identity

They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand.

Nehemiah 1:10

No personal identity could be better than this one: to be known as one of God's people. For the Jews who had made their way back to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon, this was their new hope. No more were they strangers in an alien land. Now they were home, the servants and people of God with the task of rebuilding lives as they rebuilt the city.

Their identity was all God's doing. He chose Israel. He called them to Him. He gave the nation the inheritance of the Promised Land. When they sinned repeatedly rejecting Him, He sent them to Babylon for 70 years. And God redeemed them back. By His great power He sent them back to Jerusalem to resettle. All that they were and all that they had existed because they were God's people.

What was ethnically true for these people is spiritually true for me. I am now God's servant as one of the redeemed people called and saved in Christ to be His. Jesus redeemed me from the captivity of sin and death by His great power and His strong nail-scarred hands. He has set me in the world with His gospel to see my life now rebuilt for His glory and to be used by Him to rebuild others. My identity in Christ is found as His servant, His possession, and as one of His people.