Don't take your identity from your suffering

Today's dose of Jack Miller, from The Heart of a Servant Leader. It's part of a letter to a man whose wife had just left him.

We do mean to urge you not to take your identity from your suffering and having been made a victim, even a mutilated one. That is what has happened to you, but that is not your identity. Your identity is defined in Ephesians as being in Christ. You are first of all forever defined by your being in union with your most faithful friend, even the Son of God, who saw you perishing in your sin and blindness and then gave His precious life for you. He sees all of us as betrayers of His love, and grace, and laws. And yet He found it in His great loving heart to die for the treasonous, faithless ones. For me and for you.

Do remember your identity. Soak in Ephesians if you will. See yourself as a new person. Hurt and wounded, yes, but not controlled by that hurt, but controlled by your Savior in whom you live and move and have your being. I don't have any great counseling formulas, only Jesus. Only Jesus, Gary. Only Jesus. Remember Jesus and see yourself, your wife, your family, and all the rest of us from that standpoint.