December 8

Day 269: Within That Slot

Personality tests are intended to be predictors of identity. We look for slots and categories for ourselves and others to fit into. So we can have definition, maybe a roadmap for knowing ourselves and navigating other personalities that differ from our own.

I laugh at Asian or Greek zodiac signs, like everyone born in my birth month is somehow identical to every one else born that month. Chinese fortune cookies used to at least attempt to predict the future. Now they simply affirm a positive character trait, that may or may not be true.

If I ever opened a fortune cookie, and the message inside said, "Actually, you are a horrible person," at least that would get my attention.

I know, to some extent, how I slot. I am a "High D." I am an ENTJ. I am an "Activator." I am an "8, with a wing of I don't know what."

I've been inside a church building, and inside a public school building where each staff office door had a posting of that occupant's Strength's Finder results. Almost like, "All who enter here be forewarned!"

Problem with each of these? There are times when I (and everyone else) venture out of where I've (or they've) been slotted.

All of us look for a source to determine and validate our identity. All of us want to see lasting value in who we are. Every human being asks the question, Who am I?" And they may spend a lifetime trying to answer that question to some level of satisfaction.

What differs, however, is where we go to find that identity. Someone or something will be given the final and ultimate say about us. Because we all do the giving.

And we will believe that which we hear/read/internalize from the highest ranking truth source we value. Maybe not intentionally, but we give that chosen truth source ultimate authority to determine for us what is supposedly determined about us.

Christians are not immune from this at all. Childhood experiences, faulty world views, wrongs suffered or wrongs committed, current relationships and besetting sins are all given a value that we allow to inform us about us. Unless we don't give permission to that value to be a value.

Romans 3:23 offers another identity statement, another truth source. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." This is not limited to those born during one calendar month, irrespective of year. This is true of all of us. Everyone proves it. Everyday.

Glad it doesn't stop there. It continues with, "and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus."

What does this have to say about my identity, you ask? I am justified. Justified, meaning, God is no longer angry over my sins against Him. God does not hold a measuring rod over my head, nor a club destined for my head.

My identity rests in the knowledge that I am a trophy of God's grace. I've been given what I do not deserve. I am no longer an adversary; I am now an adopted child of the King, a status protected and never to change.

So what's my chosen sign? I am justified. I am a child of the King of kings and Lord of lords. The gospel of Jesus informs me of who God is and what God has done through Jesus. This then informs me of who I am and how I shall live.

Oh, that I would allow that identifier to hem me in, to hold me tight within that slot.

-Mike Rydman, Lead Pastor, Radiant Church Juneau