Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
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‘Who are you ?’
It’s a question I ask a lot of people, the normal reply is that the person being questioned states their name, for example if the individuals name was Martin, the individual would say my name is martin. Then a further question follows, ‘who is martin?’ and then what I find is that the individual becomes a bit stuck in answering that question, however looking into the question a bit deeper, defining who a person is ultimately means considering the characteristics that make up the person, such as looks, character, dress code, language, ethnicity, sex, age e.t.c.
Looking at these factors, only a little number of them are beyond the individuals control, i.e. age, sex and ethnicity, everything else is subject to change, a fact to keep in mind is that the factors that are beyond our control are entities that are not distinct to any individual i.e. there are a lot of males and females; this means it does not specify who you are but simply put’s you in a category!
Moving on, when you consider the other factors you see that they are factors that are really moulded by your environment , for example, a person who has been brought up in France would speak French, dress like a French man, eat French food, and have the ethnic values of a French person. If charactersitics are the things that makes you yourself, does this say that the environment a person grows up in ultimately makes him who he/she is? If this has such a powerful effect in determining who the person is, how then can they say they know who they are, because in actual fact who they are is simply what the environment has made them?
If the person grew up in a different place, and they spoke different, ate different, behaved differently and lived a different life style, then they would be a totally different person! How then does a person look at themself and search deep within and say this is who I am, regardless of where I have grown up I would still be this same person? I asked myself this questions years ago, and then I started to search deep within me to discover who I was, and then I met some one called Jesus. He taught me a lot of things, including the inability for a man to live a life free from sin, i.e lies, lust, hate e.t.c and this bothered me also. I thought to myself, ‘if a person can not live a life without these things even if he choses to then this is a problem because it simply means man has no control over these things’. Because of that, it has been accepted as fine, and has been included in who a man is! At this point I said in my heart ‘If there is a God and there is a heaven and a hell, how can a person who:
1 – Does not know who he is
2 – Tells lies so i a liar
3 – Hates (according to the bible if you hate you have committed murder)
get into heaven?’.
I really wondered how a person who is a liar, a thief, a murderer in his heart and does not even know who he really is get into a place for holy and righteous people called heaven! I realised that if there was a heaven, it was humanly impossible to get into it. Another question that bothered me hugely was ‘how can a person really know who he is?’
Someone told me about Jesus! And he said Jesus paid the price for my sins and if I accepted him as my saviour I would be included in the bunch he died for. Then I got told that he was God’s son and that God knew things that worried my heart, which is the inability for man to live without sin! And so he sent Jesus (Yeshua meaning salvation or saviour) as a sacrifice to pay for all the sins that we have committed and all the sins we are going to commit, and this was a way to get to heaven.
I also learned that when he paid on the cross for our sins he left his spirit which dwells in us upon request giving us the ability to conquer sin and live free from being ruled by this thing described by the bible as sin! This can also help us to discover who we really are, and today I stand hand on heart and admit that I really did think I knew who I was, I would argue about it day and night, but that was just natural pride and now I really know who I am and I thank God for showing me who I really am.
Why don’t you ask God to show you who you really are? Or are you going to be stubborn like I was and go on pretending you know who you are just because things are good? Come on! Drop the pride and come to Jesus so he can show you who you are and most importantly save you from this thing that rules human beings called sin!
Thanks for reading.