Archives for April 2018

4 Steps To A Confident Identity

April 27, 2018 by Matt Pavlik 1 Comment

Reading time: 3 minutes

Confidence can be elusive but your identity is the key to finding it. Overshoot and you become proud or arrogant. Undershoot and you carry a heavy burden of discouragement. It’s possible to be confident and humble at the same time. It all depends on how you orient your life: where you find your identity.

Becoming confident takes time. You can develop it as you experience life when considering God as your audience of one. You can become your ideal self–the best version of you that you are pleased with.

Your ideal self is precisely who God means for you to be. You can’t know your ideal self instantaneously. Your identity is God’s greatest gift to you only if you open it up and discover who you are.

I love the following quote, which I first discovered through Darlene Harris while planning an article for her site, andherestorethmysoulproject.org.

Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.
St. Catherine of Siena

This means you have a significant destiny to fulfill by being your ideal self. If you knew who God meant for you to be you wouldn’t want to be anyone else.

To become your ideal self you must journey through four developmental stages. Each stage has a primary focus: caregiver, creation, crisis, and finally Christ. Before you can reach your full potential in one stage, you must complete the challenge of the previous stage. You can work on multiple stages at a time, but incomplete work limits your progress.

1. Caregiver-Focused Identity

You start life dependent on your primary caregivers. You don’t have anything to contribute to others. Your only real job is to learn how to receive from others. Can you receive from others without becoming unnecessarily dependent on them? You can receive and grow at the same time. You receive so you can grow.

2. Creation-Focused Identity

You develop competency and skill by interacting with the external world. At first, you learn to crawl, walk, and run. You learn who you are based on who you connect with the world beyond your body. If you do this well, you contribute to others through the work of your hands. If you don’t, you can become dependent on creation, instead of your creator, to sustain a positive outlook on life.

3. Crisis-Focused Identity

At some point in your life, you face a crisis. A crisis tests your internalized growth or identity. It forces you to clarify your worldview and specifically your Godview. Will you choose to:

Avoid God and return to creation to meet your needs?
Attempt to move Against God and redefine creation to meet your needs?
Ally with God and learn how to let God meet your needs?

If you reject God in some way (option 1 or 2), you’ll likely choose some other ally to depend on (creation or caregivers) as if they were God. You’re vulnerable to developing an addiction because you remain crisis focused instead of Christ-focused. You struggle to accept a good God in a world where you’ve experienced evil.

4. Christ-Focused Identity

You can become a Christian at any of the four steps along the way to identity maturity. However, if you’re not a Christian by the time you reach stage three, the process of resolving your crisis by allying with God and becoming a Christian allows you to enter stage four.

In this final state, you’re sold out on becoming exactly who God made you to be. You desire to align yourself with God’s reality, not a reality you make up. You’re determined to remove any false ideas concerning who you are.

Can you feel the burning in your heart to become all that God made you to be? Are you stuck at any stage in particular? God has all His resources ready to help you become who He made you to be. Then you can set the world on fire. The material in this post comes from my book To Identity and Beyond.

You Are Wonderfully Limited

April 25, 2018 by Matt Pavlik 2 Comments

Reading time: 3 minutes

Most people think of being limited as a negative, but not God. Another way of saying you are limited is you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Your limits are restrictive but they also highlight your unique gifting. Others have what you don’t and you have what others don’t.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Psalm 139:14 NIV

God Made You Limited

You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of who God made you to be. God has already done the hard work of creating you exactly as He wants you to be. You need to discover who you are, not create who you want to be. The mapping of your DNA determines how your body will grow. Likewise, the mapping of your identity (God’s design for you) determines your personality. Your purpose flows out of your identity.

To be human and have a personality is to be limited. As a believer, trying to be someone you are not is exhausting and ultimately impossible. You don’t have to make up who you are or wonder if you are inferior. Unhealthy comparison means believing you’re not good enough and you should be like someone else. Healthy comparison allows you to see how you’re different and value the differences. Uniqueness creates value.

Being limited simply means you have definition. If you weren’t limited, you’d be God. You’d have every ability God has. But even God is limited. He can’t be evil. Limited doesn’t have to mean incapable or impotent; it can mean intentional focus.

You Have a Purpose Just Like Jesus

Jesus’s primary identity and purpose is to reveal who God is. Jesus is human; He has a personality. Jesus is also God and when we see Jesus, we see all that God is, too (John 14:9).

Jesus prioritized the time He had on earth. For example, because Jesus is also God, He could express perfect athletic ability. He could have come to earth to be a pro athlete, but He didn’t because that’s not His purpose.

By becoming a person and following God’s will, Jesus limited himself in many ways so He could remain focused on completing His mission. To limit attention is to focus. Jesus limited His ministry to what God purposed for Him. He didn’t try to be everything to everybody; He stayed focused on His purpose. Following are several scriptures that define Jesus’s focus.

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
John 5:19 ESV

Jesus answered, “For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”
John 18:37 NIV

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4:17-19 ESV

Knowing Your Limits Helps You Know God’s Will

If you can accept your limits, they will lead you to your unique gifts. What you can’t do highlights all the more what you can do. You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of exactly who God made you to be. Jesus has His purpose and you have yours. Focusing on who God made you to be maximizes your potential. You’ll fulfill God’s will.

Core Beliefs About Identity

April 23, 2018 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Reading time: 1 minutes

While you’ll see I’ve posted in several different categories, I write through one primary lens: identity. I want everyone to understand their God-given identity. Here are my top core beliefs about identity:

God knew who you were before you were conceived, therefore, you’re not a random occurring life form. You’re an intentional work of art.
You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of exactly who God made you to be.
You can have true freedom and fulfillment only when you accept and grow in your God-given identity.

Learn more about Christian Concepts and Matt Pavlik.