Identity
Irony is studying about one’s identity, the true self and the false self, only to learn that someone out there somewhere is somehow trying to pass themselves off right now as me. Some stranger got my credit card number, created a bogus card, and is using it all over the USA right this very minute. Now my card, rarely used as I find checks and cash a better budget and discipline guide, is right here in my hand, and I’m right here in Colorado.
Someone, however, is conniving enough to figure out my card number and my name and pretend to be me. And they’ve been having a heyday with my credit card from South Dakota to Vermont to Connecticut.
The good news is that my card company is smarter than the thief. The company noticed my normal spending habits, or lack thereof, and thus became suspicious and called me to put a stop to this nonsense. The fraud squad to the rescue!
But, all of this falls in the middle of my own study of identity: a journey of getting to know my Lord and myself better. So the irony is rather thick, don’t you think?
Christ in me, the Hope of Glory. That’s my identity at its deepest root. If you could peel me back, and see my heart within, you’d see a glow there…and the name tag would read: This is My beloved daughter, bought by My blood, delighted over as My saint. Yes, a work still in progress, but mystery upon mystery, called a citizen of heaven, called holy, called righteous. Not, of course, by Lane’s own doings and beings, but by My actions at Calvary. My life given for her ransom allows her to be ever conforming to My likeness. That’s what Jesus says about who I am. Wow! Wow! Wow! as my friend Cherie would say.
Like my credit card company, the Holy Trinity along with the Scriptures are far smarter and wiser than the thief who seeks to steal my identity, both the earthly thief with my credit card and the spiritual thief who aims to undo me from my true self.
For a goodly portion of my life, I’d have said that yes, I believed there was Satan, but, no, I didn’t really “get” that he was my archenemy, out to kill, steal and destroy the very life and identity of me, as John 10:10 reminds. Yet, over the years, I’ve changed. I have a real not-honest-to-goodness enemy: Satan. C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is in that pile of oft re-read books. Satan really does want to steal my identity from me…. thus my current studies on the true self and the false self.
I’ve often heard, as I suppose you have, that the people who work in the world of counterfeit money study real money inside and out so that they know real money and can easily distinguish it from counterfeit money. I like that concept. So, I’m aiming to get to know who I am more…who I am as my true self before Jesus, who is the Truth Himself. Subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, my false self shows up, and I begin to think that is who I really am, or really should be, or will never be able to change from being. But that’s false.
I like M. Robert Mulholland’s book The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self. This excellent book, which is underlined in so many different colors symbolizing the different times I’ve read back through it, challenges me to stay true to my true self in God.
My false self is, in a nutshell, the striving one, who is caught up in the shoulds and oughts of my life, mottoes stamped on me thickly by a gazillion different influences from my past. Your false self and mine probably have some commonalities. We heard mottos during our childhood and our youth that we took for truths, and then became ensnared in the sticky web of thinking that is who we had to be, or all we could be. Satan jumped on the bandwagon and also spread other falsehoods around.
My false self, as I look back across my life, was influenced by any place or person that tried to make my value, purpose or identity more valuable than God Himself. For each of us, different things become our identity: activities, possessions, even wounds and crisis that become who we think we are. For instance, I grew up in the deep South where connections and possessions were displayed almost as boldly as the Golden Calf in the Old Testament. A false self, for example, can be believing that my connections or my possessions are my identity. We pick up these unsavory thoughts from our culture, our conversations, even from our churches. Unwittingly, we begin to believe the falsehoods we inhale through the osmosis of our life: who we know, where we live, what we do, and how much we have begin to constitute a plethora of falsities., which lead to a potential false self identity.
My true self, however, is the internal eternal part of me: the places within me where I am becoming whole and wholly and holy integrated into Christ Himself. My mind becoming His mind as I think; my heart becoming His heart as I act, my true self is all the movements of me from my false self to my true self that find me looking more and more each day like the spittin’ image of God my heavenly Father, Jesus my Savior, Lord, and Lover, and the ever present wise comforting Holy Spirit. I need the fraud squad of the Holy Trinity to open my eyes to my own false places.
But, to move from the false to the true, I am responsible for noticing where I am being counterfeit, where I am living a lie at a deep interior heart level. I think Mulholland says it better, “I realized that the false self I was stood in the way of becoming the true self for which I had been created.” He compares the false self to being like a mud pie with a thin layer of frosting yet tries to pass itself off as a lovely angel food cake. It doesn’t take much to notice the mud peeking through that façade of the false self.
In other words, like my credit card company, I need an awareness of what my unholy habits are so that I can grow suspicious of my false places and put an end to this nonsense. Oh, that it was as easy as what the credit card company does! They can shut down one account, and it no longer exists. And just as easily, they can open a new account with a fresh start and a fresh number attached.
For me, this requires a bit more involvement than that. I am to put off my old false identity and settle into my new true identity as Christ's own follower. I must, as my friend Valerie Hess recently reminded in a talk she gave, step into some powerful spiritual disciplines, which help me walk with holy habits daily. Valerie noted that spiritual disciplines are best engaged in when they are specific, measurable, and for which we are, in some form or fashion, held accountable. Dallas Willard or maybe it was Richard Foster, or probably it was both of them, somewhere speak of these spiritual disciplines as ways of putting myself in a place where God can do His transforming work in me.
To be my true self, choices are made. I lean into being all that God wants me to be: fully alive, fully my new true self. I imagine that means, like Eustace Scrubb in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia who had to painfully shed layers of dragon skin that were not his true self, that I too will painfully turn from the old identities that are so easily assumed. Again, Robert Mulholland evokes change when he spurs me on to move from all that attaches me to that false self towards all that attaches me more deeply to God Himself. Mulholland says that we often seek to find our false identity “among the soils” of our woundedness, our resentment, our education, our profession, our possession and other such things. Instead, we are to step into intimacy in the holy soil of God as we offer our lives to Him. False self activities often “protect, defend, promote, indulge or enable” me to control my false life, Mulholland adds. So, those become good questions to ask myself. Where am I overly promoting myself? Where am I enabling my false identity to take control of my life? If I am mighty defensive about some area of my life, or a bit haughty or notice I am over-indulging in a particular area of my life, I might just need to call in the fraud squad and put a stop to this nonsense. I choose, then, to step into places where God Himself is in charge of me, and, via the spiritual disciplines, I become alert and attentive, noticing those places that I am living in counterfeit ways.
If wounds are what I hide behind, then the discipline of confession and the discipline of prayer help me gather my wounds and bring them to the altar where the Lord Himself begins the healing process. John Eldredge, in Waking the Dead, reminds me that there are four important streams to immerse oneself in for healing: walking with God, receiving God’s intimate counsel, deep restoration, and spiritual warfare. We stay in God’s Scriptures; we hear God’s voice, we are healed by God’s hand and the wisdom of His earthly spiritual directors, counselors and doctors, and we learn how to battle the enemy of our soul: Satan.
If I am most proud of my possessions and identify myself most readily there, perhaps the discipline of simplicity would be wise, for it invites me to bless others with the blessings I am holding onto a little too tightly. If I am hoarding these possessions, the discipline of worship reminds me that it all belongs to God, and I am to be a good and faithful steward. Thus, the spiritual disciplines act as a plumb line, aligning my heart to the heart of God.
I’m pondering places on which I’ve hung my false identity. It's not an easy task, for I too easily believe that my false identity is my true identity. So, in those very false places, I roust out and tame, like the wildness of the kudzu that sprawled out of control everywhere in the southern red hills of my childhood.
We all are called to become fully who God desires us to be. We are called to be the fraud squad of our own hearts and identify the true from the false. We are all in a battle against an enemy who wants us to think falsely: we are not so very beloved, we are not very important, we are, in his false opinion, worthy only to be a counterfeit.
Instead, I’m banking on the fact that I am truthfully graced with the identity of one who is beloved, who is called to be nothing less than my truest self, which only happens as I am engulfed in Truth Himself, Jesus.
Instead, I’m banking on the fact that I am truthfully graced with the identity of one who is beloved, who is called to be nothing less than my truest self, which only happens as I am engulfed in Truth Himself, Jesus.
The credit card ads are wrong, you know. It’s not what’s in your wallet that counts. It’s what’s in your true heart that matters: Christ in me, the Hope of Glory, through and through, true and true!
Lane M. Arnold. All rights reserved. 2011.
Bibliography:
Eldredge, John. Waking the Dead: The Glory of A Heart Fully Alive. Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003.
Hess, Valerie. Renovare Conversations. Denver, CO. January 8, 2011.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959.
Mulholland, M. Robert, Jr. The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self. InterVarsity Press, 2006.
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