On false identities showing up in the desert

I was sitting by the pool when I noticed the two boys.

One of them was chunky, probably eleven or twelve, throwing a ball back and forth with another kid, and he wasn't a great throw. The ball kept going wide, wide left, wide right, over the head, and every single time it did, the other kid made sure he knew about it.

See. You're such a terrible throw. You can't do anything right.

I watched this go on for a while and felt something start to rise in me, because here's the thing: that other kid was also a bad throw. He just had the attitude, the confidence of someone who had never once examined himself. He kept rendering a verdict from a position he had no right to stand in.

And at some point he overthrew the ball completely and it landed right next to my chair.

I got up and handed it back to the chunky kid.

"Hey," I said. "You probably need new friends. This kid isn't kind to you."

Then I looked at the other kid.

"And for what it's worth, you're not that great of a throw either."

I went back to my chair.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it, not because the moment was dramatic, but because the question it left behind was one I recognized from somewhere much closer to home.

Why does that kid keep letting someone define him who has no standing to do it?

Why does he keep playing the game on that kid's terms, taking the verdict, absorbing it, coming back for more?

I sat there and realized something that took me longer than it should have.

I do the same thing.

Why do we keep taking it from someone who has no right to define us?

The narrators we keep listening to

Our brains interpret experience as narrative, that's just how we're wired, and stories need a narrator to give data points meaning, to assign value, to interpret the characters and the conflicts and decide what it all adds up to. The problem is that most of us have a narrator we didn't choose and have never examined.

Our story is so small because we've really lost a larger story, and without that larger story we're just simply kind of existing, looking at the surface level, playing roles in a script we didn't write.

I could be the victim in my story, here are the people that hurt me and I'm the person that's been hurt and that is who I am.

Or I could be a survivor, I barely made it through, I am an overcomer, I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.

You may consider yourself the main character, or you may have become so discouraged that you feel like even in your own story you're a side character, leaching onto something else, desperate for attention, desperate for affection, for meaning, for love.

The problem is our narrator is wrong.

What life has told us, what culture has told us, what our experiences have given us, those voices have dug very deep roots, very deep ruts, in our brains and in our hearts, and because they're built from real experiences they feel authoritative. They feel like the actual truth about us.

We need a new narrator.

And the narrator is God.

To give someone a name is to give them identity, to give them value, to say:

I know you, you belong, you have a place at this table.

Even a farm animal becomes a family member when it's named, you can't cook the family pig once you've given it a name.

"I have called you by name, you are mine." — Isaiah 43:1

That is God as narrator in one sentence, and that is the voice that has to replace the one we've been listening to.

But his voice is very quiet, quieter than the voice of our experience, quieter than the voice of the enemy, quieter than the accumulated weight of everything that has ever told us who we are.

And here's the thing about needing a new narrator: it means stepping out of the center. It means being willing to start listening to a larger story.

My story is part of a greater story that God is writing, he is the author and I am not, and the further along I go in this the more I realize that my maturity is not independence from God but actually greater dependence.

But if it were so easy to always to hear the right narrator then I wouldn't be writing this blog.

The Fortuneteller

False identities are not obviously false.

That's the thing nobody tells you, and it's the thing that makes them so hard to shake.

They seem true because they're built from real experience, real memories, real moments that actually happened, and the enemy works this way very deliberately. He takes things that have a slight amount of truth and then applies meaning and interpretation to them, so that you may have failed at a task and he says you are a failure, and not only a failure but a fortune teller:

You did this, you will always do this. You did not do that then, you will never do that.

Jesus called him "a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44), and that is exactly what the fortune teller runs on, not truth, just enough truth to make the lie feel credible, always extinguishing hope, always landing in the same place:

Good things will never happen and bad things always will.

Here's what it actually sounds like in my own head, right now, if I'm being straight with you:

You are never enough.
You are too much.
You are behind.
You are an idiot.
You never finish what you start.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You are an imposter.
You have no position to speak to anybody.
Why don't you just find your little life and play in it.
Don't hope for anything. Don't dream.
You can't hear God.
You will never be spiritual.
You will always struggle.
You will always be surface level.
You will be a Pharisee.
You are on your own.

I just rattled off about fifteen things I know still have deep roots in my heart and in my brain, and the reason they stick is not because they're true but because of something that's just true about how we're made: you can hear a hundred praises of your name but one deep criticism is the one you're going to dwell on.

That doesn't make it the true thing.

It just means they cut deeper.

The cost of not dealing with this is greater than the cost of facing it, because these cycles of shame and guilt and spiraling and addiction and depression and fear are not random, they are narratives driven by identities and narrators in our story, and the false identities producing them are not just painful, they are producing something.

And what they are producing is killing us slowly.

But here's some hope, dear ones.

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." — Romans 8:1

The grace of God is powerful enough for all of it.

But we have to be willing to go there.

Getting to the other list takes more work.

The false identities surface on their own the moment you get quiet, they've had years of practice, but the true ones require something more deliberate, more fought for.

That's the nature of contested ground.

But God is speaking, and these are some of the things he says to me when I get quiet enough to hear it.

You are beloved before you did a single thing.
You are accepted exactly as you are, not as you hope to be.
You were chosen before the foundation of the earth.
You are seated with him in heavenly places right now, not someday.
You have a name no one else has been given.
You have a place in this story no one else can fill.
You have a good heart.
You are trusted.
You are my friend.
You are not on your own.

Why the Fight Got Loud After the Blessing

The intensity of the fight tells you what's at stake, because you don't contest worthless ground and the enemy doesn't waste his time.

If there is a war being waged over something in your life, that is not evidence that the thing is lost.

It's evidence that the thing matters.

Look at Jesus.

The Father speaks before a single act of ministry, before Jesus has healed anyone, cast out anything, said a word publicly:

"This is my Son, I am well pleased with him."

Thirty years of waiting, and then immediately, boom.

And here's the irony I never noticed until recently: you would have expected Jesus to immediately start pouring into ministry, to get the blessing and the thumbs up from the Father and go, but instead he goes away, he is sent into the desert, physically weak, without eating, no food, a place of silence with everything stripped away.

Satan was likely given permission by the Father to test what God had already said, similarly to Job, and what he does with that permission is revealing.

He doesn't go after Jesus's record or his resume or anything he has or hasn't done.

He goes after the exact word the Father just spoke.

"If you are the Son of God."

The identity itself is the target.

It was always the identity.

I have no doubt that Jesus, as he got up early and left and got away to be with his Father, returned to that same word every time.

Some days tired. Some days just worn.

Encountering brokenness and hypocrisy and hunger and poverty and all the things that would have weighed upon his soul, and yet returning again and again to the same anchor: that he was God's beloved son, that the Father was with him, that the word spoken over him was true regardless of what the desert felt like.

That is the thing being protected.

And it was worth protecting.

There is territory being fought over in your heart, and every time God shows you something true about who you are, expect a fight.

That is not a sign it wasn't real.

That is a sign it was.

You were not supposed to maintain the mountaintop, because the wilderness is where what God said gets tested and purified and battle tested, and when it's battle tested it's going to get hit, and that doesn't mean it's not true or that it's not good.

That's just how it goes.

I think about the man who can lead a successful company, be on all these boards, be successful in almost every area of his life, but ask him to slow down and be vulnerable with other men, share his story and his insecurities, and it is terrifying to him.

He would never be caught dead doing that.

Even though everyone in the room sees him as the most successful person there.

The reason is that he actually hates what's inside and he is not willing to go there.

And yet going there is where the fight is.

And the fight is where the value is.

What the desert is actually doing

Sometimes God will speak from the mountaintops, speaking with that loud voice just as he did with Jesus at the Jordan:

You are my beloved son.

Which is really beautiful and awesome.

But we should not expect that to be the case most of the time, because he talks predominantly in the whisper, in the still small voice, and for us to hear that whisper we ourselves must get quiet.

But first, something about the desert itself, because I think we misread it almost every time.

"I will allure her and lead her to the wilderness, and speak to her tenderly. There I will give back her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor into a gateway of hope." — Hosea 2:14-15

God himself does the alluring.

He draws his people into the desert not to abandon them but to get them alone, away from distractions, away from the noise and the false things they've been reaching for, so he can speak to their hearts.

The phrase translated "speak to her tenderly" literally means speak to her heart.

The desert is where God gets personal.

"Behold, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert." — Isaiah 43:19

He doesn't just lead you through the desert, he makes the desert itself the location of his new work.

Streams in the desert. A way where there was no way.

And then there is Jesus in Matthew 4:1, led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, the same Spirit who descended on him at his baptism now leading him into the desert. He relived Israel's forty years in forty days, but where Israel failed, grumbling and turning to false gods and testing God, Jesus succeeded, answering every temptation with scripture from Deuteronomy, the very book written to interpret the wilderness.

The desert became the place where Jesus won the victory that Israel could not.

That changes how I read my own desert.

Sometimes God is sending us in, like in the case of Jesus, like John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness, like Paul being sent to Arabia to be discipled by Jesus.

There are other times when circumstances, and sometimes even our own sin, push us in, the way the children of Israel wandered as punishment, unable to enter the promised land because of their unbelief and their sin, or the way Elijah and David fled to the desert because evil people were pursuing them.

Not every desert season looks the same.

Not every desert season is bad.

But what is consistent across all of them is this: the desert is where God gets personal, it is where he speaks to the heart, it is where false things fall away and the real things get tested and proven.

It is where the question of identity gets answered.

The only way to get there is to stop.

What surfaced when I stopped

Getting quiet is actually terrifying, and I want to say that plainly before anything else, because when you do it all surfaces.

All of those false identities are going to come to the surface.

The things you don't like about yourself
The things you don't like about your circumstances
About life, even about God
The ways you've hurt people
The ways you've been hurt

As long as we're doing we don't have to slow down and come face to face with who we are.

Busyness is a very effective way to avoid yourself.

I went on a walk one night alone and just started pouring my heart to God, actually talking to him, not performing a prayer but just saying what was there.

And I was surprised, genuinely surprised, at the amount of hurts and pains and insecurities that had been building beneath the surface in so many areas of my life.

Things I'd addressed before with God that had quietly come back up. Things I thought I was past. Things I thought I'd dealt with.

Sitting right there waiting for me the moment I slowed down enough to feel them.

Months of accumulated weight I didn't even know I was carrying until it started coming out.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pouring out, I kept thinking that maybe this was the moment, maybe God was about to give me some major revelation, some angels coming to minister to me moment, some clear word that would tie everything together and finally make sense of the season I'd been in.

I did not get that.

What I got was one verse.

Psalm 22:24.

Our ancestors trusted in him and were not put to shame.

My first reaction, if I'm being straight with you, was that it felt small. I had brought out months of accumulated pain and confusion and unanswered questions, and what came back was one verse about ancestors who trusted God a long time ago.

I almost walked right past it.

But I sat with it instead, turned it over, let it settle, and somewhere in that sitting I think I heard something like:

Look at what I've done for the ones who trusted me and held on. They were not put to shame. And neither will you be.

That walk didn't resolve much, and I'm still searching for the full interpretation of a lot of things in my life.

But something did shift in me out there.

Not everything.

Just something.

Because in the process of pouring everything out I started to see the noise more clearly. The voices, the accusations, the fortune telling, the you'll never and you always and you've already missed it, all of it that I'd been carrying as just the normal interior life of a tired person.

It wasn't normal.

That was a battle. That was contested ground.

And knowing that changed something, because if there's a battle then there's something worth fighting over, and if there's something worth fighting over then what God has said about me is more real and more solid than the enemy's volume would ever suggest.

I'm still in the middle of this.

The seed feels small.

But I'm holding on to it, and I'm learning that sometimes holding on is the whole assignment.

Something is not wrong when you get quiet and it gets painful.

Prepare for it, not to scare you off, but so you are not caught off guard when the voices surface, because they will.

The false identities are eating away at us slowly, these cycles fueled by false beliefs, and ignoring them because it's too painful to face is the same as ignoring a diagnosis.

But we have a master surgeon who is able to come in and heal us and repair us, and that just requires coming face to face with the pain first.

What does getting quiet actually look like?

Go on a long walk. Turn off the music, turn off the television. Get away and breathe.

You don't even have to bring your Bible.

Just talk to him and pour out what is actually there.

And then expect this tactic from the enemy when you do:

God is quiet so obviously he's abandoned you. You don't get it. How could God love you if you just got all this good stuff and already you've blown it. You've missed it. That was your chance and God is done with you.

That tactic is not new. He used it first in the garden with Eve

It is age old.

And it is a lie.

Sometimes that striving, that reaching, that desperate trying to believe, is because you actually believe and actually care, and the fight itself is evidence of faith.

Don't let the enemy take that from you too.

How do you know which voice is God?

That's probably the question sitting in the back of your mind right now, and it's a fair one, because if the false identities feel true and the enemy's voice sounds reasonable then how do you actually tell the difference?

John tells us not to believe every spirit but to test them (1 John 4:1).

That's not spiritual immaturity or doubt.

It's a command.

Discernment is part of the job.

You have to know the shepherd's voice, and Jesus says his sheep hear it, that they know his tone and his cadence, that they've seen him and they know him, so when he speaks they know it's him.

But he also says something else worth sitting with: his sheep will never follow a stranger, in fact they will run from him, because they do not recognize a stranger's voice (John 10:4-5).

The false voice, the longer you spend with the shepherd, starts to sound like what it is.

Foreign. Off. Coming from somewhere it has no right to come from.

The test is actually simpler than we make it.

Paul says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Whatever God speaks over you will move you toward those things.

And God, Paul says elsewhere, is not a God of confusion but of peace (1 Corinthians 14:33).

If the voice produces shame, disorientation, and hopelessness, that is a diagnostic.

That is not his voice.

The false identities fail that test every time.

Hold them up and look at what they produce.

Not one of them moves you toward love or joy or peace.

"Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, and everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself." — Ephesians 5:13

Bring what God has said about you into the body of other believers and let it be prayed over and spoken over.

When you say it out loud in a room full of people who actually know you, it doesn't just get confirmed.

It starts doing something.

The enemy loses ground when things come into the light, and what was spoken over you in the dark starts to illuminate instead.

Your last name and your first name

I've been thinking about identity in two parts lately.

Your last name

Your last name is what you have been adopted into, and we have received a new name just like someone who is adopted gets a new birth certificate.

These are not things you are working toward. They are not aspirational. They are already true of you if you are in Christ.

Let them actually land.

Beloved. Before you've done a single thing, before ministry, before performance, before you've proven anything to anyone, the Father couldn't help himself but say it over Jesus before the work even started, and he says it over you the same way. Before.

Accepted. Not conditionally, not pending your next spiritual victory or your ability to hold it together this week, but fully accepted in him right now, exactly as you are, not as you hope to be.

Chosen before the foundation of the earth. Before you were born, before you made a single decision, before you had anything to offer or anything to show, he chose you then, and that was not an accident and it was not based on your performance.

Seated with him in heavenly places. Ephesians 2:6. This is your position right now, not a future hope, already done and settled, and you are not trying to get there because you are already there in him.

These can never be taken from you if you are in Christ.

This is where I keep having to come back to.

Your first name

Your first name is specific, the particular calling and purpose God has put on your life, the specific way he wants you to advance his kingdom through you and through your story and through the way you get to manifest the Father's heart.

No one else can do it the way you can.

No one who has ever lived.

God has a mosaic of names written for you, some already revealed and some still to come. Just as God himself has many names, he has put his image in you as a mosaic of identities that reflect him.

"I will give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it." — Revelation 2:17

There is still more to come that you don't even know yet.

Start with the last name. As that takes root, move to the first.

Hold on to the seed

It can feel so small, a mustard seed of faith up against this vast ocean of toxic waste with everything trying to eat away at it.

The false identity is louder and it cuts deeper, but hold on to it anyway.

Hide it in your heart

"I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." — Psalm 119:11

The hiding isn't passive storage, it's protective.

Write it down if you have to, the things God has shown you, the moments that were real, the truths that landed, the whispers you almost dismissed.

Name them and keep them somewhere you can return to when everything else is loud.

Don't let them stay vague.

Plant it

Stop waiting until you feel it fully before you act on it.

The mustard seed does not feel like much going into the ground.

You plant it anyway and water it even when the ground feels dry and nothing seems to be happening.

Ask the Holy Spirit to take it deep

"The Holy Spirit will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." — John 14:26

You cannot root it yourself.

You can only tend it.

Only he can take it down past the surface into the places where the false identities have their roots and the ruts run deep.

Ask him to do that.

He is willing.

Bring it into the light

"Everything exposed by the light becomes visible." — Ephesians 5:13

Bring what God has said about you into the body of other believers and let it be prayed over and spoken over.

Something happens when you say it out loud in a room full of people who actually know you.

The enemy loses ground when things come into the light.

I know in my heart of hearts that what God has said about me is real, that it is something he has put into me, and even though a lot of times I still cry out, God where are you, I know that he cares.

Psalm 22:24 says our ancestors trusted in him and were not put to shame, and that is not just a historical footnote, that is a pattern.

Every time the saints of old put their hope in God, every time they believed him and trusted his heart and what he said was true, it was vindicated.

Not always immediately. Not always in the way they expected.

But in the end, every single time, God came through for the ones who held on.

And that promise does not stop with them.

Psalm 34:5 says those who look to him are radiant with joy and their faces shall never be ashamed.

David wrote that after crying out in the same desperate place you may be in right now.

He sought God. He called out. He was delivered.

And then he turned around and said: taste and see that the Lord is good.

That sequence, the crying out and the waiting and the deliverance and the invitation, that is the same sequence you are in.

You are not behind.

You are in the middle of the story.

"Those who hope in me will never be put to shame." — Isaiah 49:23

That word hope is not wishful thinking.

It is a confident expectation that God will act on behalf of his people, anchored in who he is and not in how things currently look.

So yes, the world will shame you for believing this and the enemy will too, and everything in your life at some point will feel like evidence that none of it was true.

But the Lord will not shame you.

When you see his face it will all be worth it.

Every moment of holding on. Every mustard seed of faith planted in dry ground. Every time you poured your heart out on a walk and got a whisper instead of an earthquake. Every time you chose to believe what he said about you over what everything else was screaming.

We will actually see: this is what my faith was pointing towards, I actually was loved, all along, and then we will get the final and full interpretation of God pursuing us and loving us and a plan for us, and how we have been part of his story that he has been writing.

That is beautiful and good.

God's grace and mercy will sustain you.

If you have him, you have enough.

Back to the pool

The kid at the pool didn't need a pep talk about his throwing.

He didn't need tips on his form or a lesson on ignoring criticism.

He needed someone to hand him the ball and tell him the truth about who he was taking it from.

That other kid had no standing to define him.

He was also a bad throw.

He just never examined himself long enough to know it, and the chunky kid never questioned whether the verdict had any authority behind it.

An unexamined verdict from someone with no standing will keep you in the wrong game indefinitely, not because you're weak, but because nobody has named what's actually happening.

I'm still learning that myself, and some days I still catch myself in it, still absorbing the verdict, still playing on terms set by a voice that has never had my best interest in mind and has no right to define me either.

But I'm learning, slowly, by getting quiet, by going back to what God has actually said, by holding on to the seed even when it feels like nothing.

Someone walked over, picked up the ball, and handed it back.

The voice that has been defining you doesn't have standing either.

It is also a bad throw.

And what God says about you, before you did anything, before you proved anything, before you earned a single word of it, that is the only name that was ever handed down by someone with the right to give it.

Listen to the voice of your Father, friends. Because every time you do it will be worth it.

"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are." — 1 John 3:1

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it and even have a conversation!

Your Name is a Battleground