Understanding Your Identity

A man’s identity signifies his individuality, which is what differentiates one person from the other, apart from our sex (male and female). Each gender has its own varied individuality. Your identity talks about your character, your personality and what makes you who you are.
According to the Oxford dictionary, Identity is who or what something is; the characteristics, feelings or beliefs that distinguish people from others.
Identity can be manifested and understood under three broad headings: Who, What and Why.
Who: This explains your person or personality that is your behavior, trait and character. The way you will react to things or how situation or circumstances will affect you.
What: This explains your content or substance. Are you a living thing or not; are you an animal or human; are you male or female.
Why: This looks at your purpose or responsibility. The reason you are what or where you are; the functions you have to undertake at specific time and place; job or duty that you are saddled with at any given time, place and occasion.

Factors Affecting Identity
One’s identity can be determined by some factors like:
a. Environment
b. Situation or Circumstances
The environment that individuals find themselves will affect their identity. Take for instance, even though you are the Managing Director of the world’s biggest organization and you were invited to a function where presidents of nations are present, your identity will command some respect, however, it will still be subject to the dictates of the protocol officers of the various heads of states.
You will not go to the high table, order people around or people cowering at your presence, because in such an environment your identity does not command such powers, as it will when you are in your office or around people subordinate to you.
Another good example is, you may have become the head of state of a nation, but when you go home, to your parents and elder siblings; your identity is that of their baby child and little brother. It matters not that you can take decisions that affect their lives, as well as, others on a daily basis; however, when you are with them you will take orders from them and obey them on issues as regards the family.
In a similar way, situations and circumstances can affect an individual’s identity at a given time or place. For instance, a typical law abiding citizen of a country is wrongfully accused of a crime he/she did not commit (as is common in our society – Nigeria. Where the police indiscriminately arrest people for wondering, putting them in jail or even subsequently accuse them of one crime or the other to cover up for their lapses), that individual for that period looses his/her identity of been a law abiding citizen, to become an accused (enemy of the state, depending on the crime alleged against him/her).
One’s circumstance of a loss or gain can also affect the identity of that individual, in the event of the positive (gain) giving birth, marriage, or building a house: the individual becomes a mother/father from being childless; a husband/wife from being bachelor/spinster; homeowners from being tenants. While in the negative circumstances: the loss of one’s spouse transforms a married individual into a widow/widower; loss of job to being jobless; loss of accommodation to being homeless and so on.

Effects of Identity
One’s identity can be of positive or negative effect on the individual, as seen above, your identity is either adding to you or taking away from you.
Your identity determines how people relate with you and sometimes how you as an individual can and will relate to others. You will either be in control or you will be the controlled. For instance, a help cannot control the master, unless the master has committed an infraction, and the situation has now affected the identity of such a master, so the help is now in control.
For example, a leader that goes to sexually harass a subordinate in the office or institutes an illicit relationship with the subordinate, will lose his/her identity as a leader to such a subordinate and can and many times be under the control of that subordinate, since the liaison is illicit and needs to be kept a secret.
With the above, the question now arises: What is our identity in Christ?
Are we servants or are we slaves, as some religion will profess, that you can be nothing more than a slave/servant to God; the Almighty Creator of the heavens and the earth. That is contrary to what the bible tells us even from the beginning of creation.
Genesis 1: 26, states that, we were created in His image to have dominion. That for me is our first qualification on earth, our identity.
Created in His Image!