Identity and Destiny

[HKHaugan]

If you don’t know where you came from you can’t know where you are going.

Every year on Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina the Highland Games celebrate the Scottish heritage. Those who have Scot names identify themselves by wearing their clan tartans. There are traditional athletic events, food and the sounds of pipers accompanying old dances. My own heritage has taken me back to Norway to study, to find family and to get a feel for my origins. A friend I met here in Banner Elk (we come here in the Summer) traces his Norwegian ancestry to a grave marker etched in the year 1102 AD. Heritage is a big thing for many people because it gives them a sense of who they are because of where they came from. Many people live by their earthly heritage and form clubs to sustain the sense of origin. There are German-American, Italian-American clubs and the Sons of Norway to name a few. Besides these you have a proliferation of all kinds of clubs that give people a sense of identity, belonging and even purpose.

Shift for a moment to science. There is a never-ending search for the origin of the universe. Then you have the pondering possibility of finding extra-terrestrial life along with the realization of the vastness of space and speculation as to what is out there. But there is also absorption with determining how small the interior substances of the universe are. At the heart of it all is the search for origins as though if we found them we could then control who and what we are.

In these two searches, identity and origin, five things are revealed:

First, there is this enormous gap between the visible and the invisible in all of existence.

Second, humanity is limited to speculation having no idea of who, what and why it is here.

Third, individual self-conscious aloneness is where everything takes place, where search begins, where satisfaction takes precedence in mind and emotion and where all is questions seeking answers.

Fourth, there is a tremendous sense of conflict in the individual and between individuals, a grinding uneasiness in just existing. Every personal human endeavor is an agonizing search within trying to understand what is without. Wars and rumors of wars, economic crises, social political unrest, crime, addictions, climatic changes, all point to a lost mankind looking desperately for its origin.

Fifth, the search for identity and origin have given no final answers, no final peace, no sense of belonging that lives beyond its meetings, no life beyond its identity, nor any final secure relational identity. Something has to come from outside the self, outside of man’s speculation, outside of what is. That something has to be revealed pesonally.

Charles Colson wrote in his book Faith, a chapter called Invasion, that the world needed an invasion from outside. It came in the person of Jesus Christ. This led me to see just what that implied. It meant Jesus invaded our lost world. He invaded it with a perfect body, mind and heart. He invaded our intellect. He invaded our emotions. He invaded our hearts. He broke down the Jericho walls of our individual fears and our chosen independence from God. He invaded the strongholds that hold us captive and keep us from faith and love. He invaded the collective resistance of the devil’s rule. He invaded our consciences, our skewed morality and our attempts to take God’s place in human interaction. He invaded our pride, our arrogance, our self-indulgence and our social classes. He invaded our religions and our heartless institutions. He invaded all the walls the devil had erected to keep God out of man’s mind. Those walls have gates and they will not prevail against the invasion of Jesus Christ who brings them down.

What Jesus brought to Chuck Colson is what He brought to all of us---His Word, His Spirit and His life. He brought with Him the knowledge of where we came from, who we are and why we are here. The Cross Jesus bore was the one event in all of history that rearranged the whole issue of who we are and why we are here. By submitting His identity, His life, His destiny to death on a Cross, He let the world’s power structure throw its entire arsenal against Him. When He rose from the dead His life as recorded in Scripture became the demonstration we look to for the essence of who God is and how we find our identity and destiny all wrapped in His having physically and spiritually lived here.

Instead of our struggling to open the world's gates of identity and life Jesus showed by His Cross and Resurrection that He was the single gate to ultimate and final reality, eternal life in the Kingdom of God. He is the lifestyle for this world. Jesus is the gate to the unseen dimension which governs every move we make. The real world of people is lived in the individual mind and heart and spirit. Those are the gates to everyone around us. How we open those gates depends on how willing we are to seek entrance.

It takes trust first in the Lord and second, keeping in step with what the Holy Spirit is leading us to do. Then the question becomes a challenge. Are we willing to establish a trust relationship with those who don't know the spiritual experience that comes from outside secular existence? We discover our purpose is not adaptability to the secular atmosphere but to present Jesus to everyone so that they who are still drifting in the temporary can find their eternal spiritual identity and destiny. It means living our lives trusting Jesus in every situation in which we find ourselves. It means to look forward to living in faith in every next moment, event, occurrence and relational occasion.

Now we return to those gates in the walls we were talking about above. They are the ones we define as attitudes. Attitudes that we use to protect our heart and minds from any invasion. Attitudes are the real unseen environmental issues that face us first in ourselves and then in others. Secular society encourages us to immerse ourselves in self discovery and conformity to its standards, not spiritual discovery. Its goal is control of our mind, heart and spirit through fear.

Secular attitudes are shaped by fear and self preservation. The attitude of Jesus is based on the love of His Father and the desire to please Him by doing His will. That's really the heart of Jesus whose attitude was to put His Father first. The Father's desire for us is to listen to His Son Jesus, put Him first and please Him. That is the singular attitude that makes us truly human, truly an image of God and truly eternal. The gates of hell can never prevail against that spiritually grounded attitude.

Psalm 16 The Message Bible
My choice is you, God, first and only. And now I find I'm your choice!
You set me up with a house and yard. And then you made me your heir!
The wise counsel God gives when I'm awake is confirmed by my sleeping heart.
Day and night I'll stick with God; I've got a good thing going and I'm not letting go.