KNOWING WHERE YOU CAME FROM

KNOWING WHERE YOU CAME FROM

With Pastor Anya Oko

If you are going to live your life with precision and accuracy, you need a very clear sense of your origin. One of the biggest problems you will ever have is identity crisis – inability to know who you are...

If you don’t know who you are, your behaviour cannot be consistent with who you are. Then they call it MISBEHAVIOUR – a behaviour that is not in keeping with who a person is. Supposing your name is really Jane but you think it is Ruth. You will always respond when Ruth is called and not respond when Jane is called. The implications of this can be very frightening. You can both miss your opportunity as well as fight with people over theirs...

People generally understand themselves from the frame of reference of their relationship with other people. Such descriptions as husband, wife, mother, brother, boss and so on require someone else to be meaningful. That is to say that such people’s sense of themselves is incomplete without other people. This may look normal but is very dangerous. People also think of themselves in terms of other people’s opinion. They think they are intelligent, good, bad, ugly, etc., because someone or some people say so. They could go home happy because someone with whom they took the bus yesterday night thought they were beautiful. A third way people think of themselves is in terms of their experiences. They can call themselves failures, graduates, successful, etc. based on what had happened in their past.

The problem with the above means of personal identification is that it creates instability. In the first instance, if the relationships with whom we identify ourselves changes, it affects our sense of identity and causes us crisis. If our spouse dies or if at the time we are not even married, we feel like something is missing from who we are. In fact, simple misunderstanding with those others with whom we identify ourselves upset our sense of personal balance. Again if people change their opinion about us it affects our sense of identity. If our teacher in school or our colleague at work calls us stupid, we lose appetite for food for a day or two. Furthermore, our experiences change over the cause of our lives. If we build our identity on our experiences, our lives will be a roller coaster. We keep redefining who we are as our experiences change. The question is who are we before we got into relationships with people, before people had the chance to have an opinion about us and before we had the experiences we had.

The truth is you are fundamentally you are not because of your relationships, people’s opinions and our experience. You are who you are because of where you came from. That is why without a sharp sense of your origin, you can never come to grasp with your true identity.  If you come from a monkey, you are a monkey. Stop arguing. If you come from a tree, you are a tree. And so on. If you come from Nigeria, you are a Nigerian; German if Germany, etc. The implications of this is very profound but the bottom-line is if you don’t know where you are from, you don’t know who you are. You are not your experiences or people’s opinion or even the relationships you have. You stand apart from them.

The Bible reveals that ultimately, man comes from God, the Creator made man in his image and likeness, Gen. 1.26. Incidentally, some people don’t believe this. They prefer to believe that man came from nothing. No wonder their lives are empty, meaningless and unfulfilling. If you come from nothing, then you are nothing. Knowing that one’s origin is God immediately raises the person’s sense of personal worth. This is because an element will always contain the attributes of its source. If milk is poured from a jug to a cup, then the milk in the jug and the one in the cup is the same essence. Knowing that God is your source challenges you to know that you have His character and attributes in you. This motivates you to live life effectively and impactfully. So if you really want to know who you are, don’t ask your relationships, don’t consult with other people and don’t take your experiences too seriously. Ask God. Wow! What a feeling. You come from God. Live like it today and every day. Have a great life.