Baggage and Filters

“Baggage” and “filters” are two of my favorite analogies for those things inside us that keep us from seeing truth.

Baggage – because over the course of our lives we have gathered bags full of ‘stuff’ that we carry around with us wherever we go.  The stuff may be good, bad, or neutral, but it all adds up to a heavy load.

Filters – because we will view every new input in our lives through the filters of our previous experiences, unless we consciously lower those filters.

Are you willing to test your beliefs?

If your beliefs are true and correct, and you confirm them to be so, then you can hold fast to them with even more devout conviction.  If your beliefs turn out to be incorrect, then you are better off for having discovered that, are you not?

Let’s start here:

Do you know who you are?

Are you sure?

Would you make a conscious decision to discover and recognize who you are? To organize the fabric of your identity? To celebrate the wonder of your authentic self?

This message. 

I am convinced I cannot overstate its importance in our lives, nor can I explain it in enough different ways to amount to overkill.

It is something that has been on my heart for many years.

I have mentioned it and discussed it in many previous conversations.

Here is the basic concept:

You are the product of the accumulation of your life experiences.  Everything you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, read about, heard about; every person you have known, met, befriended, loved, hated, ignored; books, movies, television, music - every kind of input that has touched you in any way has contributed to who you are today.

Some of these influences you have cherished and nourished, some you sought after, some just happened unexpectedly, some you have struggled to forget, some have haunted you relentlessly, some came and went like a whispering wind, some thundered and clamored and crashed into you and over you and through you.

In one sense, every scrap of it is vital to you, your identity, and your future.  In another sense, all of it needs to be examined and categorized as useful, extraneous, or toxic. You can decide what should stay and what needs to go.  Of course, deciding to put away some element of your personality, what you think makes you you, is a major turnstile in your life. Even when you have decided to lay something down, often it does not stay laid down.

At some point, in order to walk in freedom, we must put aside the things that prevent us from seeing who we truly are.  There are things we have learned or experienced or chosen to believe that are hindering us.  We must figure out how to face those things and lay them down in favor of the things that contribute to our authentic identity. 

You see, some of the things that have influenced you are lies.

Bold statement.  Am I right?

Do you doubt the truth of it, though?

All of us would certainly prefer it if, all through the course of our lives, we had only and ever recognized and retained truth.  But sometimes we have been convinced of the truth of something when in fact it was not true.  We have held tenaciously to untruths for years.  Decades.  Our whole lives.

I know for sure that I have advocated many things I was convinced were true.  I have persuaded others to believe them, too.  Now I know some of those things were not true at all.

It’s not like these things used to be true, but have somehow now become untrue.  They were always untrue.  I was just convinced otherwise.  In other words, I was deceived; and I was contributing to the deception of others.  All with the best of intentions, of course.  We like the (false) absolution of declaring the sterling sincerity and sanctity of our good intentions.

My point here is that none of us can claim honestly that everything about who we are and how we behave is based on nothing but the truth.  Many of us certainly want that to be the case.  Most of us will probably say we would do whatever it took to get as close to that ideal as possible; i.e., the ideal of living only in truth all the time.

Now that we have accepted - and I trust you have, however reluctantly, accepted - that we may have some elements of our identity that are operating according to faulty information, what do we do about that?  How do we know if something inside us is true or false?  What is our standard of truth?

For most, if not all, of my life, I have understood the prime standard of truth to be the volume commonly called The Bible.  Scripture itself has convinced me that certain things I once believed to be true are not true.  

How could anything we have believed based on The Bible not be true?  Let me remind you that the enemy of our souls, HaSatan, used scripture against YHVH’s only begotten Son, Yeshua.  Of course, Yeshua was not swayed.  Nevertheless, scripture can be used to convince us of all manner of things that are untrue.

Here is an example.  I was taught, and I believed for many years, that The Church replaced Israel as YHVH’s Chosen People.  We were told that Israel rejected Messiah, so YHVH rejected Israel.  Not true.

YHVH’s gifts and callings are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). 

His covenants are eternal.  He is a covenant-keeper.  (Genesis 17:7; Jeremiah 32:40; Psalms 105:8, 10; Luke 1:55; Hebrews 13:20, and many more)

Even when we are faithless, he remains faithful.  (2 Timothy 2:13)

We are grafted into an existing tree and root, which is Israel.  (Romans 11:17-18)

We are Israel. (Galatians 3:29)

Judah and Ephraim (kol Yisra’el) will be brought together as one in the end days  (Ezekiel 37).

Are you ready to understand that you are Israel?

Are you ready to explore what that means?

Shalom!

שלום

Identity in a Pie Chart

Do you know who you are? Can you explain your identity to others?

DNA testing seems to have become all the rage these days.  Various companies take a sample of your saliva (usually), and eventually send you your “results.”  Most often your results are displayed in the form of a pie chart with percentages for each “known” geographical/ethnic aspect of your DNA.  From these results, people apparently form a new understanding of their identity.  In one commercial a man explains how he grew up knowing he was German, but discovered through DNA testing that he was actually Scottish, not German at all!  So, he traded his lederhosen for a kilt.

I am not here to denigrate the DNA testing industry.  I think it can be enlightening and interesting.  I am just wondering if knowing how your DNA reads will alter your own perception of who you are.  Also, I am wondering about the whole percentage thing.  Another DNA testing commercial depicts a young man who finds out he is six percent Native American; so he is finding new family among his previously unknown roots. Based on a reading of six percent.

As a believer in YHVH, and a follower of Yeshua, I see in scripture that I am grafted into the tree of Israel (Romans 11:17), and I am the seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:29). Further, I am no longer “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel” (Ephesians 2:11-13).  By grace through faith, I have become Israel (Ephesians 2:8-9).  That makes my identity “Israel.”  I find this to be a non-negotiable truth.

Besides laying claim to an identity as Israel, my perception of who I am is based on multiple factors, not just DNA, ethnicity, and geography.  My “identity pie chart” would also include things like education, gender, age, relationships, experiences, skills, talents, preferences, and more.  I might be able to sub-divide my identity into discrete pieces labeled with those various categories of input.

However, my identity as Israel is a 100 % category.  Whatever else makes up my identity is superimposed or coexistent with my identity as Israel.  All of me is Israel.  I cannot break the Israel in me into smaller portions of who I am.  I might be able to say that 30% of who I am is based on my education; and perhaps a larger percentage is based on the relationships I have had with others over the years.  But the fact that I am Israel supersedes all other factors in the stew of my identity.  My whole being is Israel.

In fact, that turns out to be a pretty decent metaphor.  Stew.  I am a pot of stew.  The whole pot of stew is Israel.  Chunks of meat in the stew could be my education.  Various vegetables could be other elements of my identity, like experiences, skills, and talents.  The broth might be the sum of all the relationships in which I have participated.  Overall, the stew itself is Israel.

What shall I do with this knowledge of who I am?  If I am Israel, does that make me Jewish?  Could I be literally descended from the “lost” ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom; i.e., Hebrew but not Jewish?  Does that matter?

“Tell them that Adonai Elohim says this: ‘I will take the stick of Yosef, which is in the hand of Efrayim, together with the tribes of Isra’el who are joined with him, and put them together with the stick of Y’hudah and make them a single stick, so that they become one in my hand.’  The sticks on which you write are to be in your hand as they watch.  Then say to them that Adonai Elohim says: ‘I will take the people of Isra’el from among the nations where they have gone and gather them from every side and bring them back to their own land.  I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Isra’el; and one king will be king for all of them. They will no longer be two nations, and they will never again be divided into two kingdoms.’” 

(Ezekiel 37:19-22)

Valid Identification, Part One

OK.  The title is a bit misleading.  I am not going to discuss the merits of driver’s licenses, passports, and library cards.   Those things are important, and I will probably bring my line of thinking back around to something like ID cards when I circle around to my summary (in Part Two).  But I actually want to talk about identity, not identification; although, of course, there is an undeniable relationship between these terms.  Ya feel me?  [Translation:  Do you identify with (understand) what I am saying?]

Who are you?  There are many factors that contribute to your identity.  Your family heritage, which includes cultural norms and expectations; and also genetic inheritance such as physical appearance, temperament, health conditions, etc.  Your community, which includes the neighborhood where you live, your school, workplace, church, hobbies – basically any individuals or groups of individuals with whom you interact regularly.  Your chosen inputs, like reading material, television, movies, and other entertainment decisions.  Your name, your face, your skills and abilities, your education, your experiences, your fashion choices; all of these and more define who you are, at least in a physical, temporal sense.

Perception is also an element of your identity, from at least four different angles.  First, how do you perceive yourself?  Do you see yourself as strong, calm, intelligent?  Or do you see yourself as funny, talented, spontaneous?  Or perhaps your view of yourself is that you are reserved, cautious, shy?  Your perception of yourself may change over time, and you may take conscious steps to alter how you see yourself, based on the idea that others will accept you more readily if you are someone different.  This internal checklist remains, for the most part, a private matter.  You may not even fully recognize it when you are doing this.

Second, how do you think others perceive you?  What you think others are thinking can be very different from how you see yourself, but it also usually affects your view of you and the actions you take, or don’t take, to try to alter what you think others think.  Ultimately, you cannot completely prevent yourself from having a personal opinion of what you believe to be others’ opinions of you.  But you CAN remind yourself that this will most likely remain speculation.  You cannot, in fact, know what others are thinking.  Odds are high that you will be incorrect about what you think others think about you.

Third, how do others say or demonstrate how they perceive you?  Outside of specifically organized instances when this opinion is solicited or required (e.g., for performance appraisals), few of us are going to have people openly sharing with us their opinion of us.  Often, when people share this type of thing with us, they are intentionally trying to be encouraging or flattering.  This is not to say they are lying, but probably we are seldom going to receive from anyone, directly and voluntarily, what their true and full opinion is of our character, traits, personality, and behavior.  Whether they are trying to pump you up or tear you down, they will not be giving you the full picture of their perceptions.

Fourth, how do others actually perceive you?  As indicated in the previous paragraph, this seems unlikely to be wholly revealed to you by any means.  However, whether you ever truly discover this information is irrelevant to the exploratory exercise in which we are presently engaged.  That is because, at the end of the day, how you are perceived by others is outside of your ability to apply any measurable degree of control.  Of course, you can change your clothes, practice unaccustomed behaviors, use different vocabulary, speak enthusiastically about all of the “right” things – but at that point you are devoting time and energy to an effort that has about as much chance of accomplishing what you hope it will accomplish as a flea has a chance of being adopted by a family of rhinoceroses.

So much for the elements of perception.  Point being: who you are is tangled up in a mostly contradictory and confusing web of perceptions; and perception has a nasty habit of applying tangible impact on the real world.  We need to understand the potential of these perceptions to cause us to forget who we really are.  And the only opinion of who we are that matters is YHVH’s opinion.  This is true whether you believe in YHVH or not.  The fact that some people claim not to believe in him does not cause him to cease to exist.  Since he created you and has had his eye on you throughout your existence, he knows you better than you even know yourself.

What YHVH thinks of you is what matters, especially from an eternal perspective.  It is what we should keep foremost in our consciousness; over and above the contents of our mental and emotional rolodex* that keeps track of all those factors we mentioned above.  Your identity is in him.

By now, if you are in fact still reading this screed, you are wondering, “What on EARTH does all of this have to do with the author’s Hebrew journey?  I mean, this is all very interesting (or not), but I am not making the connection to the processes of exploring the Hebrew roots of our faith.”  The connection is this:  I am convinced that a solid recognition of who we are – our identity – is fundamental to our ability to embark on or continue this journey with unshakeable confidence that we are seriously seeking truth and not just on some kind of distracting frontage road.

So, first of all, know that your identity is in YHVH, and that this pursuit includes him.  In fact, it is about drawing nearer to him.

Next entry:  Fuller explanation of the connection between identity and the exploration of Hebrew roots.

·        *  Rolodex ~ an archaic, hard-copy, static method of organizing contact information; i.e., names, phone numbers, addresses, fax numbers, pager numbers, etc…