It's Official

Yesterday we made our trip to the DMV and became "official" residents of South Carolina.  Again.  We are now the proud possessors of South Carolina drivers licenses, and my car has a South Carolina tag on it.

The DMV wasn't crowded when we got there, so I was hopeful this could all be taken care of quickly.  I should have known better.  It was, after all, the DMV.  And too many other details of this moving experience have been less than ideal, so I really shouldn't have been surprised that we got off to a rocky start at the DMV.

However, after a trip back home to pick up some extra documentation, a stop at the tax office to pay taxes on the car, and a stop at the insurance agent's office to pick up paperwork that says we are insured in South Carolina now, rather than in North Carolina (even though it's the same company), we headed back to the DMV.  We properly completed all the paperwork, had our vision tested, and were awarded with South Carolina licenses and car tag.

It's official now.  We are legal residents of South Carolina.  We belong here. We carry identifying documents to prove it!

We carry no such identifying documents to prove we belong to Christ.  We don't have a "Christian license"; we haven't been given a "registration card" to show our identity in Him.

We are identified as His in other ways, among them the fruit of His Spirit in our lives.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control."  (Galatians 5:22 NASB)

These fruit in our lives give evidence that we belong to Christ.  They are, in a sense, our "identifying documents".

In the same way, the passage in Galatians gives us the identifiers of those who are living "in the flesh":  "The deeds of the flesh are evident, which are:  immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these."  (Galatians 5:20-21 NASB)

So the question is, which of these is our identity?  If we belong to Christ, is it evident in our lives that we are His?  Are our lives reflecting the fruit of the Spirit or the deeds of the flesh?

Something to think about.

"If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit."  (Galatians 5:25 NASB)