What's Your Personality?

And this is where one aspect of my morning query arose.  The query regarding personality.


What is personality anyway?  Is it other than the results of a collection of choices made in our formative years in response to the stimuli around us, merged with basic natural responses and instincts, and a small amount of DNA/RNA differences from person to person?


As a child in our world ...nation, state, county, village, and finally home and family... learns what ways work and don't work to get their needs met - for love, security, sustenance mostly - they make these choices - trial and error, trial and seeming success -  and as the child learns from these, little by little the child will settle upon a strategy for living which appears to work for him/her.  It will become the way they see themselves.  ... their, "This is how I function - how I interact with others" (be they elders, peers or their junior counterparts) - this becomes "who they are" - their personality.


BUT - if all this was built on a belief of god-less-ness AND THEN their heart embraces salvation through the finished work of Christ Jesus, will that ground work, those choices and decisions made before, not HAVE to be revisited in light of the new frame of reference?


Now, I realize this falls under the heading of renewing of our minds, but what I'm seeing in and around me, is people who are - yes, they really are Believers in Jesus Christ, and they faithfully read His Word, sing praise and worship songs (even hymns!) , many are Spirit-filled Believers - but if they are asked specifically about themselves, autopilot kicks in and they're describing the personality that was their "old man"! 


That representation of ourselves that was crucified with Christ should not be who we see ourselves as being! And we must get out of the habit of speaking of ourselves in those old, outdated terms.  That person died with Christ and was raised up a new creation - not a reworked version of the old one.


Look at Paul - he even went so far as to change his name to keep himself from the possibility of seeing his old self as his new self.  Sure, he still remembered what he had done, how he had behaved and even how to make tents, but I really believe his change of name was a deliberate move to separate the new creation from the old, dead works life.


It seems we resist allowing God to alter what we see as our "self" ... to alter our "who I am" ... to alter our personalities.  Was the "who-we-were" working that well for us that it couldn't do with the change?