Identity theft is constantly in the news. If you’re on social media, you know that peoples’ identities are being stolen on a regular basis. How many of us have received a friend request on social media from someone who was already our friend? At the same time, there are products being sold to us to provide identity protection. We have systems at airports like “Clear” that can identify us by an iris scan.

Our human nature, ideally, is revealed in the man Jesus as He lived. Remembering the statement in the letter to the Hebrews to the effect that He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (4:15), we may presume that the author had in mind, among other things, the wilderness temptation, which can become a commentary on the nature of humans.

I left Kansas City for Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, via Lisbon on September 30.

I had a day for rest and visited with the family of Daniel Gomis, Africa Regional Director. His wife, Anélie, was in Canada helping their daughter, Sara, get settled in college. Her mother cooked a delicious dish from Cabo Verde!

On October 3-6, Regional Advisory Council and Regional Mission Team members met for three days of leadership meetings.

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Holiness Today, May/June 2022

“Who am I? 

We define our identity by what is particular to us . . . but what is particular to my culture, my group, can often lead to a sense of injustice, of oppression, of grievance. In this fallen, sinful world, perhaps it cannot be any other way.

What is the Christian perspective?”

—Dr. T. A. Noble

So much has changed in the last one hundred years. Imagine being born in 1920, and being alive in the year 2020. In just a single century, the cultural context in every region of the world has moved from industrial to informational (Gutenberg to Google), from rural to urban, and from modern to postmodern. These are tectonic cultural shifts that remained unchanged in the previous 500 years.