I find it hard to describe, but there is a place they need to get to. It is not self-confidence, bravado or ego. There is a place in God you need to step into where part of you is saying, “I’ve got this. I’m going to enjoy this. I’m not nervous. I’m not threatened. I’ve done my homework, and God is going to flow things out of me that other people need to hear.” The problem is that all of us have an identity, and hardly any of us see it. It is like the fish in the water. One of the first things we need to do is ask God to show us how we see ourselves: not yet how He sees us, but how we see us. Your identity in Christ has a massive effect on your perception.
How Do Childhood Labels Shape Your Identity and Belief?
To what degree do they shape us? Massively. As it is written in Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” I hate to say it (and this can be broken) but the reverse is also true: train a child up badly, and when he is old he won’t depart from that either. What gets set in our minds in those younger, formative years is so important.
Most of us have very few memories from before the age of five. I can probably access three or four, where I can play the movie in my mind. Yet think about that five-year-old. He has lived five years on the earth, plus nine months in his mother’s womb, and all of that love or lack of love, acceptance or rejection, joy or its absence, peace or turmoil is forming how he sees the world around him. Childhood affects us absolutely massively.
For many of us, it will be a lifelong journey of learning to say by faith, “That old me is dead. By faith, this is who I am,” and then practising stepping into that new identity. I believe the Lord can rewire those things in us. All the more reason, as parents, grandparents or parents-to-be, that we think it through and are intentional and purposeful about the way we raise children.
How Does Renewing Your Mind Transform Your Self-Image?
I am writing a book on AI and its history, and it has helped me, because there are many terms, like LLM (large language model), that I knew vaguely. You can float around with a bunch of ideas. I am fairly up to speed with that world, yet I had never studied it the way I am studying it now. The point I am making is that we think with words, pictures and feelings, and we carry what I would call scripts: perspectives and beliefs. If I drop this book, it will fall to the ground. I don’t have those words memorized; they express a belief I hold, a sense of how the world works that I have adopted on the inside.
The Lord wants to renew our minds. We have a spiritual mind; as it is written in 1 Corinthians 2:16, “But we have the mind of Christ.” We also have a natural, rational mind. Without going into high-school psychology, there is the current thinking of our mind, the handful of things we are consciously dealing with (one, two, three, four or five things is already a lot). Then, more like the hard drive of the mind, are all our commitments, memories, ideas and beliefs, these scripts running in the background.
The Lord gives us a brand new identity. We have it by inheritance. We received it in a moment. We don’t earn it, produce it or work to get it. We have it. What we then have to do is practise it, until we have assimilated those beliefs and look at things as the Lord looks at them, and it is not that hard. When you believe something deeply in your heart, it will keep expressing itself out of your mouth. The words may change, like the LLM, but the belief will surface.
The opposite is equally true. Keep engaging with God’s words, God’s scripts in the Bible, and say, “Lord, You have said this.” The danger is simply repeating something like a parrot, as if it were a magic mantra: “My God will supply all my needs. My God will supply all my needs.” Instead, engage with the truth of it, and the imagination is probably the best way to do that. See yourself walking through life, this day and every day, knowing that your God will supply all your needs. God has given you your identity; He wants you to be aware of it and to practise thinking it through.
How Does Rejection Shape Your Identity and Relationships?
Profoundly. We were born from God and born for God. We were created and constructed to be in relationship with Him, and all of us have been grandfathered into rejection through Adam and Eve. We are born into a world of rejection. There is something in us, from the moment of conception, that knows we are estranged from God and, in a way, rejected by Him (I am speaking of the fall, not of what we have through Christ; that is the good news). We are born into a world where everybody else lives with that knowledge too. As written in Romans 8:19, “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.”
So there is innate rejection in us, we are born into a world of rejection, and hurt people hurt people. Rejected people reject people. We long to be loved; that is the passion of all of our hearts, the driving mechanism behind everything. People want to be famous, and it is not usually about the money. They want to be loved. Rejection is painful, but most of us live in the fear of rejection.
I heard somebody suggest recently that one reason many Mormons make such good businessmen is that, as young missionaries, they go in knowing they may need to knock on five hundred doors before anyone is even kind to them (I am inventing the figure). They start from that premise, and rejection becomes normal. The point is that we live in the fear of rejection, and it defines our identity. We become the person who says, “I’m afraid of going there, because that hurts.” Like a dog with an invisible fence, most of us aren’t actually feeling rejection. We have a whole set of places we no longer go, and it is limiting our lives. The Lord wants to take all of that away and set us free.
How Can You Overcome Insecurities Through Your Christian Identity?
First, you have to see them. Ask God to show you, because, as with rejection, when we are insecure in an area (and we all are) we tend to avoid it. After a while, we don’t go down those streets anymore. I have known the city of Liverpool for fifty years, and there are probably areas I wouldn’t walk at night. In a way, I have constructed my own Liverpool, and I no longer have a problem with those areas because I simply don’t go there. That is how most of us construct life. So ask God to show you those insecurities and be aware of them.
Second, invite the Lord into them. Say, “Lord, lead me into the places where I am no longer captive and bound by these insecurities.” As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:10, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Third, step into a place I call the beloved. You are loved, but it is not enough to know you are loved; you need to be the beloved. God wants you to know you are so loved and accepted by Him that you cannot be rejected. Insecurity dwells where we say, “I’m not loved, but I want you to love me, and if I can get you to love me, then I’ll be happy.” Start instead from the place where you have already won. Jesus began His ministry with the Father declaring, “You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He had already won the top prize; there was nothing left to win on planet earth. Rejection never really touched Him until the cross, because He was perfectly accepted. If we will start from that place of perfect acceptance, then if God is for us, it is game over.
How Does Fear Shape Your Self-Image and Decisions?
In a sense I would rather reverse engineer this and talk about how hope does. We all have an identity. Most of us don’t see it. God wants to show it to us, and to make it in the image of Christ, in the image of the new creation we read about in Colossians 3. How does that shape our decisions? Through everything, because we live by projection. We live by imagination.
I don’t know anyone who simply wanders through life letting things happen. Each of us has an image of the day ahead, a movie we are going to play: where I will work, what I will buy, where I will eat, what I need to prepare. When we allow God to centre and set good, godly, righteous beliefs in us, we rewrite the movie that way.
Imagine you want to be an evangelist, a soul winner, and the Lord says, “I am going to take away every trace of fear. You can go up and talk to anybody. You will experience no rejection.” What would you do? How would it change your life? If you believed you were like that, you would live like that. That is what God wants. He speaks things to us that contradict and contravene our own perceptions of ourselves, and then He says, “Be that person. Live that way.” As Jesus prayed in John 17:17, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” If you believe His word is true, you will live and walk in that manner.
Scriptures for Study
Proverbs 28:1, Proverbs 22:6, Proverbs 23:7, 1 Corinthians 2:16, Romans 12:2, Philippians 4:19, Philippians 4:8, Romans 8:19, Romans 8:31, Romans 8:38–39, Romans 5:12, Ephesians 1:4–6, Matthew 3:17, 2 Corinthians 12:9–10, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Colossians 3:9–10, John 17:17, 1 John 4:18, 2 Timothy 1:7, Galatians 2:20, Psalm 27:10, Isaiah 54:4, Hebrews 13:5–6, Joshua 1:9, Mark 11:23
10 Questions for Reflection
- Where does your own identity cause you to “flee when no one pursues”?
- What does it look like for you to step into the place of “I’ve got this” in God?
- Which childhood labels still shape how you see yourself?
- How can you, by faith, declare that the old you is dead and practise the new?
- What background “scripts” might be running on the hard drive of your mind?
- How can you engage with God’s promises through imagination rather than empty repetition?
- Where has the fear of rejection created “invisible fences” in your life?
- Which streets of your life have you stopped walking down because of insecurity?
- What would change if you lived from the place of already being the beloved?
- If God removed all your fear, what would you do differently?
