Companies spend billions of dollars a year for celebrities to endorse their product.  They believe our culture wants to wear, look, eat, drive and be like a celebrity, and they are probably correct.  We often try anything to be like other people or someone other than ourselves.

I have thought about this when facing a questionnaire or personality profile, “How I can skew my answer to be perceived ‘more favorable,’ be like someone else or be what someone else would want?”  I look back and see how I applied this premise to some of my past relationships.

There was a time when I tried to be and do everything I thought my girlfriend wanted.  I changed my lifestyle, I changed what I ate, I changed the sports I played, I changed the way I acted—I became a different person.  After noticing I was emotionally up, down and all over the place, a close friend shared with me that I wasn’t being myself.

I discovered I had let my relationship define who I was.

Define Yourself

Years ago a popular advertising campaign stated, “Be like Mike” (Michael Jordan).  As a result, millions of people ran out to purchase basketball shoes and apparel imprinted with his image.  The only person it defined was Michael Jordan.

So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27).

We are all created in God’s image, not in an image you see on a magazine cover, on television, or in the movies.  Unfortunately, we tend to spend more time absorbing these images from the media than we do absorbing God’s Word.

The Lord gave me a message.  He said, ‘I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.  Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as a spokesman to the world’ (Jeremiah 1:5).

It must pain the Lord when I try to emulate another person rather than embrace who the Lord created me to be. 

       He knew me (us)
       He formed me (us)
       He set me (us) apart
       He appointed me (us) as a spokesman to the world. 

Define yourself as God’s creation in God’s image for God’s purpose.

Refine Yourself

Precious metals are often mentioned in the Bible in correlation to a person’s character.  The process of purifying a metal or making it precious requires high heat, hammering, cooling, and forming along the way.  Our journey to become precious requires us to go through difficult times and struggles so that we may grow strong, pure and complete.

I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure, just as gold and silver are refined and purified by fire (Zechariah 13:9).