Acceptance, Security, and Significance is the three legged stool that makes up our identity. My weakest “leg” is the one labeled significant.
I look at my little ol’ life and see a stay at home mom who rarely gets regular showers, a crazy homeschooler who receives the stink eye way too often, a wanna be author with dreams of a book in my local bookstore. My kitchen sink is never empty, I raise dust bunnies, my bed gets made fifty percent of the time, and my kitchen island collects life’s clutter. I don’t see significance when I look at my life.
God’s definition of significance transforms my understanding of it. Significance is not about being noticed or an empty kitchen sink. It’s not even a bed made with the blankets hanging evenly along the side (mine are quite crooked, thank-you very much).
It’s not even having thousands of people read these words or buy my “some-day books.”
Significance means becoming smaller so God can become bigger. It’s about less me so more God-honoring fruit grows so other’s can experience the harvest for his purpose. It’s realizing that this life isn’t about positioning myself for my idea of success. But how I position myself to be used for God’s kingdom. In order to do that I must go lower and lower so he increases higher and higher.
I must let go of the unspoken, yet very loud, expectations that pressure me. A clean house? Perfect children? Harmonious marriage? Successful blog? My success or failure in my roles as a wife, mother, housekeeper, teacher, or writer cannot dictate my significance.
That dream? The one that involves words on a page and my name on the spine? My significance doesn’t change whether that dream simply stays this wonderful, glow-y kind of dream. And the even more secret dream—of leading worship for women’s conferences, and leading tender hearts into the most precious presence of God? Guess what? My significance doesn’t change whether I’m leading 8 or 800.
My heart, my life, and my innermost being grows most significant when placed in the tender hands of my most loving God as he shapes and molds for his purpose and position. Even when I’m feeling as though I’m not seen, and as long as I stay a living, willing sacrifice, I know without a shadow of doubt that God looks at me and sees me as significant.
But it’s one thing to know this on a surface level, it’s a completely different to accept this on a heart level where it gets lived out on a daily, moment by moment level.
But these verses in Ephesians and Philippians show us how to live out our acceptance, security, and significance.
“In whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.” Ephesians 3:12 ESV
“I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13 ESV
I cannot convince myself of my acceptance, security or significance because I cannot positive self-talk to myself enough to break through the lies my heart believes. I’ve tried. And the failure feeds the lies.
It’s only when I take my weakness to God that I find the strength I need to embrace the Truth of what he says about me:
Beloved.
Chosen.
Accepted.
Purposed.
Significant.
Special.
Priceless.
Receiving our identity in Christ happens the moment we receive Christ as our Savior. But living out our identity with him takes steps of faith and trust that he will rewrite our negative thought patterns into thoughts based on his truth.
It’s this process that makes our lives beautiful and colorful and oh so worth the wrestling. There’s nothing more beautiful than a woman, who has never felt loved or chosen, then when her eyes light with the Holy Fire of God’s truth as it sinks into her heart and rewrites what her past has taught and told her who she is. As the profound truth penetrates her heart, the strongholds fall and God rushes in and beauty is wrought from the rubble.
It’s like the butterfly’s metamorphosis. Beauty unfurls and beauty is you as you embrace the struggle of owning your significance in Christ. Let go of self-sabotage and trust the truth God declares over you.
I’m a pretty boring fruit person—I like the basics, at least that’s what I buy on a regular basis. Ido like mango, but my grocery doesn’t stock the kind I like. I like kiwi fruit, but sometimes I forget to eat it. Have you ever felt a mushy kiwi? It’s kinda creepy.
If you looked in my fridge right now, you’d find one grapefruit and five apples. The apples aren’t crispy, which is to bad. I like them to crunch and squirt apple juice all over my chin, and they must have the perfect blend of tart and sweet. So maybe I’m not really a boring fruit person, but a picky fruit person. Some people would think so, but I just say I know what I like.
I’m glad God isn’t a picky fruit person. I don’t think he’d throw me away if I weren’t crispy like I do with my non-crispy apples. In my house, apples are not guaranteed security. In God’s house, I’m accepted, secure and significant.
I’m studying the verses surrounding my identity in Christ, and I’m finding out who God says I am. He says I’m chosen and not just once or twice, but over and over again. He says I’m secure in him and in today’s world, I need that security. You, too?
But significance? That’s a tough one because pride twists it into something ugly and sinful, rather than something beautiful and holy. Our hearts, my heart, yearns for significance, and I’ve looked for it in people, in approval, in my strength, in my independence, in my roles, in how well I do this marriage thing, and how well I mother my kids. The problem with that?
The pressure to perform squeezes me dry and I fail repeatedly. I’m hurt when I’m overlooked and not recognized, but then I feel guilty when I read Bible verses about humility and meekness. So I squelch this desire for significance, but it grows and comes out in ugly, arrogant ways.
There is the self-seeking, arrogant, all-about-me side to significance, which reveals a gaping hole in my heart that cannot be satisfied with anything but God.
My identity—my approval, my security, and my significance— is found in him. He placed this desire for significance in my heart so that I would gain a greater understanding of who I am in God. And God says I am significant.
I am significant. You are significant. Did you know that you and I are God’s workmanship? We are created for purposes prepared in advance for us to fulfill because we are significant players in God’s plan for mankind.
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Ephesians 2:10
I’m not created for myself. I am his. He longs for me to walk in his ways, not mine. I’ve messed things up enough to know that my plans aren’t that great so I’m totally okay with his plans for my life. I’ve found that when I walk in his ways, my desire for “self-seeking significance” is traded for the real truth.
The real truth is that I’m significant because Jesus chooses me. Imagine! God chooses me. He chooses you. God chooses the educated and the uneducated. He chooses the wealthy and the poor. He chooses us because he made us, and he is waiting for us to respond to him. When I stop striving for self-defined significance, and I rest in the significance of Jesus’s choice, I am given two choices.
I can either receive it or reject it. I’ve done both. When I’m stuck in a place of perfection and insecurity, I reject his choosing me. I receive His truth when I give up perfection, insecurity, and disbelief. The belief that I have purpose in God’s plan and that I’m chosen by Jesus to bear fruit is intertwined and cannot be separated.
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” John 15:16
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15:5
Fruit bearing is impossible without abiding in Christ. We are either branches disconnected from the vine with fruit that rots from the inside out or we think we are the vine itself and the fruit we produce will look like fruit, but it’s a mirage.
Our significance comes when we receive God choosing us and planning for us to fulfill the works he has prepared for us. We don’t bring our resume. We don’t bring our list of accomplishments as a prerequisite for significance. We come with humble, wide hearts, and he receives us.
I don’t know about you, but I want to be good fruit. I don’t want someone to take fruit from my branch and be disappointed by the quality. I accomplish good fruit bearing when I live my life wholly committed to His absolute, unswerving truth. This is my significance and it is yours. Will you receive it?
I’m well acquainted with insecurity. It’s been a companion to Perfect for much of my life, and it lies dormant for a time. Then something happens that wakens the sleeping giant and insecurity becomes a driving force in my life. I’ve learned the triggers that bring Perfect and Insecurity into my life. and I’m learning to deal with them in a healthy way. Ignoring them makes them worse because they want their voices to be heard, and if I don’t listen they scream louder for attention.
Not to sound crazy, but treating them in this way gives me an opportunity to speak God’s truth to them, aka myself, when those voices drown out the voice of God in my ear. I’ve let Insecurity win far too many times, but lately the battle is turning in favor of Security.
I’ve not been able to fight this fight on my own, though. It’s been God who has worked and shifted and transformed my life, but before He could truly bring transformation, I needed to allow the depth of my insecurity to be mined and all the pieces laid at Jesus’ feet. It was deep and wide with many twists and turns along the way, but He filtered through the tangle of lies and truth, and He straightened what needed straightening and threw out the lies that destroyed.
I’ve believed the lies that my identity was secure in what I did or didn’t do. But security is not in my success at loving others well, or how well I live out God’s precepts. My identity is secure in knowing that I am precious to God and that I belong to him.
Security also provides ways to live this life well. When security is allowed a place in my heart, I find that my self-control grows. On the other hand, Insecurity leads me to self-indulgence. When I feel insecure, I self-medicate through excess food and a couch potato life or through food restrictions and excess exercise. Self-medication can happen through materialism, minimalism, and mommy-wars.
Insecurity drives our fear and security drives our self-control.
“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control,” 2 Timothy 1:7 ESV
Insecurity will drive us to excess and extremism because insecurity tells us we’re not enough so we run around trying to fill the void with something, with anything. Security in Christ helps me to turn to him instead of food, exercise, minimalism, materialism, and mall hopping. Security is the key to self-control.
When Insecurity rages within me, I try to find security in my own efforts, but security in Christ means releasing the ‘in’ part of insecurity. It requires a laying aside of our thoughts and hearts being wrapped up in ourselves.
This is hard.
I make the most compromises in my Christian walk when insecurity is in control. Usually, when insecurity is running rampant in my heart it’s because I’m far more concerned about what someone else thinks than what God thinks. I’ll downplay my relationship with Jesus because I’m afraid of what you might think. Or I’ll laugh at a crude joke rather than standing for purity. Or I’ll add my two-sense to speculating why so and so is acting they way they are.
Security in Christ helps me be steadfast in my Christian life, because I remember 1 John 5:18,
“We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.”
When I forget that I’ve been born of God—and if you’re not sure if you are or what that even means, let me know and I’ll share the good news with you—I grow insecure in my identity and easily fall into old sin habits that were left behind when the old me died and the new me was raised to life in Christ.
And the new me? She sets her mind and heart on Christ. It’s when my focus is on Christ and his will for me that I’m fully able to serve and love others without the fear that I’m going to fail or make it all about me.
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory,” Colossians 3:1-4 ESV
When Insecurity stops by for a surprise visit, I invite it in for coffee and listen to its concerns. I look at the circumstances that perhaps triggered its visit. Sometimes it’s an unresolved argument or a recent failure. Sometimes it’s because I don’t like my hair or my shirt. But mostly, insecurity is a response to the uncertainty in life.
God uses my insecurity to point me to him and it’s then that he reminds me of where my security lies: in him, in his love, in his goodness, and in his strength.
