life on planet earth on Identity

A Multi-faceted Church Who loses by the church and parachurch’s lack of unity and cooperation? Absolutely everyone : congregations, ministry organizations, ministry leaders, individual believers . ....

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

Almighty God, from the very beginning, You have designed us for glorious work. You have given us Your Spirit and spread before us limitless resources. Because You have made us a royal priesthood, we n...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

Jesus, you are our peace You proclaim it You create it You bring us near Without you there is No safety No belonging No nurturing No identity rooted beyond this dust Without you we are Anchorless St...

O Father of all creation, who hovered over the deep at the beginning, who spoke light into darkness, who split the heavens open and descended upon the Son of God in the waters of the Jordan, who creat...

Prayer of Adoration Father God … our Abba: You seek us with relentless love – coming after us in Your Son, Jesus. When we are in the pits – You draws us up and out; When we are broken – You fix u...

We have been created by God, to be loved by God, and to receive our identity from God. But in our everyday lives, as we go about our work, school, interacting with our family and friends, we don’t alw...

Dear Heavenly Father, we lower our heads before you and we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are yours. Sometimes we carry on our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being...

Immanuel Kant was one of the greatest philosophers in history. The story goes that he was accustomed to taking long summer walks. One day, he stopped in a park, sat on a bench for several hours, and j...

There's a refrain in one of the songs we sing at our church that goes like this "I am who you say I am." It's a rather simple line, but a lesson that takes a lifetime to live out. ...

The act of ingestion and digestion involves the incorporation of food into our own flesh. What we eat literally becomes us, and we become it. Logically, therefore, food is among the most powerful expre...

All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,...

According to a December 2014 article in The Economist, there is a “distinct correlation between privilege and pressure.” We may earn more money, but we can never earn more time. And because we’re work...

Peter Storey, the former Methodist bishop and president of the South African Council of Churches, a white man who opposed apartheid, tells a story about a party at which he and Archbishop Desmond Tutu...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

In his book  Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

Ideally, when a baby is born into a healthy family, she is received with gladness. Her parents look on her with delight and the baby responds with joy. The baby is wanted—is loved. Her parents will ma...

As Christians, we wake each morning as those who are baptized. We are united with Christ and the approval of the Father is spoken over us. We are marked from our first waking moment by an identity tha...

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general ...

Protestantism developed its sense of identity primarily in response to external threats and criticisms rather than as a result of shared beliefs. In one sense, the idea of "Protestantism" ca...

When an issue is less central to one’s identity it’s possible to feel, for example, “I really should do more to help those in need, but it’s just too hard’ or ‘I just can’t find the time.’ But when th...

Define yourself radically as beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion.

I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.

Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..

We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.

It’s been said that our identity is that which is identical about us in every situation. Identity. Identical. Yet that doesn’t help much because we are composite people, bundles of competing desires a...

Wer bin ich? Der oder jener? Bin ich denn heute dieser und morgen ein andrer? Who am I? This one or that one? Am I then this one today and tomorrow another?

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.