Living Out Your Real Identity

You may have spent your life pretending to be someone you think you should be, instead of living out your real identity as God designed. This excerpt reveals how discovering who you truly are in the Father changes the way you see your past, your purpose, and your present.

As you fight to find yourself, you need to see who you really are. Not just the good, and not just the bad. All of it.

Our identity is something that is given to us—not something that we gain. When I fly, I usually don’t watch movies. I’m usually that person conked out against the window. But for some reason, I recently watched that old Man of Steel film on a flight home. And God was speaking to me through it. In Man of Steel, and all Superman lore, Clark Kent is a Kansas kid who discovers that he’s actually an alien from far-off planet Krypton. Since he wasn’t born on Earth, he’s got supernatural abilities—it’s got something to do with the sun that was close to his planet. The result? He’s faster than a speeding bullet. He can fly. He’s super strong. He becomes the most recognizable superhero of all: Superman.

And what struck me was that the Kents, as much as these parents loved their son, could only teach him how to be a Kent. They couldn’t see who he was about to become, and they couldn’t teach him to be what he was about to become. And we hear that when Mr. Kent tells his son to hide his gifts. It’s coming from the right place—it’s coming from a father who wants to protect his son—but that advice isn’t going to help Clark live into his truest identity as Kal-el (which was his biological parents’ name for him).

One day, though, Jonathan Kent takes his son into the barn and heaves open the huge cellar doors, which are hiding the spaceship in which his son came to earth. “We found you in this,” he finally shares with his teen son. Clark is feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of who he might be. And like a lot of us, his impulse is to blend in. His impulse is to be like all the other kids who ride his school bus.

“Can’t I keep pretending I’m your son?” he begs his father.

His father answers immediately, “You are my son!” Then he adds, “But somewhere out there, you have another father, too, who gave you another name. And he sent you here for a reason, Clark.”

You have a Heavenly Father who has sent you here for a reason. And He wants you to know what that reason is. He wants you to know your purpose. He wants you to live your purpose. He wants you to move forward in power. What’s in you is something that God deposited in you when He created you. What God is concerned with today, what God cares about right now isn’t the level where you’re heading. It isn’t what He’s called and equipped you to do three years from now, or a decade from now.

God wants you to understand who you are, and God equips you to apply that knowledge to what you’re doing today. What you’re speaking today. What you’re building today. What you’re learning today. You’re going to realize that purpose when you find your identity in the Father who made you. Who designed you uniquely. Who created you. Who knit you together in your mother’s womb.

I think most of us can identify with the teenage Clark Kent in the barn. We’re waffling between wanting to accept who we really are and wishing we’d never known it in the first place. Instead of taking hold of the truth, it’s easier for us to believe some of the myths about our identity. As you start fighting to find yourself, I want you to see who you really are. Not just the good, and not just the bad. All of it. The painful memories. The gifts you inherited from your parents. Your regrets. Your relationships. What you love. What you’re good at. Your failures. Your dreams for the future.

Fighting to find yourself isn’t easy. There will be resistance at every turn. You have to choose to stay in this fight, and you have to be willing to see yourself as you are—the good, the bad, the awful, the pretending, the hopeful, the messy, the lies, and the truth. And when you see those things all laid before you, and you’re able to accept yourself as you are—not as you wish you were, not as a collection of things you can do—then you’re in the fight for real. The fight to find your real identity: beloved child of God.

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Excerpted from The Fight to Find Yourself by Joel Tudman. Copyright 2025. Used with permission from FaithWords, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com.

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