The Process of Returning to Who God Created You to Be

One of the biggest shifts that happens when you come to faith in Jesus Christ is a shift in identity.

Before accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, your identity is largely rooted in how the world defines you. You internalise a version of yourself shaped by the opinions of other people, culture, past experiences, and the systems around you. This year the Holy Spirit showed me a framework in the bible that will help you to understand how God delivers His people from this area of bondage. Part of the sanctifying process of the Holy Spirit is Him stripping away the false identities the world gave you, and rooting you in who He originally designed you to be.

Jeremiah 1:5, the Lord said:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

God knew exactly who you were before you were ever born. Your spirit belongs to Him, and He designed you with a unique personality, gifts, and purpose that were always meant to glorify Him and serve His Kingdom.

So the question you naturally begin to ponder on is this: how does someone move toward their identity in Christ? How can you discern what parts of you are socially constructed, and what parts are God-breathed?

The framework the Holy Spirit revealed to me comes from God’s commissioning of Jeremiah:

“To uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

This is how God restores our identity. Before He establishes us in truth, He exposes what is false. Before He builds, He removes what cannot remain. There are 3 stages so let’s break it down.

Stage 1: Uproot and Tear Down

The first stage is the work of uprooting and tearing things down. To uproot is to pull something out of the ground from it’s very root. It’s not just about covering up, or trying to manage… it’s the literal work of ensuring that whatever is planted is taken out of the ground, so it can never grow again in the spot from which is was taken.

This is what God does with us. He uproots everything that does not come from Him, or align with the righteousness His Kingdom is built upon. This means false belief systems, self-sabotaging patterns, perfectionism, and even the pressure to perform.

This is such a significant first stage because there are the lies you have identified with as you grew up in the world, disconnected from Jesus Christ, and unfortunately many of these lies were internalised over time. Things like:

I am not good enough.
If I just do more they’ll love me.
This is just who I am.
I am too much for people.
I am difficult.

These labels were often spoken over you by other people, or exposed to you through other mediums. Because you had no truth to measure them against, you accepted them as fact and it shaped the very core of who you have become today.

The words people said, the pictures you saw, the rules of the culture you grew up in, the music you listened to, the books you read, the shows you watched… these were all seeds planted in the depths of your soul, and over time they grew into trees that bore fruit. The issue is, the fruit is produced was not the fruit that is grown in God’s Kingdom. We’re talking about fruits of fear, shame, comparison, control, insecurity and so much more. The fruit reflects the seed, and it’s the seeds planted that creates deep roots of trauma, rejection, and even striving.

So, the first stage is to partner with the Holy Spirit to identify what needs to go. Ensure you pray honestly, and respond with your attention to spiritually discern what begins to surface over the coming days.

“Holy Spirit, bring to light everything hidden in darkness. If there is anything in me that needs uprooting regarding my identity, reveal it to me. Show me every lie I have partnered with.“

Stage 2: Destroy and Overthrow

Once the lies about your identity have been exposed, the next stage is to destroy and overthrow the systems you built around those wounds.

Most of us develop emotional and mental structures to protect ourselves from pain, rejection, and disappointment. It feels necessary at the time, and maybe it is, but eventually the very things that once protected you begin to imprison you. The self-sufficiency, the performance, the need for validation, the way you managed people so they could not get close enough to hurt you. These aren’t just your personality traits, which is why saying things like “that’s just who I am” can actually reinforce the bondage that work to free you. What you are destroying are survival mechanisms that have outgrown their purpose, and it’s only when you dismantle them that you can then make room for who you were really created to be. This isn’t about becoming someone entirely new, but rather the pruning that allows the truth of who you have always been in God’s eyes to take it’s rightful place.

Stage 3: Build and Plant

Once you uproot the lies, you need to intentionally replace them with the truth of God’s Word. This is the final stage – building and planting. The lesson to remember here is that an empty space does not stay empty. If you think about gardening, when you pull up a plant and the soil is left bear, if you do not plant seeds in the empty space, weeds will grow in it’s place.

So in this same way, when you uproot lies from your life, you need to replant truth in it’s place. If you don’t, someone will come along and plant a seed in the empty space you created.

If you leave it unattended, something will grow back in its place, and what many times grows back is familiar – the old narratives, the world’s definitions of you, the opinions of people who were never qualified to speak over your life.

You have to replace every lie with truth. If the lie was I am not enough, the truth is: I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I am chosen. I am loved. I have purpose. I am accepted in Christ.

But this is not a self-help exercise. The ground in which these truths take root is intimacy with God. The more time you spend with Him, the more clearly you begin to see yourself through His eyes, and when God defines you, the opinions of the world begin to lose their grip.