Identification in servanthood is where you put yourself in the shoes of others.
“…being made in the likeness of men…” (Phil. 2:7)
When Jesus came to earth He came like the ones He came to serve. He could have come as anything – He came to serve humans so He had to become one.
He became a man to know us and to identify with us. He was a human man through and through. He can sympathize with us because He was just like us.
But even though He was like us (Greek: homoioma) He was not identical to us (Greek: eikon). “Though he had a fully human nature, that nature was not sinful” (T. Constable) “Like” can mean “a state of common experience.” (Precept Ministries).
He was human like you and me – he did human stuff just like you and me. Because of that, He could feel what we feel, and understand things as a human could. Yet importantly, without sin, but in the same way as us. He became us so he could be a sympathetic high priest (Heb. 4:15). To sympathize with us humans he had to crawl inside our skin – literally.
This is what identification calls us to: we are called to understand and experience the life of the person we are called to serve:
- The believer puts himself in the shoes of others.
- He sees himself in light of the person he is serving.
- He empathizes, seeking to feel what he feels.
- He replaces judging with more graciousness.
- When being inconvenienced he chooses patience over impatience.
- His goal is to identify with someone other than himself.
When it comes to crawling inside the skin of another to identify with them, what does that look like with your wife, your child, or a co-worker?
After identification, Jesus then subjected himself as a servant. Read more about that here.