Hardship of Knowing who you are!

For days now, my heart has been burdened by a few things. Some in which include a few individuals I know that may be tampering with the homosexual idea, or even attempting to live in the lifestyle. The ache in my heart, troubles me, as I know the life way too well.

In deep thought, what is the answer to who we are? Theoretically speaking, it's hard enough trying to figure out what is my true, real identity. The question I get all the time is, why am I so different? How do I respond?

Well, for many of us the word "different" goes back to earliest childood. Translated, it always meant "inferior" or "less than." As we say over and over again, homosexuality is to a great extent an identity problem, and for most of us, one of the first identities we had was "different," and this grew into 'less than" and eventually into "homosexual."

"You are different." "You will never measure up." "You can't do what other men (women) do."

Most of us know that overcoming homosexuality involves our taking on a new identity, and that this encompasses more than that we stop identifying ourselves as gay. It means a much deeper change in how we see ourselves and how we feel about ourselves. It means a change at the core of our being that will eventually enable us to respond spontaneously to the world around us a man or woman, not as a homosexual.

This change in identity is also more than just grasping a spiritual truth -- although it is that. God did create me to be heterosexual, and through Jesus Christ my heterosexuality is restored. This is true, and for many overcomers the realization of this truth is a great milestone in the healing process. But we are not unreasonable to expect that a spiritual truth will eventually manifest itself in our experiences as living, breathing human beings. God created us as flesh and blood beings; in the act of redeeming us He became incarnate, taking on our form. Our redemption is not just a spiritual thing, it encompasses our bodies, and souls as well as as our spirit, and thus it encompasses our identities.

In seeking a change in identity, we are seeking one of the most profound changes a man or woman can experience. Our whole central point of reference changes. From the perspective how we see ourselves, we do truly become new creatures. How do we do this? How can we help the process along?

First, I think we need to look at where our identity as men and women comes from. Then, what reinforces and sustains that identity, and finally, if our identity is broken or distorted, how we can replace the old identity with a new one.

In discussing where our identity comes from we start, of course, with the great truth that we are who God says we are. He has told us that He created us male and female, in His image, and that at the beginning He pronounced us good. Our problem, however, is not that we don't already know this, but that we don't experience it. My point in this article is not to hammer in this truth, but to help you make it a reality by discussing what went wrong after our particular creation, and then getting into how we can come back to the point at which our creation as male and female seems real to us.

God assigned to our parents a primary responsibility and authority to give us our identity, in effect to define us. From our mothers we were to be given a sense of being, and from our fathers our identity as men and women. But for those of us who became homosexual, something went wrong -- in the message that was delivered to us, in the way we received it, or in there being static or confusion surrounding us that distorted the message.

Whatever the cause -- be it confusion or the wrong message having been sent or received -- many of us as adults still live under the power of these early messages. Spoken or demonstrated, real or only in the perceptions of the child, the voice of the parent inside us still declares our lack of worth or manhood or womanhood; our incompetence or inadequacies.

Having received a wrong or confused message from parents, we were off to a bad start. We were ripe to have our broken identity reinforced by others who would be a part of our world. Often most likely to reinforce the fact that we were different, because they were likely the most insensitive, were our peers. We perceived this recognition as rejection--and maybe it was. Often this was painful enough to cause us to withdraw from the world of other little boys or little girls, and so for many isolation set in.

All of us engage in self talk, so the next voice we heard was our own. "I'm different; I will never be able to..." Finally, sensing a weakness, the enemy knew he had a place to establish a foothold. His voice was added to the others. The great accuser joined the chorus to declare that, "You are not like other men (women)."

And so many of us grew up still listening to the voices that declared our brokenness. We continued to give authority to parents, to peers, and to the enemy himself to define who we are.

Some of us, confused and uncertain about our identity, give to others the authority to define who we are. Because of my father's inability to help impart his male identity to me and to help me eventually become my own person, I was who my mother said I was. When people marry that deal with this issue, it is easy to transfer that authority to their wife, and trust me, they won't grasp it; because they thrust it upon them. The husbands tend to give their wife the authority to define who they are and then the husbands live with fear and resentment towards her. Not a very good situation in which to develop one's manhood.

If we are to hear (in our deepest hearts) who God says we are, we are going to have to silence the other voices. I offer three ways of doing this.

First, we consciously and prayerfully, before God, declare that we are no longer who our parents or peers or others said we were. We revoke the authority we gave them to define us. Parents had this authority rightfully in our early childhood, but through normal growth and separation we should have cast that off. We need to do that now.

Second, we need to change our self talk. By this I don't mean we take on some sort of "positive confession" whereby I declare I am healed while I still have a temperature of one hundred and three. No, we carefully and objectively analyze our self talk and wherever it is factually false, we replace it with the truth. If I am the lead male dancer in the Washington ballet, yes I am different -- praise the Lord -- but that doesn't mean I don't measure up as a man. If I am a woman and I am not comfortable with a certain type of man, that's unfortunate and maybe I need to do something about it, but that doesn't mean I am not fully a woman. Don't spiritualize here; don't say what you don't really believe. Just declare the truth as you see it, and your true identity will start to emerge.

Finally, we need to silence the voice of the accuser of the faithful. His message is often disguised as he somehow gains access to our minds and changes the message from, "You are not a man." to "I am not a man." I often have difficulty discerning whether the negative message I receive comes from the devil or from the remnants of my own brokenness. I find, however, it isn't necessary to differentiate. I simply state, "I reject that message in the name of Jesus, I command the voice of the enemy to be silent, and I declare that I am who Jesus says I am." That does it.

These efforts to take authority away from those who no longer have the right to define who we are can really work, but they are going to come up against two obstacles that need to be addressed.

The first obstacle is that we all experience a lag between our intellectual acceptance of a truth and our knowing that truth in a deeper sense; knowing it in a way that will change our emotional responses. Thus the wife who had a hyper-critical husband for many years, after he has repented and turned completely from his criticism, is likely to continue seeing him as critical for months -- even years -- after the change has taken place. Our perception of change always lags behind reality. Thus we will need patience as our perception of ourselves lags behind the intellectual truth that we recognize when we revoke the authority of others to define us and as we silence the negative messages.

A second obstacle may lie in low self-esteem; especially if that low self-esteem is rooted in infancy or earlier. Low self- esteem is a common root of homosexuality, and it may provide a filter through which we view all reality. It may fight every effort to silence the old voices and to tune into the voice of Jesus, and it may be beyond our strength to do any thing about it. If so, this is an area for prayer and healing. This may be one of the obstacles that each of us confronts on our way out of homosexuality that Jesus will have to lift us over. He will do it.

So in summary, we come into our new identity by silencing the old voices so that we can hear the voice of the One who created us and who has the rightful authority to define who we are. The three elements of this process are our efforts, the healing power of Jesus Christ, and patience. He will bring to completion the work He has started.


Maybe this can help! Consider Please. For more information, please email or message me anytime.

I love you deeply
Dg