Past VS. Identity

I now feel as though I am constantly defying labels put on me. I used accept the words of others as truth, and act out of what I had been identified with. All my life I’ve heard people label me saying I’m a cynic or a pessimist. In the past I’ve accepted this, thinking it’s who I am and how I should act. I felt bound to these labels afraid of what people would think if I acted outside of the restraints of these labels. I didn’t know how to behave other than the extremes of a negative characteristic. I would often classify myself based on the lies whispered to me by the devil, that what I’ve done in the past is who I will always be. I would hear people tell me I’m a rebel or an anarchist and in every moment I would base decisions on these labels, trying to decide, whether to defy the labels set upon me or to find security in knowing who I am.

Recently I’ve found myself slipping back into my old ways of negativity. I knew this was not a characteristic of God and therefore not something I desired for my life. The difficulty increased as I began to question if negative is just who I am. Negativity, after all, is the way I’ve always lived my life, it’s what I know. That’s not who I am. I am a new creation in God. I don’t have to be anything other than who God has created me to be. I now realize that when I do anything contrary to the fruit of the Spirit/ contrary to God’s character, I am producing bad fruit, fruit of the devil. I choose to produce good fruit, the fruit of my Father in Heaven. I will not buy into the lies which encourage me to produce any bad fruit of negativity.

I am free from the past. I will no longer be bound to these labels. I will not let anything hold me back from fulfilling my destiny, my purpose for greatness. My actions don’t define me. The seed of God in me is who I am. I am empowered by the grace of God to live extraordinarily. I will live as it says in 1 John 3:9 “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.” Because I live in the truth based on the words of 1 Peter 1:23 (For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God,) I have hope knowing that God’s seed cannot be quenched. In Christ, I will always have the power to do the right thing.