To answer that question, you have to do a few things. First, you have to think. This may seem obvious, but it's important to know that each time you establish your own identity, you (and not anyone else) have to come to these conclusions yourself. Next, you have to bring to mind certain personality traits like; "I'm kind," "I'm generous," or "I'm lazy."
What's tricky about this is that behind each of those personality traits is a story. It's impossible for someone to just derive from nothing that they are kind or generous or lazy. We get these ideas from somewhere, and that somewhere is our experience in life. Essentially, the only reason I know that I'm Matt Culler is because that fact has been reinforced over and over and over and over, etc. Your life is a story about what you know to be true about you.
If this is true, then we run the risk of problems in our lives when we misunderstand the truth. Say I've gone for a long time getting A's in all of my classes, but at one point I take a class and fail it. I see this and feel bad, but understand that this failure is not an intrinsic part of my identity; it's more of the exception than the rule. But I start telling my friends that I failed a class. And some other friends see that I got an F, not knowing that I was an A student before. And my parents start holding that F over my head. And throughout all this time, it is never mentioned that i got A's in all of my other classes. Suddenly I care more about that F than those A's; suddenly my idea of myself is that I'm a failure. Knowing that I am a failure, I start acting like a failure, because that's all I know to be true.
This happens to us everyday. Parts of who we are are reinforced by others and ourselves, while other parts of who we are get ignored and eventually forgotten. If you start saying that you're sick, acting like you're sick, and telling people that you're sick, it's likely that people are going to start treating you like a sick person.
The important question here is who does God think that you are? Does this factor into your story at all? Maybe it does, but the person you think God sees you as is pretty terrible. Maybe you think God's ashamed of you. But what if the person who's ashamed of you is you? What if the idea of yourself as terrible has come from a source other than God? What if your story life got hijacked midway through?
When you come to conclusions about who you are, whether negative or positive, you're right. You're constantly constructing this story about you. While we include information in this story from a bunch of different sources, who you are is up to you in the end.
When you think of who you are, what do you think of?
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