What a lie. And not a great way of thinking if you say you’re a Christ-follower.

Yet, it’s what the world and everyone around us tells us to be.

Just the other day, I was whining to God. Yes, it happens. You know … the times when you’re thinking God is sympathizing with you about a situation … or how unfair something is … or how no one really understands you … or how you just want to be able to be yourself  … and so on and so forth.

You’ve never thought those things? Great. It’s just me. Awesome.

Well as I was whining about just wanting to be able to be myself (and people love me that way), I heard the voice of God whisper in my ear, and do you know what He said? … “I haven’t called you to be yourself. I’ve called you to be Me.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks.

Of course, I knew about crucifying flesh and being Jesus to the world and being an example every day. But, this was different.

Being a Christian means dying to who you are. But, in this world, we’re taught the opposite. We’re taught to be ourselves, whoever we may be. People will accept us and like is if we’ll just be ourselves.

Wrong.

Yes, God uniquely created each one of us and put things inside of us to be used for His glory. So, no we’re not robots. We are uniquely designed. We have personality. We have gifts. We have opinions. We have talents.

Those things that He placed inside us are a reflection of who He is. After all, we are made in His image.

God wants us to take those things that make us uniquely us and use them to reflect Him, not us. That He would receive the glory, not us. That people would look at us and see Him, not us.

A lot of things that are in us are not of God. The Bible says the heart is wicked above all things. So, why would we want to be ourselves anyway? We should desire to be opposite. To portray Jesus to the world … which unfortunately means casting down a lot of our actions and bits of our personality and thoughts and words and a whole bunch of other things.

God, help me to be You, not me.