Daily Devotional
Who Are You?
Text: Genesis 39:9
How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” So it was, as she spoke to Joseph day by day, that he did not heed her, to lie with her or to be with her.(NKJV)
Message
I’m not asking who people say you are. That can get you off the correct answer.
The wrong answer to my question may blow your ego yet making you miss the mark. Their answers may satisfy and prod you to destruction. My question is, “who are you?
Now take five minutes, pen on paper and write your answer before going on. Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t deceive yourself.
Now that you’ve had that done faithfully and I hope so, let’s go!
Who are you is not who you think or desire that you are. It is the person God your maker says you are!
Why?
There is a difference between want and need. Balance desired to die the death of the righteous but never walked on their paths. He died cheaply on the war front.
You may in fear or out of laziness think less than God says you are. What a tragedy!
Who you are is different from your past or present.
Who you are is your future outcome based on divine dictate and plan for your life and the culmination of the past and present efforts of yours towards your future goal.
Who you are or will ever be is the outcome of your pressing forward efforts towards the mark of your high calling by God!
Joseph at a time or many times found himself in this identity politics. For an instance, Potiphars wife saw in Joseph a handsome play boy, fornicator and trust betrayer among others, but not Joseph. Joseph response was, “How can I do this and sin against God”. In other word am a Prime Minister by Divine arrangement and that is what I am working on and in notwithstanding that am your houseboy in the present.
“The irony is that so-called identity politics so often takes an axe to the roots of our identity. For who we are is not just something we magically dream up in a cultural vacuum, but grows out of a thousand thousand inherited cultural reference points, laid down over time. These form the background against which things make sense”.
“Of course, tradition must not become a kind of cultural prison. And a vigorous culture reinvents itself all the time”.
But the idea that we might wipe away the African most formative cultural influenced “Christianity, in the name of follow-follow, peer pressure, inclusion, threatens to create a generation of restless, rootless wanderers, for whom the building blocks of their own identity come to be little more than ever transient popular culture and, even worse, simply how they feel”. And this is the very essence and need of my question, “Who are you?, and your giving your answer and the right abswer a thought.
Who you are is seeing yourself as God sees you. Period. It is not a feeling or emotion. It is a covenanted divine engagement outcome.
Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:20 says, we “are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were entreating by us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God”.
Just as a head of state sends an ambassador on a diplomatic mission, Christ sends us on a mission to represent him in both words and actions on earth. We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God ( 2 Corinthians 5:20).
1 Peter 2:9, put it in more, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the One who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light”.
Peter is describing a new Exodus people who will proclaim God’s praise among the nations and whose priestly sacrifices will take the form of mutual submission and honoring others before themselves (see Philippians 4:18. Philippians 4:18).
So, stop comparing yourself with others. You are specially made. No example of you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
To know who you are, you need to be in agreement with God, your maker. This agreement must be total. Anything less is unacceptable.
An analogy here; according to finance author Morgan Housel, being wealthy — much like beauty — is in the eye of the beholder. “There’s no such thing as an objective measure of wealth,” he told Lewis Howes, host of The School of Greatness podcast on a recent episode. Housel is the best-selling author of The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes.
To illustrate his point, Housel pointed to a joke by comedian Chris Rock: if Bill Gates woke up with Oprah’s money, he’d jump out the window. “Because who is a billionaire comparing himself to? Other billionaires,” Housel said.
According to Forbes’ 2023 world’s billionaires list, Gates had a net worth of $104 billion, placing him at No. 6 on the list of more than 2,000 names. As a result, he’d be more likely to compare himself to an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg than an Oprah Winfrey, whose net worth is, by comparison, a mere $2.5 billion (No. 1,217 in the world).
But how does one end up on such an exclusive life fulfilled list in life?
It is by knowing, believing and faith-working as God planned!
Housel s added, “being born at the right time in the right place — plays a significant role” in life. You lacked neither.
You are not just one of the pack. You are created in the image and likeness of God and by God!
Now my asking, “Who are you?” is to prevent your ending at having a middling level of success.”
It is to prevent you from “short-termism.” In other words, to tell you to stick it out long enough to reap the benefits of your hard work in line with your divine destiny.
The antidote to short-termism is endurance. “It comes down to whether you have the endurance — if not stubbornness — to keep it going in any …life endeavour”.
That goes for who you are. You are an investment-investor. You are God investment. You are created too as an investor, investing, as well.
If you’re an investor, you’re paid to put up with uncertainty, since most people will “cry uncle sooner than they thought.”
Those who are successful not only have the endurance to wait out tough times, they also have the ability to withstand “pain,” which could mean different things to different people.
When former president Barack Obama met the Navy SEALs who took down Osama bin Laden, he “was stunned at how ordinary they looked,” Housel said. Half of them looked like they could have been high-school principals, he added, but “their tolerance for pain was off the charts.”
A high tolerance for pain doesn’t mean you have to be able to do 100 push-ups with perfect form in two minutes like a Navy SEAL. For Housel, as a writer, withstanding pain meant being able to handle the possibility of failure and coming up against criticism.
“People are going to tell you every day… how dumb you are, how bad of a writer you are, and you’ve just got to bite your lip and endure it.”
Who are you is a culmination of these three traits: a mix of endurance, a high tolerance for pain, sprinkled with a dose of Divine luck.
We’ve heard of athletes going bankrupt shortly after retirement or lottery winners losing all their money within a few years. “If Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg… inherited a billion dollars at age 18, it would have not slowed them down at all — they were so ambitious, irrespective of money,” Housel said. “But if I [had] inherited a billion dollars at 18, I’d be a disaster.”
The activities in Your past and present is as most people that need to be motivated “by the fear of not making it.” They stay there by learning how to maintain and grow despite the adversities. After all, these are two completely different skills.”
Remember that there is no short cut in life. Those who thread in short cut end being cut short by Life.
May you succeed and stay succeeding. That’s Who you are.