Your Spiritual DNA, Part 2: Your Unique Personality

Your Spiritual DNA, Part 2: Your Unique Personality — and Why It Matters

Second in a 5-part series that outlines the components making up your spiritual DNA

Just as your cellular DNA provides a means of physical identification, your spiritual DNA distinguishes your inward identity. It’s made up of four components: your personality, your spiritual gifts, your passions, and your story.

Your personality, the first of these, is a combination of your natural strengths that form your distinctive character – the predictable ways you respond in different situations. That’s not to say you can’t learn other responses. We often do, even unknowingly. Yet you were wired by God with a one-of-a kind approach to processing information, solving problems, managing change, and facing risk.

Am I Really Wired By God?

Psalm 139:13 explains, “You created my inmost being.” The actual Hebrew word for “inmost being” (kilyah) refers to the human kidney, used in scripture figuratively to represent the mind and soul. In other words, God deliberately and intentionally created your personality – those inmost recesses that comprise your being.

For some, this is remarkable revelation. It’s easy to understand that God the Creator made our physical bodies and that each of us has a differently-shaped nose or distinctive fingerprints. Yet as this verse points out, in creating you He also put together a unique recipe of personal strengths. The elements that make up your personality are God-given and God-ordained. And they contribute a meaningful portion of your spiritual DNA.

Finding and Using Your Strengths

What are you to do with this truth?

1. Acknowledge Your Uniqueness

Your personality is God-ordained. That is a freeing principle! The cultural need to change your personality to “fit in” and be like everyone else is a myth – one you no longer need to buy, because you’re not supposed to be like other people. Furthermore, you are not required to “fill in the gaps” in what you perceive to be missing parts of your personality (note we’re not talking about addresses your weaknesses here) because you were created with a special combination of strengths. You don’t fit in another mold, nor do you need to … nor should you,

3. Honor Your Uniqueness

Just as you revere the beauty of a sunset or the miracle of a new baby as evidence of God’s creative hand, so can you honor your uniqueness as a revelation of His work. Comparing yourself with others or minimizing the value of your strengths diminishes your individuality – the expression of God’s creativity in you.

3. Uncover Your Uniqueness

Your unique personality blend reveals the manner in which you will approach God’s work through you – the “how” you go about processing information, solving problems, managing change, and facing risk. (The three other spiritual DNA components address why, where, and with whom you will accomplish God’s task in your life.)

Whether you’re highly self-aware or have never before considered how your strengths are put together, consider taking a strengths assessment. This fact-based, quantitative profile provides remarkably objective data outlining the God-given strengths which make up your “inward being” with 92.1% perceived user accuracy. It’s powerful information.

By discovering your personality strengths, you take the first key step in the journey to uncovering your unique spiritual DNA – who you are and what great work God has for you to do.