What Causes Gaps in Your Identity and How God Sees You

What we believe dictates where we will go based on where we put our focus. Have you ever noticed that if you decide you want to buy a new car, dress, or pair of shoes, you start seeing others of the same type everywhere? Or have you noticed that when you’re in the beginning stage of a diet, it seems like everything you see has to do with food, particularly the foods that are your weakness?

This phenomenon is due to a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS, simply put, means what we focus on grows. What we focus on or pay attention to will continue to come into our view because we have seen it as a focus. When it comes to our identity, what we focus on grows. So if we doubt ourselves, feel like we’re not good enough, or don’t feel like we measure up, we will notice those areas that support that thought process because that’s our focus. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as courageous, capable, happy, fulfilled, and living on purpose, we will notice these areas more because that’s our focus. Changing, pruning, or creating new pathways is possible to develop the focus, life, and lifestyle that aligns with God’s identity for you.

Proverbs 18:21 says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” This means the way we speak can either give life and build up or bring about death and tear down. The way we speak includes how we talk to ourselves. Although the way we talk to ourselves is mostly internal, we can either cause ourselves harm or build ourselves up in the way we speak internally. So we have to be very mindful of how we speak to ourselves so that we are speaking life over and not death. We want to focus on cultivating life and not death in the way that we think so that the ways God sees us grow.

Cultivating a focus on God’s vision for us can be challenging especially if we don’t quite fully believe it. This is why we can get stuck in wanting to align more with God’s identity for us and continuing to live in our present identity.

The good news is that God says in Romans 12:2 that we can renew our minds, and science says the same through a concept called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity says that our brains are not fixed at any moment in time. What you believe today can be changed and shaped into something else by being deliberate, intentional, and mindful. Just as you have formed patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that have formed your current identity, you can create and forge your new identity based on how God sees you.

Application / Reflection:

1. What have you said to yourself that is speaking death over you?
2. What have you said to yourself that speaks life over you?
3. How can you shift your focus to those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are life-giving?