Identity Crisis

I had a dream two nights ago that I will not take the time to relate right now. However, it was so strong that I had to get up immediately and write it down along with the impressions God was giving me.

The other day as Kevin and Rose were ministering to us they suggested that maybe I was acting as an “image manager”, carefully choreographing my life and my appearances to control what others think about me. At the time I felt a resonance inside that indicated there must be some core truth about this that I needed to consider and discuss with God. After I woke up from the dream and asked God what it meant He brought back the subject of “image manager” and began to amplify what He wanted me to see about myself.

Yes, I am an “image manager”. But this time He pointed out that the images I am managing are really the false gods mentioned in the second commandment. These are internal gods that lay heavy burdens on me and cause me to bow to them and satisfy their demands. I either look to them for pleasure and fulfillment and identity or I appease them and submit to their demands to try to avoid pain. I am their manager, the director, the caretaker of a soul-house full of images that I keep rearranging to meet every emerging situation, especially any threats to their exposure.

Many years ago I had a screaming match with “God” while traveling home to Mattoon from Cedar Lake, MI in the backseat of our car to see my dying mother. I was living a miserable life of both rebellion and trying to appease a tortured conscience based on very distorted and twisted views of God. That night after intense anger at a “God” who I knew was going to let my mother die if I didn't change my ways, I struck a deal with Him very grudgingly and under intense duress. I promised Him that if He would allow my mother to live then I would try much harder to be a good boy and put away my bad desires and be a good Christian.

Well, my mother did not die but got dramatically better. Accordingly, I kept my end of the bargain and for the rest of my life until a few days ago I marked that night as the beginning of my walk with God. However, it has very recently been brought to my attention that the god I struck that bargain with so many years ago had none of the characteristics of the true God of the Bible that I now know about. I had always rationalized this discrepancy away by saying that “God met me where I was and used that to turn me in the right direction”. But that idea greatly disturbs me now. I am beginning to realize that it is very possible that, in fact, that night may have instead marked the beginning of my long and illustrious career of “image manager” and actually introduced a number of false gods into my soul by that deal I struck with some entity out there. After that time I launched with great vigor into working on being a good Christian and doing everything that Christians are supposed to do. I realize now as I look back that over the years of those efforts more gods have been quietly joining the team until now I am gasping for a breath of reality. I am no longer sure how many my prayers have been directed to the true God or how much I am still worshiping and serving the imitation god that I promised my life to in the car that night and has held me hostage all these years since.

Yes, my picture of the true Creator God in heaven has dramatically improved over the years and I am still confident that the real God is somewhere behind the scenes communicating with me through all this. But I feel partly like Job with his twisted view of God, partly like the helpless demoniacs of Jesus' day longing to cry out for freedom but the words always end up backwards, partly like the confused disciples misjudging the character and desires of Jesus and even a little like Simon the sorcerer. I resonate quite a bit with Simon's agonized cry for Peter to pray for him. Only the problem with Simon's request was that his desire was to avoid the consequences instead of desiring a new heart.

As I lay in bed yesterday contemplating my dream and the interpretation thereof, I also strongly identified with Jacob when he wrestled with the heavenly messenger. He was desperately begging for a blessing, a new identity, freedom from the demon-gods of his past. He was clinging to the physical body of Love itself until he would feel it inside his own soul and be able to live without fear and shame for the first time in his life. The tears started to leak as I expressed that this was my own intense need, I desperately crave a blessing from the only One who knows my heart, my deepest longings that He planted in there originally. I want to know how to be real, to be free to be real, to know the joy of living from my heart with abandon uninhibited by the constraints of all the little gods that demand I conform to the religious and cultural customs they impose on me. I want to know who I really am, not the interpreted identity prescribed and micromanaged by the gods within.

I am just starting to recognize the various voices and familiar messages from many of the gods in my own head. They are quite insistent, controlling, demanding, manipulative, shaming, debilitating, frustrating and clamoring. These lying spirits have been very effective in locking up my marriage relationship, nearly eliminating my relationship with my children and straining my relationship with the church. Some of these gods are generational gods that have visited me from my father and mother and from their parents.

For instance, my own father's prominent gods of fault-finding and of bitterness have been very alive and well in my own mind and heart for many years despite my best efforts to the contrary. In fact, my despising of these gods in my dad and my repeated vows that I never wanted to repeat his mistakes only served to conveniently assist these gods into camouflaging themselves within me and forcing me to follow their demands.

But as the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, that shines brighter and brighter until the full day (Proverbs 4:18), the light of honesty and truth, especially this last two weeks, has been slowly increasing in the dark rooms of my soul. Consequently the shapes and images of my parents gods as well as many of my own are becoming more visible and their effect on my soul has become frightening.

I am becoming dimly aware that these gods have been so subtle and yet so pervasive over the years that they have in fact defined who I perceive myself to be. They have defined my identity and I really don't know who I am apart from them just as my Dad didn't know who he really was until a couple years before his death. Never before did I even begin to realize that they were, in fact, false gods using and abusing me and those around me. But for the past few days they have been emerging from the shadows sometimes more insistent with their demands now than ever, now that their presence has been exposed and their security threatened. Sometimes I feel like the little boy at the base of the mount of transfiguration being thrown about and abused by these mocking gods while Jesus and his father discuss his case history and the disciples look on full of helpless shame for their inability to bring about healing.

I do not want them to live here any longer, They are not welcome here. I want only one God and I want only the One who is genuinely good, who knows my true identity and who's plans for me are to give me a future and a hope. (Jer. 29:11) I realize that I am just as incapable of evicting these gods as the demoniacs were in Jesus' day. I have wrestled with them for years, managed them, avoided them, tried to argue them away and sometimes even been somewhat loosed from them by grace for a time. But they always sneak back in quietly and soon assert their control in me again further locking down my heart.

The polluted atmosphere the gods breathe into my soul is a low-level fear that most of the time remains just below consciousness. At times it temporarily becomes intense fear momentarily when there is danger of them being exposed, but most of the time it stays disguised beyond even my own awareness. This polluted atmosphere has over the years quietly drained away my life and health and has stolen most of the joy and fun and relationships in life that God wanted for me before my heart could even enjoy them and be strengthened by them. These gods have built thick walls of hard ice around me that prevent me from receiving and giving love freely and spontaneously. They have created a substitute life that looks very similar to true life and forced me to settle for that as the best I can expect. My heart has been kept at a distance from my wife, my children, my relatives and my friends to various degrees. Then the gods in concert with other people around me assert that all these problems originate from me and define who I am. Sometimes I truly want to exclaim with Paul, “who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24) I have to remember that though “I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. (Romans 7:16-17)

In spite of all this I have been amazed and humbled by the continued personal and frequent messages from God that continue to get through the clamoring voices and lies of all my little images. He has been revealing more and more beautiful truth about who He really is and how He feels about me in spite of all the counterfeit programming from my past and my surroundings. Like Jacob I have to say, “O God of my father, O LORD, who said to me, 'Return to your country (where you grew up) and to your relatives (and the people you grew up with), and I will prosper you,' I am unworthy of all the lovingkindness and of all the faithfulness which You have shown to me. Deliver me, I pray... for I am afraid.” (Genesis 32:9-11)

"This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God." (John 3:19-21) So the time has come to expose these false gods and images to the light. It is terrifying and I sometimes feel like I am going to die. And I suppose I am. I have repeatedly asked to be crucified with Christ, but that does not remove my fear of death. So I want to start by confronting the spirits of judgment and criticism that have been some of the prominent false gods of both me and my father.

As for me, first I want to be freed of all the gods except for the right One who really knows me and still loves me. I don't know how, when or how long this will take but I know already they don't leave without fierce resistance which they want to attribute to me. They have claimed to be my identity , my self-image for so many years that I have very little awareness of the true identity that God created my heart originally to express. He will have to move into all the vacancies created by the other gods absence and fill in the huge resulting gaps in my identity awareness. And beyond that I have very little idea of what is in store. But knowing a little bit about the personality and passion of the true God that I have been discovering in His revelations to me over the past few months and years, I have no doubt I am in for the wildest ride of my life. “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in me will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)