Identity in Christ

This article has been transcribed and adapted from a special sharing in Sunday School. It has been edited for brevity and clarity. There may be spelling or grammatical errors. You can listen to the recording on YouTube.


Who Am I?
I think I've been a Christian since I was a child. So I do believe that I had faith when I was a child. I think that around my junior senior year of high school, that's when I started to think about my future and who I am as a person, as an individual. I was in the marching band at school. Since junior high, I've been in the school marching band. And that was my identity, because that's where my friends were. That's what I did. That's where all my time went. And so my senior year, me and my friend, we quit band. That's a different story. But I think when I quit, that was sort of eye opening to me, because I realized that oh, I kind of don't have friends anymore. My Friday nights were suddenly free, and my Saturdays were free. And Sundays… I wasn't tired. I could go to church. There was no excuse.


A Son of God
And so, I think when I quit, it was sort of like, okay, I think I realized I was placing a lot of my identity in my band identity, and what I did, like playing music. It caused me to think about when I go to college, I'm not going to be in band. And even if I did do band in college, like, I'm not going to do that forever. And so yeah, it kind of made me wrestle with who am I just without the things that I do and the friends that I hang out with. I think I came to realize, or God made me realize that, oh, I'm a Christian, and that's my faith. I’m a son of God. My family, my friends — they're with God's people. And so I think at that point, like senior year, and then moving forward, it kind of just reoriented my trajectory in life where it wasn't so focused on people outside the church. Honestly, I kind of just put my attention on God and God's people. And that kind of aligned my identity to being in Christ.


Who God Is
Of course, reading more of the Bible helped a lot, too. It wasn't just like, hey, I'm going to become a Christian now. Or, like, I'm going to be more hardcore. I think it went hand in hand with reading more of the Bible, and really figuring out like, oh, what does God say — not just about me, but also about the world, and how things work in the world, and who God is. I think when you realize who God is to you, that kind of changes your identity, too. Because the things that you are, the things in your heart, if they're not aligned with God's, you'll realize those false identities need to go away, and I need to be more aligned with God in His Word. So that was kind of my journey.