I just want to start by thanking Women of Reverence for making this platform available to us. Last year, I read all the blogs and just yearned to be able to one day write, too. God really encouraged me to just be brave enough and I am so grateful that I am able to share a piece of my heart with a ministry that is dear to my heart. I pray you are all blessed by the powerful testimonies that many powerful women are sharing with each other.
This month we are talking about Identity. I know this can be a deep topic and often many of us struggle with how we see ourselves. In a very quick side note, I will add here that our identity is still one of the main areas in which the enemy wants to attack us.
Eve, who has taken the rap for the fallen world we live in, honestly just experienced her weakness under a spotlight, where we probably deal more with ours in silence (and let’s be fair, our weaknesses are not in the first pages of the Bible, the most printed book in the world).
The trick of the enemy: to make us doubt that God could really be all that good to us.
Eve simply and innocently, in one moment, believed the lie more than the truth, and she took it from the liar instead of the One who IS Truth, God Himself.
Let's be sober; we all have done this. We have all believed the lie of the enemy above the truth of God. As women, we critique ourselves more than we critique a bad pizza or poor customer service, and we definitely tend to be harsher on ourselves than we would ever be in any of the above experiences.
You see, God's amazing truth is that we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139). This psalm shows a God of intentionality. He formed us! Not our parents, God Almighty himself. He personally covered you in your mother’s womb! Every part of you was crafted by His design.
I often see God spending many hours, way into the evening, sitting and creating me. I imagine how he chose every element of my personality. My character. My giggle. My eyes. My one pixie ear. How he chose to place in me a heart that feels so many emotions. How He created in me a deep sense to always help and not think about how it is going to get done, but just to know it will be done, somehow. That he placed in me generations. Each of my children He had already called by name and then, too, placed each egg that was going to be the part that also created them, inside me – before I was even born.
When I spend time seeing God doing all that just to make me, I suddenly explode with a sense of love as I look at my children and know He did that for them, too. He has also crafted in them something fearfully, wonderfully and marvelously incredible. With all assurance, we can know we have a Daddy /God who is consistently the same. He never changes. So how He spent time making me, He, too, made you.
Psalm 139:16 (NIV) speaks of God having written down every day of your life: “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them.”
God thinks about you. He has written a love-letter book filled to the brim for you to live out and, like the master planner He is, He did it all before you lived a single second of your life.
The more I read this psalm, the more loved I feel, the more seen, precious, cared for and purposed I realise I am. God didn’t place me on this earth, in this time, because He forgot what He was doing. NO! He took all of eternity, and looked at all of time on earth, and then said, “This is a good time for her to live.”
You see, now that I have learnt that the enemy was always after my identity, I have also drawn closer to God to hide me from the lies. Yes, I was abused as a young girl and I honestly lived the first 38 years of my life believing the lies that I was never going to be good enough for God. I constantly messed up the more I tried to live a life that was good enough. I was 9 years old when I met Jesus, but I was 6 years old when I was abused. And even though I could never understand what it was that was hurting so much, and what that hurt scarred deep in me, I really did spend my entire life trying to just be good enough for Jesus.
When I was 38 years old, I met Jesus in the most incredible way. These were scriptures that ministered to me, and, truthfully, in all the years of reading my Bible, I had never seen these words like I did the day they changed me.
I am the righteousness of God – I have right standing with Him – in Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit; I belong to Him (1 Corinthians 6:19).
1 John 4:16-18 (ESV): “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment....”
My friend, you are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Colossians 3:3 (NIV): “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” You are, as Jesus is. The Holy Spirt dwells in you.
WOW! This ignites my heart. So, when the enemy tries to accuse me and say, “Who do you think you are?” I shout back that I don’t think anything, I KNOW that I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. I shout back these scriptures to him, and he leaves me alone. I get to live in the identity that Jesus has declared over me in Psalm 139. I am, indeed, God's handiwork.
I pray you would take time to sit at His feet and let Him speak into you what His truth and word declares over you.
Ephesians 2:10 (NLT): “For you are God’s masterpiece. He has created you anew in Christ Jesus, so you can do the good things he planned for you long ago.”
Genesis 1:26 (NLT): “Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.”
You, my dear friend, were made by Heaven, for heaven. You were made in the most powerful image of all of creation.
Your identity is placed in you by God Almighty.
Declare His word over you and live free of the many lies that you may have lived bound to. But now that you know the truth, the truth will set you free. So live free!
Love
Cindy
Women of Reverence welcomes Cindy Osborne as a guest contributor.
Cindy Osborne is married to Nicholas and together they are blessed with 4 beautiful children. She works as a learning content developer and trainer. Her passion in life is to help others by sharing information with them that makes an impact and difference in their lives, enabling them to help themselves. She manages a monthly charity drive for an orphanage in Ivory Park where she simply asks anyone to help these young children who cannot help themselves.
Cindy enjoys a good cup of coffee, reading, listening to CHRISTIAN podcasts and by loving Jesus in her best way possible.