Why is it that our search for identity, in adolescence or middle-age crisis, almost never begins with God? It seems to me that this search for meaning and identity apart from God is, in many ways, the first sin. There was something other, something God had denied them, and the temptation included a sense of you will be complete when you have this.
The search for identity, for Christians, is found in reflection on our being created in the image of God and the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In John's Gospel we hear the depth of the Fall, "He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." (John 1.10-11) Those who were created in the image of God no longer recognized the one whose image they bear, the Fall was complete.
If we believe we are created in the image of God and we also believe Hebrews 1.3a: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word," then how is it that we search for identity elsewhere? Our identity is hidden in Christ with God and in order to discover our identity we must seek to know Christ by and and every means.
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