Finding your identity in Christ through personality tests
By Aaron Evans
Columnist
Who am I? What makes me tick? What makes me so different from everyone else? What are my strengths? Why am I the way I am?
These are the questions that slapped me in the face over Christmas break as I sat on my couch with an open jar of Nutella in my lap, having an existential crisis. I honestly didn’t know the answers to any of these questions beyond surface level answers. I took the Myers Briggs test a few months ago when I was in the T.A.G program, but my results just didn’t seem right. So I did the best thing I knew to do: I retook the Myers Briggs.
Needless to say, I got a completely different answer than my first time. It turns out I am an INFP, which stands for Introverted, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving. I was totally engulfed by what this personality test was telling me. It was like someone had been following me around my entire life and wrote down everything they saw. It was scary accurate, and I was intensely intrigued.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the Myers Briggs jargon, let me clear things up for you. Each letter in whatever acronym you get — ENFJ, ISTP, ESTJ and so on — stands for a different aspect of your personality. You have Extroversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition,
Thinking vs. Feeling and Judging vs. Perceiving. I could go so much further, but if you want to know what these mean, just search “MBTI types” in Google and let the results fly in (you can find a lot of these test online for free or at our Career and Calling Center).
Be warned: it can be insanely accurate at times. These can tell you everything from what kind of job works for you to what kind of friend you are to what kind of person would be romantically compatible with you.
As I scrolled through hundreds of articles and websites, I began to think about all this personality profile business in a broader scale. How does this fit in with God’s image of me? Is the Myers Briggs just a bunch of psychiatric hogwash that God-fearing Christians should avoid?
Absolutely not. In fact, I would argue the opposite. I think that a tool like Myers Briggs can give us deeper insight to not only ourselves but, more importantly, how we can better serve the kingdom of God.
It’s no secret that God has made each one of us differently. The ”there is no one in the world exactly like you” message has been preached to us practically since birth. But just let that thought sink in for a few minutes. Out of billions of people, God made you unlike any of them.
And God doesn’t just make things for the heck of it. Everything has a purpose. Nothing is a coincidence.
When we gain a better understanding of ourselves, we can better understand how we can use what God has given us — even our strangest quirks — to serve others. But we can’t serve to our best ability if we dont know how we serve best. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says, “But our bodies have many parts, and God has put each part just where he wants it.”
We were made for connecting with one another, and we were made to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the world. But that extension of his nature won’t look the same for everyone. He has a mission for you, and you can be sure that your strengths and weaknesses will play a vital role in that. And no one will fulfill that purpose the way you can.
Therefore, know yourself, so you can better serve Him.