There are thieves among us. Identity theft is real. I’m not talking about the crime where a thief steals your personal information, such as your full name and social security number, to commit fraud. I am talking about the person who robs you of your self-esteem by constantly tearing you down verbally. Words have power. Our words have the power to create and to destroy.

Often times, if we are called something, whether good or bad, we will begin to associate it with our identity. When I was a child, my younger brother would get into trouble. He was always doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing and my mother would always call his name and tell him to stop. After a while, he thought stop was his middle name because he heard it so much. It became how he identified himself. When you hear someone being called stupid, ugly, worthless or a loser, you are witnessing identity theft. They are robbing the person of the truth of who they really are.

Sometimes we label one another. When I was in high school, our senior class voted on superlatives, such as who would be most likely to succeed. Did that imply that the rest will not? We have a tendency to place labels on people. If someone is labeled the greatest, they might also feel the need to label someone else the worst. We might also do this by the way we engage in social media. In today’s society, we have been led to believe that our worth is dependent upon how many friends or followers we have, or how many likes we receive and so on. When did our value as a person become dependent upon social media?

Sometimes we rob ourselves of our own true identity. Have you ever had someone give you a compliment and instead of saying thank you, you come up with excuses why the compliment isn’t true? Others try so hard to remain humble that they never want to see themselves as something special because they don’t want to appear arrogant. There is a difference between arrogance and confidence. I once heard someone say, “…arrogance is thinking you are better than everyone else, and confidence is knowing that no one is better than you.” My point is that we are all uniquely different with something great to give to the world.

The biggest identity thief is the devil himself. He puts lies in our heads on a daily basis. Telling us we are not loved, telling us that we will fail and telling us that we are no good. We listen to the lies and sometimes don’t even recognize who we are. None of it is true. Our true identity comes from God. We are made in His image, in His likeness and God said “We are good!”