REMIND – Reclaiming Our True North

THE SECOND OF SEVEN

It’s not easy to look honestly at ourselves. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things we’ll ever do. True self-examination can be painful because it forces us to face uncomfortable truths — to see what we’ve become. And often, what we see is someone we don’t like, someone we never meant to be. So instead, we hide behind the image we project, believing our own carefully crafted propaganda.

Yet, remember this. We are not the sum of our actions. It's not decided who we are, based on our behavior, or lack of it. Neither are we what other people have said or think we are. 

We are who God says we are. You are who God says you are. Period. 

God’s viewpoint, His statements, His calling, and His working for you is what counts. That is where you get your identity. When God called you to become His child through the sacrificial death and resurrected life of His son Jesus, and you repented and believed, you entered a new sphere of eternal existence and participation in the divine nature, that nothing can change or take away. As Paul’s letter to the Romans states:

³¹ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³² He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? ³³ Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴ Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. ³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? Romans 8:31–35 (ESV)

Just in case you are not sure of the answers to all of these questions, they are: “no one” and “no thing.” 

Paul then tells us why all this is true as he wraps up this section of the letter. 

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:37–39 (ESV)

We never lose God's favor because of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That will never change. But we can forget it.

The world is dominated by the belief that our identity is bound up in how we look, what we own or what we can buy, what we can do or what we have done. We're bombarded with these beliefs continually. This is why we must remind ourselves whose we are before we can identify who we are. Therefore, Remind is the first of the five steps to renewal. 

This brings us back to Josiah, the young king of a nation that had forgotten their assignment to be a light for God to the world. He had a humanly impossible task before him. The first thing we’re told about Josiah is astounding. 2 Kings 22:2 says, “And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left”.

Pause and consider the gravity of that statement. His immediate heritage was a spiritual catastrophe. His grandfather Manasseh had filled Jerusalem with pagan altars and even sacrificed his own children to false gods. His father Amon continued this wicked legacy and was assassinated by his own officials. Josiah came to the throne as an eight-year-old boy with no godly father, no godly grandfather to model his life after. 

So where did he get his "true north"? The text tells us. He reached back. He skipped a generation, and then another, and he anchored his identity in his spiritual ancestor, David. He reminded himself of his covenant identity. He knew he belonged to the line of David, but more importantly, he belonged to the God of David. His obedience didn’t flow from a list of rules he was trying to keep; it flowed from a deep, settled sense of belonging. The Chronicler tells us that in his eighth year as king, at just sixteen years old, Josiah “began to seek the God of his father David”. His reform didn't start with activity; it started with identity. He first had to know whose he was before he could know what to do.

We see this principle in the modern world as well. In the mid-2000s, the coffee giant Starbucks was in deep trouble. After years of explosive growth, its founder, Howard Schultz, who had stepped away as CEO, wrote a now-famous memo to his leadership team. He warned that in their relentless pursuit of expansion, the company was losing its soul. The focus had shifted from the craft of coffee to the efficiency of transactions. The warm, inviting smell of roasting coffee had been replaced by the smell of breakfast sandwiches. This, he said, was leading to the "watering down of the Starbucks Experience".

When Schultz returned as CEO in 2008 to turn the company around, his first major act wasn't financial. It was an act of identity. He did something that Wall Street thought was insane: he closed all 7,100 of his U.S. stores for an entire afternoon to retrain over 135,000 baristas on the art of pulling the perfect espresso shot. It cost the company millions in lost revenue, but it was a powerful, symbolic act. He was reminding them of who they were. He was saying, "We are not a fast-food chain. We are not just about transactions. We are about the coffee. We are about the experience. This is our core identity". The historic turnaround of Starbucks began with a return to its true north. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/27sbux.html

What does this mean for us?

Personally, who are you? I mean, who are you really? Before you are a husband or a wife, a parent or a child, an employee, a neighbor, or a citizen of this nation, who are you? If you’re in Christ, your primary identity is this: You are a beloved child of the living God, bought by the blood of Jesus, sealed by His Spirit. Do you live from that identity? Or have you allowed your job, your political affiliation, your successes, or your failures to define you? 

We must constantly preach the Gospel to ourselves and remind ourselves of our core identity. We are not what we do; we are who God says we are. We obey God not to become His children, but because we are His children. That simple shift changes our motivation from fearful performance to grateful love. It changes us at the core of our being, our soul. 

And corporately, as a church, what is our identity? We are not a social club. We are not a political action committee. We are not an entertainment venue. We are the body and bride of Christ, a family of disciples on mission, called to make more disciples of Jesus. Every ministry we run, every program we launch, every dollar we spend must flow from that core identity. Renewal begins when we Remind ourselves who we truly are.

This is a good thing, but I didn't say it was easy. What will it take for you to truly align your self-identity with how God identifies you? Ponder that for a minute. 

If we believe, and I mean really believe the Bible is the Word of God, we can believe what it says about us, God’s covenant children. Once we get a vision of this and accept it as reality, we can live it. The more you know; the more you can believe and then, the more you can change. 

Several years back, Dr. Neil Anderson, a theologian specializing in practical theology at Talbot School of Theology, authored “Victory over the Darkness.” Among his contributions in this book is a section on “Identity.” This has aided many in REMINDING themselves of who they are and in reclaiming their true direction. You can download a PDF of this below.

Who I Am In Christ