Happy New Year, friends! Today, we turn down a new road of blogging devotionals with a different theme.

A couple of months ago, I was listening to a dear brother from our church, David, expound on a thought about identity. He shared about how he had heard someone use the phrase “be who you are” and was considering further what that phrase meant for those who profess to believe in and follow Jesus Christ.

That set my mind running on a track of what I know of Jesus as mentioned in the Word of God. Who is Jesus? Not just the attributes of Him that our culture now magnifies out of proportion — or says belong to Him but never really have been His according to His own life, teaching, and glorified place in the triune Godhead. But who is He, really? My head was flooded with adjectives and nouns to describe His identity, His attributes.

According to Websters dictionary online, the word identity is actually, interestingly, rather opposite and yet joined in its different meanings. Meaning one speaks of “the distinguishing character or personality of an individual” but the following meanings point to a condition of being the same with described or generic characteristics. In other words, our identity is all at once both what makes us unique as individuals — and also what characteristics we share with the one(s) with whom we are grouped or the one(s) we seek to be like.

The person who chooses to follow Jesus and live for Him wholeheartedly will bring their own personality, gifts, and vices into that relationship…the gifts to be further refined and used for good and the vices to be stripped away. But the call to follow Jesus is a call to surrender to Him and become more like Him. My individual identity must blend into the background on the canvas being painted, and His character reflected in me must rise to the foreground in the highlighted details.

Sometimes — even daily — we need a heart massage, to think on or recalibrate to His being, His characteristics, and what He has called us (to be). We need less of our negative characteristics and more of His wondrous ones.

We need to think about who we are. In Him. And we need to be who we are. In Him.

So, this year, at least once a week, I am going to post a new article here, each reflecting one aspect of who we are in Him — who He calls us to be. I invite you to return often, to read and think.

And then to go and to be.