For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12 (ESV)

Fighting For Your Identity – The Fighting Series – Part 3

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

In the last 3 chapters of Ephesians, the narrative moves from identity forming to how to live your identity. Rather than living FOR acceptance, you live FROM acceptance.

Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:1-4,
“I plead with you to walk holy, in a way that is suitable to your high rank, given to you in your divine calling. With tender humility and quiet patience, always demonstrate gentleness and generous love toward one another, especially toward those who may try your patience. Be faithful to guard the sweet harmony of the Holy Spirit among you in the bonds of peace, so that you will be one body and one spirit, as you were all called into the same glorious hope of divine destiny.”

We are valued, we are one (sons and daughters, brothers and sisters), we are holy. This is our collective identity in The Christ.

It changes the way we treat ourselves.
It changes the way we treat others.
It changes the way we react and respond.

Of course, it's easy to say and a struggle to live. It’s a daily choice, sometimes a moment by moment choice, to remember our true identity in Christ and our connection with others. Often it’s in making mistakes that we learn how to walk this road best. And that's OK – that's what a life of repentance looks like. Not perfection, but learning and growing in grace and love.

But for many, their identity remains a mystery. A heartache, an unanswerable question. So they draw their sense of self from other things. Career, a relationship, achievement, sports, art, titles, governments, countries, race, religion… these things turn into identity sources (rather than expressions) for many. I find that most of us are in the middle of this kind of identity struggle on some level. It’s a continuous, lifelong journey.

When your identity is in something that can be taken away from you (rather than something that is shared with others), you will fight to the death for its protection and advancement. Conquest becomes our purpose, and that outworks itself in millions of ways on micro and macro levels, from the home to governments.

“The war of conquest, which is a war to heat the blood of even the most timorous, because one way or another we all fight to conquer, and what we fight to conquer is the world. Not literally the world… but, for the most part, our goal is a more realistic one: just a place in the world, a place in the sun, our place… We feel that we must conquer a territory in time and space that will be ours.

If that is the goal of this war of conquest that we all must wage, there are also the adversaries with whom we have to wage it; and they are adversaries of flesh and blood. They are human beings like ourselves, each of whom is fighting the same war toward the same end and under a banner emblazoned with the same word that our banners bear, and that word is of course Myself, or Myself and my Family, or Myself and my Country, Myself and my Race, which are all really MYSELF writ large.

But there is another war that we fight, of course, all of us, and this one is not a war against flesh and blood. ‘For we are not contending against flesh and blood,’ the letter reads. Then against what? What worse is there to contend against in this world than other men?” – The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner. Harper Collins.

Go to To Become Truly Human – The Fighting Series – Part 4 »

Written by Liz Milani

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