Identity in Christ Part 3: My Speech Manuscript from Church Women's Conference

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I was asked to speak about identity in Christ at the First Baptist Church of Brookline's Women's Conference in October of 2021. I have divided the manuscript for my speech into three parts so that I can share one part at a time (the speech took 45 minutes). In this third/last part (click for link to part 1 or part 2), I share my testimony of journeys in my life that God used to help me learn about identity in Christ as a child of God and woman of God, ultimately refining my faith and drawing me nearer to Him in times of trial. I pray that reading this strengthens your faith and helps you see the great love of our great God!

….We are free [as women] to be who we were meant to be in God’s design as daughters precious to Him.

The world continues to provide us with a different message. We are told that we must act, dress, think, and talk in a certain way to be women or to be valuable. It varies across cultures, ages, and backgrounds, but we are told that our identity is not found in treasuring Christ and who Christ has called us to be, causing us to struggle with a conflict of our identity in many different ways. There are two specific common struggles for women based on observation and personal experience that I will briefly talk about, and both are related to fearing the judgement of man: social standing and body image. This is by no means an extensive or male-exclusive list, but these are two broad observations made from talking to other women and trials that God has put me through to bring me closer to Him.

The first observation is that the world says our identity is in our social standing. We must be agreeable to others to be liked and appreciated. Throughout most of high school, but especially my freshman and sophomore year, I was a very shy and anxious person. I constantly thought about how others saw me. I tend to describe this as an out-of-body experience, as if my mind is in a box outside of my body watching everything I do and say, not knowing who I really am at all but only wondering who other people think I am. Was I beautiful enough? Was I smart enough? I was obsessed with my grades, wanting to please the future universities and fearing that I would not be successful if I earned anything less than an “A”. By my junior and senior year I had become a bit less shy and a bit more social, but my desire to please others began to conflict with my faith. I had made close friends in high school who claimed to be Christian but saw God and His teaching differently than I did. They saw God’s word as an optional truth, but the culture determined what was really right and wrong for them. We all went to church, we all said that we loved Jesus, and we all said that sin is wrong, but my friends challenged my beliefs when discussion about homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, and gender roles came into the picture. They told me that “love is love,” and “the bible doesn’t say anything about it” to dismiss any orthodox and seemingly “outdated” approach to these topics. One of my friends even told me, “I know homosexuality is wrong, but I don’t want it to be,” so he continued declaring himself a queer advocate even after admitting that he was supporting something that was wrong in the eyes of our Creator. Many believed that abortion has some exceptions, that it is a necessary evil (or a necessary good) to make sure that women have the lives they want to live at the cost of an uncountable number never having a chance to live at all. I did my best to not say anything around my friends when these topics were brought up, fearing that I would be rejected or labeled as “weird” in some way. Certainly, there is discretion in determining whether or not to counter statements with the truth of God because there are circumstances where it would be more appropriate to wait for a different opportunity. But by my Junior and Senior year I had learned that not everyone agreed with the bible, so I was determined to be as quiet about such an unpopular book unless I thought the other person believed the same thing that I did. I was stumbling over myself to affirm and please people who could not be pleased, ignoring that the desires of my friends for me was not that I would love Jesus more but that I would make them feel like they were right. Despite my attempts to be pleasing to everyone, I was still called hateful, homophobic, and sexist by those who I had called good friends because they knew I was one of those “extreme Christians,” clinging to the bible as inerrant and entirely good. I was thrown into a battle of anxiety and depression for almost 2 years as I wrestled with giving in, but I did not know who I could turn to. Like Peter when he denied Christ, I wanted one foot into my Christianity and one foot in the world. One day my mom mentioned to me that my Pastor had recommended an author named “Rosaria Butterfield”. Apparently she was a former atheist and lesbian who had been converted to Christianity. She addressed popular issues such as sexuality and gender identity from a biblical Christian perspective. Although she is mostly known for her book Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, I read Openness Unhindered because it was less of her background and more of a direct defense of the moral and sexual teaching of the bible, but really, it comes down to whether or not one believes the bible at all. I recall sitting on the couches of my dimly lit high school library as I consumed the words in the text, and Butterfield quoted Romans chapter 1 verses 21-25:

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” ¹

I had read this verse before, but Butterfield made a bold claim about this in her book: giving into our own desires and the desires of the world is denying the God we claim to know. While she was using this verse to address the root of sexual sin mentioned in verses 26 and 27 of Romans 1, I realized that this applied to all of sin. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5:15, what was perhaps one of the most encouraging verses to me at this time, “and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” I am either living for myself, making myself into my highest treasure, or I am living for Christ, desiring to please and honor Him with all of my life, not just my personal preferences. Butterfield said that a friend pointed out to her that “Jesus is the Word made flesh, and that ‘knowing Jesus’ demands embracing the Jesus of the Bible, not the Jesus of someone’s imagination. The whole Bible. Even the places that took my life captive” (Butterfield 21). We are not supposed to pick out the verses that we do not like, or change their context and relevance to us based on what we want the text to say. We are to live in submission to God, seeing the sin that is within us and throwing ourselves more fully on Christ. I loved God’s word, but I did not know how to defend it, or why it was so important that I held on to it so tightly. All I knew when my faith was chiseled down to the bone was that reading His word was the only thing that matched reality, the only Words that truly comforted me and lifted the burden of anxiety and despair off of my shoulders. Butterfield’s book told me that not submitting to God’s word is not submitting to Him at all, no matter what you believe to be loving. So give up trying to please and serve the world. We are to be kind and love our neighbors, believing and unbelieving, as ourselves. Showing grace upon grace to all as Christ has shown to us. We will never please the world, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). But our eyes have been opened to the true reality. We do not live by an empty and meaningless faith because Christ is reality. These were truths that I had already known, but it was as if plunging myself into the world had caused me to forget about them, really, to forget about Him. The world cannot remove God from His throne, and this God loves me and declares who I am. He is more than sufficient for me.

The second observation is that the world says our identity is in our body image. Normally, these expectations are different for men and women. But our world has always been a sex-crazed world, and we are all told that we must look a certain way in order to be seen as attractive or desirable in any way. I am sure we all know the body expectations by now because we see them all over the covers of magazines and ads on social media: men are supposed to be strong and muscular while women are supposed to be both thin, curvy, and busty, all at the same time (a feat that only seems to be possible through surgeries and photoshop). These expectations affect men and women in different ways. I do not for a moment want to give the impression that many men do not struggle with these unrealistic and fictionalized physical expectations because statistics and mere individual observation prove otherwise, but I will be focusing on this struggle specifically for women. There is no beauty, according to the world, simply in how we were made. Even the current popular feminist idea that a woman can wear whatever she wants has begun to include the idea that prostitution or any form of a woman sexualizing herself is her choice and is therefore her freedom. To this I will say, that idea is not only complete ignorance of how women come into sex trafficking in the first place, but it is also encouraging an enslavement to the sexualizing of the self, disregarding the sin of exhibitionism by displaying the body in a way that is shameful in the eyes of God, and ignoring the underlying influence of the world that we must be sexual objects to be valuable. Whether you are basing your identity on pleasing the sexualized beauty expectations of the world or boasting in your ability to expose your body, it is an identity apart from Christ that will not lead to the life and freedom that is only found in Him. Our created bodies belong to our Creator.

This distorted view of the human body, including the woman’s body, has been an issue in the world since the garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Genesis 3:7). Sin has caused us to see our bodies differently apart from God’s original design, for His design was good, but we feel shame in our flesh and cover ourselves, as if that will cover the sin that is within us. Sin brings harm, and indeed, this idolization of our bodies for various pleasures and a feeling of worth has had horrifying results. The mass connections that media and the internet provide in the 21st century has made the problem even worse. One of these results is the harmful psychological effect of wanting to make our bodies look different than they are, and for many, this is displayed through eating disorders. The rise of weight-loss related eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia has only been on the rise, according to the National Eating Disorders website.² There are other disorders I could mention here, but if you do not know what anorexia or bulimia are, they are disorders that result in unhealthy methods of controlling one’s weight through means of self-starvation, excessive exercise, and overdosing certain medications, to name a few. They are all harmful to the body, and can have devastating consequences in severe cases (such as infertility), and in the most severe cases, death. Eating disorders, especially Anorexia, are the most common cause of deaths among young women in the US according to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health.³ Though now it is increasingly common that girls as young as 5 or 6 years old are diagnosed with an eating disorder.

I can recall as a little girl being at the grocery store with my mom and seeing Vogue and Elle fashion magazines. The heavy make-up and luxurious clothing the women modeling on the covers wore did not hide the ribs that poked through the shirt, the arms that I could wrap my fingers around in a complete circle, or the cheeks that seemed hollowed out with nothing but skin and bone. A doctor would see these symptoms and say that the person is ill, but society said that this is beautiful. It was not until just before high school that I began to believe this myself. I was struggling with anxiety, and like most young teenagers, very self-conscious of my body. In the midst of my anxiety, it seemed that my mind and my life was spinning out of my control, and I was desperate to get that control back. So I found great relief from this anxiety by channeling it towards something I could control: my weight and appearance. I found that if I ate less and exercised more, the numbers on the scale would slowly drop each week. But soon watching the numbers drop became an addiction, and I would eat less and less to speed the process. I can recall putting my hands on the sides of my waist to see how thin I was multiple times a day. I thought I was happy because I felt like a beautiful 13-year old when really I was concerningly underweight, but I pushed aside the fatigue and growing anxiety that clouded my mind. I was so obsessed with putting my identity in my image according to the world, that I was damaging the body God gave me. Finally, God revealed to me that my heart was sick, and that I was sick. I confessed my struggle to my parents, and my mom encouraged me to get to a healthy weight. Something I have learned over the past 7 years is that this struggle to place the identity in the body is not a one-and-done deal, and God has helped me come so far in what I hope is not a life-long battle. I believe that the services provided by medical professionals for physical and mental illnesses can be beneficial and are sometimes necessary, but in my personal situation these were not available options for me, and I had to lean more fully on Christ for peace and comfort. I share this story with you to show how a distorted view of our identity can harm us physically, mentaly, and spiritually, but also because it is a relevant and increasingly common issue in our society that is not nearly addressed enough or taken seriously enough. Even though I was submitting my identity to the world, God shined His light through the darkness of my sin to bring me closer to Him as I realized I was weak and He was strong. Through prayer and reading His word, God revealed to me the immense love that He has for me, and that my body is the vessel for my soul that has been saved by Christ. He made both my body and my spirit, and I am to worship God with all of me. Do you know how scripture uses the word “beautiful”? It uses this word in light of our inheritance provided to us by Christ “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; You hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance” (Psalm 16:5-6). Our beautiful inheritance is Christ, who has given us eternal life and freedom. Not only are our bodies a part of God’s creation that He declared to be good and glorifying to Himself, but the beautiful work of Christ shines within us. Let us be thankful for the bodies that God has so wonderfully given us to serve Him, and let us see that all ugliness in the world is not bodies but sin, which lies in our hearts and distorts our view of what our great God has made. What good is it to be considered the most beautiful girl in the eyes of the world, when the heart within is consumed by the darkness of sin? Let us see God’s creation for what it truly is: beautiful and His. We are all a part of God’s beautiful creation. Our identity is not in how the world sees us but in treasuring something so much greater: Christ Himself.

When we walk through our day-to-day lives, are we treasuring Christ above all things? Is He the center of our thoughts, attitudes, adoration, and attention? The praise of man for beauty or popularity, great materials in wealth or clothes, achieving the perfect family, receiving a great education, are all things that will fade. Christ is the only treasure that lasts, and He is a person that loves you and knows more about you than you know about yourself! My fellow sisters in Christ, He alone is our beautiful inheritance, our greatest Treasure, and all things come from Him. When we look to ourselves and to the world, we become big and Christ becomes small. Seek Him as He truly is, and we will see ourselves as we truly are - that we belong to Him.

References

1. Butterfield, Rosaria. Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ. Crown & Covenant Publications, 2018.

2. “Media and Eating Disorders.” National Eating Disorders, https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/media-eating-disorders. Accessed September 20, 2021.

3. “Eating Disorder Statistics.” South Carolina Department of National Health, http://www.state.sc.us/dmh/anorexia/statistics.htm. Accessed September 20, 2021.