1 Peter 2:9-10 - But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
One of the most important questions we have to answer in this life is this: who am I? How you answer that question will impact every area of your life for good or for ill. The search for personal identity is a search that has sparked all kinds of definitions of how a person defines themself to crop up in the world. The problem is that if we don’t know who we are supposed to be, or we don’t have an external force defining our identity for us, we will never find an end to that search. In order to find the identity people desperately want, they have done everything from changing jobs to changing schools to changing communities to even changing their biology to support who they think they are supposed to be.
Sadly, this search for identity can often lead people away from the God who has defined this world and defined us as human beings and as individuals. He knit each of us in our mother’s womb and wired us to think and function in this world in a way this is in one sense unique, but also fits within the whole. If we ignore how God sees us, then we will never truly find who we were created to be.
As Christians, we have received salvation from the wrath of God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This carries with it a new understanding of who we now are in Christ. People often don’t like to be defined by others, but to have God tell us who we are is not negative, especially given how he identifies us as his people.
We are a chosen race. He chose you personally and made you a part of a race of people that is not identified by color or gender, but by being united in Christ. We are a royal priesthood, carrying with us a position of worship in God’s kingdom. We are God’s possession, and nothing can take us from his hand. We are God’s people, meaning that we have a home to call our own. We were once a people in darkness, but now we are people of the light. Finally, we are a people who only have these things because of mercy, which we didn’t have before.
This is who we are, and because of that identity, we can rejoice because the community and relationship that we all long for can be ours through Christ bringing us together under God. Once we see ourselves in the merciful light, the only logical thing is to tell others just how wonderful our great God is for showing us who we are and through identity, having great purpose in the world.
You can live today in this identity. You need not wonder who you are or what meaning there is to your life. God has given us these things, and what a hope we have knowing that our identity is not found in things that change, but is found in an unchangeable, perfect God.
