“Recent(2022-2025) Survey Evidence on Self-identity Struggles Among Young Adults” shows: “A nationally representative survey conducted in December 20222(Harvard’s Making Caring Common project) found that 58% of U.S. young adults (ages 18-25) reported lacking ‘meaning or purpose’ in their lives in the prior month.” “The same report pointed out that 50% said their mental health was negatively impacted by “not knowing what to do with my life.”
Without clarity about whose youare (origin, source or meaning), who you are (self), why are you here(purpose), what are you doing with your life, what guides your decisions, and how you make a difference, adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyles, achieving optimal health, completefreedom from poverty, violent behaviors, immoral nature, leading a purpose-driven life, and enjoying a stable marriage and a strong family lifeis unattainable.
The United States Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, captures the timeless claim:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These truths echo the Bible’s declaration:
“So God created man in His own image… male and female He created them.”1
The Creator-God created you to be like Him. Understanding this statement and modeling your life after the Creator-God’s character traits are fundamental to discovering meaning, developing purpose, and building clear direction for your life. Therefore, your true self, your identity, your worth, or what defines you is not an external label such as your physical attractiveness, profession, ingenuity, government, family background, possessions, achievements, geographical location, or what your parents, siblings, relatives, and friends think and say about you or how you feel about yourself.
Instead, you are a new creature with a new nature created “after God, in righteousness and true holiness.”2You reflect God in several dimensions (likeness or image): spiritual, moral, mental, social, healthy, and industrious.
God is a Spirit.”3 He created you with a spiritual dimension to reflect Him .4 You can be all that God has revealed about Himself through Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, the first fruit of every creature.”5Your spirit dimension provides the capacity to know, worship, and commune with God . 6 God created you in His image with divine purpose and eternal value. You reflect His glory and reveal His character. You are fearfully and wonderfully made and will reign with Him in eternity through Jesus Christ.7 However, you must first repent of your sins and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. 8 (Read about “Your new you created to be like God”). Simultaneously and instantaneously, God forgives all your sins,9 crucifies your old sinful nature with Christ,10 creates a new you to be like God in righteousness and true holiness, seals you with the Holy Spirit,11 restores you to His favor, and makes you His heir. 12
The Holy Spirit produces the character traits of Christ in your life, including holiness, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, mercy, humbleness of mind, and forgiveness.13These character traits model you after Christ and provide the foundation for your spiritual growth and development. This spiritual likeness represents the true you. The foregoing indicates that you are born again or regenerated and possess a changed heart that habitually loves God, brethren, enemies, and lost souls.
God’s moral nature refers to His character, expressed as righteousness, justice, holiness, love, faithfulness, unchangeability, benevolence, mercy, and truth. These qualities shape your moral character. God’s righteousness and justice refer to God’s holiness in action. God is just, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. God is faithful and, as such, he is dependable, promise-keeping, and works for the good of those who love him. God’s moral likeness is inherently unchangeable. You can depend on His unchangeable promises. God created you to reflect his moral nature of righteousness, holiness,14 forgiveness, justice, goodness, love, and dependability. You are to live out this moral likeness.
God is a Spirit. “The essential attributes of a spirit are reason, conscience, and will. A spirit is rational, moral, and therefore also a free agent.” God created you to reflect His creative and rational mind–the ability to think, reason, remember, understand, make decisions, solve problems, invent, perceive, and imagine.
These intellectual capacities enable scientific exploration, discovery, art, innovation, and ethical reasoning. God fills individuals with His Spirit, endowing them with wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and various skills. The first man created in God’s likeness, Adam, was endowed with a strong power and excellent intellectual faculties to enable him to cultivate the garden and keep it,15 exercise dominion over the earth and all the creatures of the world,16 and to give names to all the animals on the planet.17 In Christ Jesus, you are recreated in righteousness and true holiness to reflect God’s wisdom, creativity, and rational thought as revealed by Christ, enabling you to design, create, and reason because you mirror God.
God has a social nature. God’s social nature finds the object of fellowship in the Father, the Word (Son), and the Holy Spirit, “and these three are one.”18God endowed man with a social nature. In the first place, man found a social fellowship with God when God came down to commune with Adam in the garden of Eden in “the cool of the day.”19Later, God created Eve as a wife for Adam out of the rib taken from Adam.19 “Therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.”20. Your love, intimacy, and social interest stem from this unique social nature that God has endowed you with. God created you to live in love with your spouse, siblings, relatives, friends, and communities.
God is Spirit. He does not have a physical body as we do. However, God created humanity with a physical body which, before the fall of man, was holy and “very good”21– a perfect state of health, comfort, joy, and peace.
When you receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, God demands that you “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship.”22 God Himself, the God of peace, sanctifies you through and through, that your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 23 God indeed wants you to know that “your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies.”24 It is the desire of God for you to “enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.”25
It took God six days to create the universe, and on the seventh day He rested. Precisely, God created the Light on the first day of creation, the sky and water on the second day, the sea and earth on the third day, the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, fish and birds on the fifth day, and animals, man, and woman on the sixth day, and on the seventh day, God rested.26 In this sense, God created a pattern of industriousness that humanity is to model after. God created you to be diligent, hardworking, persistent, efficacious, and productive in your occupation.
Adam, the first human, was industrious. God endowed him with great intellectual capacities, enabling him to cultivate the garden and keep it,27 exercising authority and control(dominion) over the earth and all the creatures of the world, taking responsibility for the environment28 and giving names to all the animals on the planet 29
Knowing that you reflect God the Creator, with delegated authority and control over the earth, should make you feel optimistic about yourselves, inspire you to live out your big dreams, pursue your vision, achieve your ambitions, and empower you to seek God first and the reality of His Kingdom. Listen to this: your old nature, including health-risk behaviors and violent nature, is gone. You lead a purposeful, successful life.
For actionable steps to becoming who you are, follow us on our website, blog, social media platforms, and at conferences, seminars, workshops, and community spiritual well-being events, etc., as we discuss the key topics to help you acquire the heart-knowledge that transforms character, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that support adoption, sustaining, and improving health and well-being, drive a purpose-driven life, build a stable marriage, a strong family life, and model lives to be like God.
1 Thessalonians 5:23;
2 Corinthians 4:16
Deuteronomy 6:4;
Mark 12:29