Embracing you

I was recently listening to my paster preach a sermon in which he brought up the current culture's fascination with and determination to "be who you are." My mind went racing as this is a prevalent and predominant idea that has taken its place in the West's mind as certainty. The idea is that you should be who you are; wear your cloths how you want; laugh at what makes you laugh; pursue whatever is in your heart. Is that right thinking? Should a Christian, a follower of Jesus agree or disagree with this idea?

Initially, there seems there is a dichotomy, if we wrangle particular verses from the Bible's New Testament. A particular verse that would say "no" to societies belief is 2 Corinthians 5.17: "Therefore, if any one else is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come." We see the dominant and very clear teaching of Jesus and his followers of repentance, which many would explain as a turning from what you once pursued and followed to what God desires his children to follow and pursue. Also, there is the New Testament belief that the Holy Spirit indwells in the life of the believer; this meaning that the very Spirit of God teaches our own spirits what it is, through the reading of God's Words, prayer and fellowship with other believers, that God desires of his people, his children.

So how do these ideas fit in with our culture's idea of being yourself?

I think part of our culture's thought of self-recognition and fruition is rooted in selfishness. This selfishness most clearly plays itself out in the fact that we are told to be who we are and to pursue our dreams is spite of anyone else. Sacrifice is a no-no with this ideology. To pursue all that you want or desire fully means that you can only be thinking of yourself as primary: if your pursuit is supreme all other pursuits not wholly your own are secondary. Sacrifice says I will take the desires of others, including God, and make them my own supreme or primary goal. This is part of repentance and God's Spirit indwelling in the believer: God's desires become the believers chief desire. 

But there is also a sense in which the thought of our day hits a beautiful Biblical nerve: God made us and he made each individual to be a reflection of His own glory. There is a sense of individuality that God crafted into each person to be who He made them to be. We are all made to reflect and display different things through a vast array of mediums for one purpose: glorify God, help all the world to see God for who He is. 

Paul speaks of this when he says that each believer is is a piece making the whole of the Body of Christ. There is no need for a body to be all eyes or feet or hands but all must come together--arms, mouth, ear, eyes, etc.--to form the whole oneness that best and most truthfully and clearly displays Christ's body. So in this we see that tapping into, recognizing our uniqueness as an individual is glorifying to God if we utilize our gifts and desires and concerns and dreams as art of what God is doing in our world. God's Spirit does not only change us--by shaking and shaping us into the reality of God and the world and seeing and believing like we were formally incapable of doing--but God's Spirit also enlightens us and makes us realize in the truest sense our own self. We who were formed and fashioned by God cannot know who we completely and wholly are without God. 

I conclude, therefore, that the Christian may take this supreme cultural thought in portion. We cannot in our pursuit of being who God made us to be, step outside the bounds of God's decrees nor His wisdom which is established by many practical modes. We must use ourselves for the glory of God in the manor God has assigned us, which requires wisdom of our own and above all patience and humility. But we cannot know who God intended us to be unless we follow God and abide by Him. We cannot glorify God rightly with our gifts and abilities and pursuits unless we are doing so in conformity with His plans and timing. We are all God's but only those who trust in God will be, in the most truest sense, who they are. When God calls one to Himself, to follow and trust Him, he takes the individual and, as it were, brings to fruition what they were to become, in part. The "in part" will vanish though when the believer  steps into eternity, for the believer will then fully become all that that God intended for that person to be in Christ Jesus' full and clear and perfect and holy and unhindered presence.