Don’t Let the World Define You, Be Who God Says You Are

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This week in Battle Drill Devotionals, we focus on how to deal with stress through the eyes of Jesus Christ. How did he deal with it, and how might that help us today? Each weekday we share hope and encouragement as we read and study the Bible together.

Stress is a major problem in our society. Globalisation, the 24/7 nature of information and communication technology, the speed of change, a greater sense of competition all compound feelings of stress.

The world will try to tell you the kind of person to be. Subtle messages tell us what we should look like, what we should eat, how we should dress, the kind of attitudes we should display. Even well-meaning people like our parents, our spouse, our friends, and our co-workers have firm ideas about who we should be.

The problem is that allowing other people to shape us into the person they think we should be often leads to stress. Different people have different ideas of our identity. And those ideas might be different from the world’s “ideal” too.

Jesus was fully divine. But he was also fully human, and so faced periods of stress in his own life. Jesus dealt with this stress by being firm on who he was. Several times throughout his ministry, Jesus taught his disciples by declaring, “I am …”. Jesus knew exactly who he was. Why? Because he was sure of the identity that God had given him.

In the same way, we can reduce stress by taking the identity God gave us and doing our best to be who God created us to be, not what other people think we should be. We don’t need to find our identity in anyone else.