Faith For This Moment Devotional By Rick McKinleySýnishorn

Day Four

A New Identity

Scripture: Genesis 12:1-3

Throughout the Bible, the people of God often found themselves grieving the loss of their identity as they once understood it, their place in the broader society, and their practices of worship. But God continued to be present among them. His presence and relentless pursuit of His people caused them to discover that they had been given a new identity in a new place and a new set of practices to know Him in deeper and more intimate ways.

Consider how Abram and Sarai left their country to go to the place God called them. The title that the book of Hebrews gives to these two exiles is “strangers and wanderers.” Our identity is made up of many things, but most important is being known. We are called into our identity through families and friends. All of that was gone now for Abram and Sarai. The identity they would be known by now was "stranger"—someone who is not a part of us. 

We are also told that Abram’s family members were pagan worshipers. Abram’s father, Terah, did not worship the God who spoke to Abram by name. The worship that Abram had been raised on, the rituals he was familiar with, and the way in which he thought about faith and truth and life and death were all about to change. The ways of his father would not be his ways, and so Abram lost his gods and the worship that he understood they required. 

We would be shortsighted to think that Abram and Sarai didn’t grieve their losses. To lose our sense of identity, the familiarity of place, and the faith of our fathers is to suffer a big loss. But God did not simply take away; He also gave, as we see in Genesis 12.

The Lord’s call of Abram into exile was a call toward something new, something that all of us have benefited from. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have received that blessing through the seed of Abraham, Jesus. This shows us that while exile is a place of loss, it is also a place of hope, because the God who is sovereign over the times in which we live is the One who sustains us in exile. 

How might being in a place of exile today lead the church toward a new, hopeful identity?