I looked at my daughter one day and said, “You’ve got issues!” She had just done something crazy and it was the first thing that popped into my mind. She responded right back with, “I like my issues!” Which made me laugh even more.
We’ve all got issues. Trials. Struggles. Things that we deal with on a daily basis.
Anxiety. Insecurity. Sickness. Depression. Financial problems. Relationship problems.
Issues.
I’ve got them. You do too. And I know people who let their issues define them. It becomes their identity and they wouldn’t really know how to do life without it. They don’t even try to fight it anymore.
“I have issues. It’s just who I am.”
Really?
Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!” (Romans 4:17-18 message)
Abraham and Sarah had an issue. Infertility. But they didn’t let it define them. They didn’t let it name them. They let God do that. They let the Word of God define them.
“Abraham was first named father and then became a father.” God named him father and that’s what he went with. God even changed his name to Abraham (father of many nations) and he agreed with Him.
Abraham stopped calling himself childless and started saying what God had said about him. Every time he said his name, Abraham, he was agreeing with God that he was not childless. He agreed that he was, indeed, a father, even if he couldn’t see it yet.
God does’t identify you with your issues. He paid for them so you could walk free! What has God called you that you haven’t become yet? Let the Word of God define you.
Healed. Delivered. Free. Peaceful. Joyful. Provided for. A happy mother of children.
Don’t let your issue become your identity. Find out what God says about you and let that become who you are instead.
