Day 362 - Accepting Who I Am Victor - Breaking Free From a Victim Based Society

Click here to link directly to the audio file. ********** Yesterday we read from 1 Corinthians 15. There was a line in there that has stuck with me. It goes like this, "...by the grace of God I am what I am..." There is something powerful about that verse that I think we need to consider in order for victor living to play the role it is suppose to in our lives. That line speaks of acceptance. It takes guts to accept who we are. The world is always telling us we aren't enough. The church is often guilty of echoing the worldly message. All the rules and regulations religion loves to hold up as proof of something about their walk with their god does nothing when it comes to the grace of God making us what we are. I am what I am and God seems to be OK with that. This doesn't mean that I won't be something different tomorrow. It just means that I need to lighten up on bad mouthing myself because I fall short in some way or another. This doesn't give me a license to do whatever I want to do and reason away bad behavior with the easy grace that cosmes with God's forgiveness. He does forgive. For me to use the fact that he forgives to act in ways that challenge my identity in worldly ways is akin to manipulation the likes of which would offend us to no end were the table turned. This grace that makes me what I am isn't a cheap grace. It cost God everything. For me to cheapen that grace in ways that flippantly excuse my victim making ways is something that seems totally unforgivable. Yet, even this sin is forgiven by God. His grace goes way beyond anything I have ever seen offered up in this world. That's why I have spent the better part of this last year talking about identity. We spend so much time doing things to try and prove something about ourselves. It is when we fail to achieve all that we think we need in this world that identity becomes something that threatens to crush our souls. God wants things to be so different for us. Victor living is all about knowing who we are no matter what might be happening in our lives. It is when we can look in the mirror on our worst day and muster up the strength to say, "God loves me!" that the power of victor living starts to take hold in our lives. If God's grace is there when things are going our way, I have to believe that same grace is there when the world turns against us. Grace is the basis of identity that makes victor living a possibility in a world so adept at making victims of us all. When things are bad, the line from 1 Corinthians isn't saying that we deserved the badness that came our way. It is as we accept that we are still the loved child of God in the good times as well as the bad that identity plays the role in our lives God intended it to be. That's what the Corinthians verse is saying to me. It is saying that God's grace makes me worthy of being called His Child. My circumstances have nothing to do with this status. When I look to what I do to prove who I am, I turn my back on the power of God's grace in my life. I have shared in my book and several times in these podcasts the fact that I hate any question asked pertaining to identity. It is when I meet new people in my life and they ask, "What I do for a living?" or any kind of question used to try and identify me, I am at a loss as to what to say. Those questions use to scare and frustrate me to no end. I have to be honest with you, I'm still not good at answering those questions. What this past year has done for me is to help me see that I'm OK with myself in the fact that I still don't know how to answer the, "Who are you?" kinds of questions I will face. Maybe I'll have the guts to say one day, "I am who I am because of God's grace in my life." I really don't know how to describe who I am outside of the vague and religious sounding "Child of God" answer. Maybe God will give me a finely worded answer in the future. For now, I'm at peace with being able to accept that I am who I am. I think what brings that peace is