Acts 27:23 proclaims the God to whom I belong and whom I serve…How do you recognize yourself?

Everyone we meet for the first time asks, ‘what do you do?’ What do you say?

It would be odd for any one of us to say I belong to God and serve Him. This was how the Apostle Paul identified himself when speaking to his captors and other prisoners just before their shipwreck.

Were we to identify ourselves as Paul it would feel weird, besides we know that people are just making small talk by being polite in asking about our work. However I think the real issue is deeper for us.

I don’t know that we really see ourselves as either belonging to God or being His servants.

At the 30,000 foot level, sure, we would acknowledge we belong to God. But at the day to day, in the home, in the workplace, at school level, we are our own person making our own decisions based upon our own perceived best interest.

The concern about God’s interest or will in the practical daily aspect of our life is almost non-existent.

We believe we belong to God because He is our Creator. We also acknowledge God’s purchase of us through the blood of Jesus. Yet these realities are often left among the theological truths we believe and not the practical truths of how we live.

God did not intend for us to think this way. The fact that we have been created by Him and have been bought back by Him is so that we would live for Him as He intended for us from the beginning.

This leads to the second identifying quality Paul mentioned; he was a servant of God. Since we belong to God we are now to live as servants of God, practically, daily, everywhere among everyone in every way all the time.

This is what it really means to be born again: born into the family of God as a child of God to serve Father God for the glory of God.

Our true identity is children of God who serve God for the purposes of God in God’s world.

As the Son of God lived for the glory of the Father by perfectly obeying the Father through His service to the Father so too we who have been adopted by God through Jesus the Son are to likewise live in obedience serving God for His honor and glory in the world.

Our identity is not to exist in the theological but in the practical world we live among all we live with.