For to me, to live is Christ (Phil 1:21) Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God (Gal 2:20) Your life is now hidden in God with Christ. He is your life. (Col 3:3,4)

We’ve been looking at the Christian grace of Kindness over the past few weeks, and that has been the foundation from which we’ve looked at a spirit of entitlement and now are considering a spirit of rejection. Both are obstacles to practicing kindness as a lifestyle.

Last time we saw how kindness is a weapon in the spirit realm and so it’s something the enemy wants to prevent in our lives. Nearly everyone has had their motives misunderstood when they’ve reached out in kindness, so it seems safer to not reach out. That’s an obvious problem of a rejection-spirited person. But most of the time it goes quite a bit deeper…to the core of our identity.

Through the lens of rejection, we will struggle with our own identity. The person who finds their identity in Jesus will live out of the peace of that identity because their self-value is established in Jesus… “to live is Christ”. The tragedy here is that for many in the Christian faith our identity is not found in Jesus, it’s found in a role we play. When we have a spirit of acceptance, our core identity is “I’m a child of God.” “I’m the bride of Christ”. And we live out of that identity.

But rejection doesn’t have the relational capacity to go there. So instead, we focus on our role and  that becomes our identity, “I’m a Sunday school teacher,” “I’m a pastor,” “I work in the such-in-such ministry,” and the list goes on. Because we’ve substituted our core identity for a role. It’s no wonder Jesus warns us against the use of “impressive titles” (Luk 22:25), because a title is just a role, not an identity. Our identity is in Jesus.

And with a spirit of rejection our true identity in Jesus gets lost in those roles. Then, if someone takes away our role…we’re plunged into an identity crisis because that role is who we think we are. If our identity is found in being an Elder in the local church, and we somehow lose that role, we’re toast. We’re having a crisis of faith. If our identity is found in our spiritual gifting, and somehow we lose the opportunity to minister in that gifting, we’re toast. If our identity is in being a follower of Pastor Smith and Pastor Smith gets caught in a scandal, we’re toast.

Similarly, if we find our identity in being a parent and then our kids leave the nest … what happens? Empty nest syndrome. When we find our identity at our employment and then we retire or get downsized… Statistically, a lot of people curl up and die. Things get out of control because decades of substitute identities have not prepared us to face reality that all we have is a role, and roles can disappear in a heartbeat. Identities persist when roles crumble.

And some Christians never establish an identity. They’re toast right from the start, wandering through life aimlessly wondering who they are, never able to connect, never able to love from the heart, because they aren’t very connected to their own hearts.

This teaching is vital to understanding how to practice kindness. Kindness is a fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of a role or a title; not the fruit of a position or an employment status. So if we’re going to be people who practice kindness (instead of missing the opportunities that abound around us), we’ve got to get our identities established in nothing other than Jesus. The rest are just roles.

Next time we’ll look at establishing our identity in Jesus.