Prologue: Lies I Believed

From Your REAL ID: Discovering the Truth of Your Identity in Christ, by Tim Howe

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I could barely read at ten years old.

I grew up in church, in a family that loved God. I was the second-oldest of what would become ten kids. From a young age, I grew up knowing the Bible, and at one point, I told my mom I wanted to be a pastor when I grew up. I loved church. I soaked up every book my parents read to me, because reading for myself was a battle I usually lost. I grew up with dyslexia. By ten, I could still barely read, and even after that, it was a slow progression that took me years. I never thought I’d be fluent in reading. And reading out loud in front of people? I hated the very thought of it.

You see, I grew up thinking I was stupid. As a young kid, because I had big ears, I got picked on and made fun of. Kids called me Dumbo. They told me I was stupid, and that started shaping an identity in me. I thought that’s why reading was such a fight. Here’s the thing about being a child: nobody hands you an identity when you’re eight. You piece one together yourself. Kids said I was stupid, so that’s what I believed: I’m stupid.

Growing up, our family carried real griefs. Early on, when it was just my older sister, me, and my baby brother, we were traveling to Florida one winter, and my dad lost control of the car. This was before seatbelts were mandatory. My mom was nursing my brother at the time, so neither of them had a seatbelt on, and they both went through the windshield. My baby brother didn’t survive.

I don’t remember the crash myself, but it affected my childhood because it affected my parents. They walked through that grieving, and I remember some of the fighting and the difficulty that came with it growing up. I may not have the order exactly right, but at one point my dad went through some major health issues, lost the business, went bankrupt, and we moved to a new town, away from everything I knew.

The Tent and the Dam

We started going to a new church, and I remember feeling out of place there. One service, I’m trying to sing and I can’t even find my place in the hymnal, and a teenage boy in front of me turns around and hands me his, already open to the right page. “Here’s the spot.” I thought, oh, that’s nice. He befriended me. He started helping me, being a mentor to me. He was fourteen or fifteen; I was eleven or twelve. And I looked up to him, the way most kids my age looked up to teenagers.

What I didn’t know was that him befriending me wasn’t innocent. He was grooming me. And at an overnight church campout, sharing a tent with him, he molested me — did things to me that nobody should do to a boy. I hadn’t even been through puberty, so I didn’t understand it. What I know is that it broke something in me. From that point forward, I felt shame. I felt worthless. I hated myself and my life. And the enemy, the devil, opened a door that night and started pouring lies in at me faster than I knew what to do with them.

I told no one. I just changed. Almost overnight I turned into someone who was angry at life, hated himself, and wanted to make everyone around him miserable. I became cruel and mean. My parents had no idea what to do with me, because I hadn’t told them what happened, until finally my dad pressed me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him there at home; I was too ashamed. So we went for a short drive, and parked at the Greenfield Dam Wildlife Area, in Lancaster, Ohio. And sitting in that car with my dad, I finally poured it all out.

Now, before I tell you what happened next, I want to mention: my dad has since apologized for how he handled this, and I only bring it up to help you understand some of the things that shaped my identity for many years. But here’s what came back across that car. He asked me: Did you scream? Did you shout for people to come help you? I told him no. Well, then you must have wanted it. He pulled out an Old Testament scripture about a woman who didn’t scream for help when she was assaulted in the city, and therefore she was guilty of the sin. He reasoned that since there were other campers in nearby tents and I didn’t scream, then I must have wanted it. You need to repent to God for this sin.

I was maybe thirteen years old. I had just handed my father the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I walked away believing it was my fault, wondering if maybe he was right and I really did want it. His words cut me to the core. The shame and condemnation I carried because of them for years helped send me down an even darker path. Because I didn’t just walk away feeling rejected by my earthly father. I walked away believing God was harsh and upset with me, like I was a disappointment to God. And let me tell you: I now know that isn’t the heart of God. What my earthly father spoke that night in ignorance didn’t represent my heavenly Father.

Living Out the Lie

What did I do with the lies? I lived them out. I’ve since learned: you live out of whoever you believe you are.

Part of what held me was a misunderstanding about God. I had developed a fatalistic view of the sovereignty of God. I thought that because God is sovereign, He controlled everything about my life, right down to making me sin. So when I cried out, God, take these desires from me, take this sin from me, and nothing changed, I drew the conclusion the enemy handed me: He must not want to. He made me this way. He must not care about me. And then the enemy handed me the biggest lie yet, by twisting the Scriptures. I found the passage in Hebrews 6:4–6 about those who fall away being impossible to restore, and I thought this was my verse, that I’d had God and lost Him, that I was going to hell anyway now, so why fight it. I’d probably prayed the sinner’s prayer, asking Jesus to save me, a hundred different times, but now I felt hopeless. I believed I was worthless, so I lived like life didn’t matter.

Then puberty hit a boy who’d already been sexually broken, and the mess in my head got worse. I started going to pornography. And eventually I followed the lie: well, if that’s who I am, I might as well see what it’s like to embrace it. Then for a season as a teenager, I voluntarily did with another young man things the Bible says no man should do with another man. It warped my understanding of who I was, and the enemy used every bit of it to reinforce the lie that I was worthless. The more I pressed into the depths of sin and depravity, the more worthless I felt, the more shame and condemnation piled on.

I decided to try and numb the pain: I got addicted to nicotine, dipping, and smoking. At some point, I started drinking, stealing alcohol from anywhere I could. Any escape I could find, marijuana, really anything I could get my hands on that could get me high, I did it. I praise God I’m still alive, as some of the things I did are incredibly dangerous. I knew I could die from it, but I didn’t care.

At my lowest, I took a little Superman figurine, set it up on a shelf, and said out loud: God, I hate You. I’m making this my god now. Superman — you’re my god. And I remember that moment, because it meant something in my heart: I was rejecting God completely.

Here’s what was really going on, because it took me years to understand it. I wasn’t really rejecting God — I was rejecting my twisted view of God: a God I thought chose to create me just to make me sin, and then removed the option of repentance so He could damn me to hell for eternity, for His twisted pleasure. Fine — I didn’t want Him anyway. The issue was never God — the issue was the lies I believed about God. And I am so thankful that God is a good God, that He knew what was actually going on deep in my heart, because through it all, He never stopped drawing me to Him. Not for one second.

Looking back on life, I’m so thankful for praying parents who love the Lord. My mom and dad never gave up on me or stopped loving me through those years. As a parent myself now, looking back on it, I can’t imagine the pain they walked through seeing me struggle so much, even though they never knew the depth of my sin or what I was really going through. I did my best to make life hard for everyone around me for a season. If you know someone who’s walking through a season like I was: never give up on them. Pray for them, and continue loving them through the lies. Don’t ever stop pointing them to Jesus, and the grace and truth found only in Him.

The Girl in Math Class

At seventeen, God used a girl in my math class named Heather, who wouldn’t stop talking about Him, and who carried a joy and excitement I wanted in my life. One day I asked about her church.

I started going to that church (Eagle Rock Church in Pickerington, Ohio), a Spirit-filled church with a freedom and a joy in Christ I had never seen growing up. In 1999, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, filled with His presence and power, the way you read about in the book of Acts. God reminded me of the call He’d put on me as a little boy, and everything began to change.

Now, I’d love to tell you the enemy quit that day. He didn’t. A few years down the road, he came back trying to take me out altogether, by bringing up all the old lies once again. I’ll show you my actual journal pages from that valley when we get to chapter ten. But a rescue had begun in me that the enemy couldn’t stop.

And as far as I was concerned, my past was forgiven. I knew God removed my sins, as far as the east is from the west (see Psalm 103:12), but here’s how I handled my own memories of the past. I pictured it like a closet. I shoved all of it in there — the tent, the dam, the sin, all of it — shut the door tight, turned off the light, and chained it shut. Good. There’s my past. It’s all locked up. Settled and forgiven by God. And I went on and lived my life.

But see, what I didn’t realize is that I still had the closet. Chained up or not, it was still affecting me. I married Meagan in 2006 — the best decision of my life (outside of making Jesus my Lord) — started a family, built a successful career, and served God. And that closet leaked into all of it. Some of the old struggles followed me, and I was still hiding things, because hiding was what I’d learned to do since I was a boy.

I served God hard, wanting to make sure He knew how thankful I was for another chance, working to be a great Christian. And the picture of God I carried was still my dad’s voice at that dam: a harsh, demanding Father watching over my shoulder for me to get it wrong. So you know what I became? A harsh, demanding father, thinking I was modeling proper fatherhood. Turns out that’s not proper fatherhood. Some nights I’d lie awake for hours, tallying the day’s failures, certain God was disappointed in me. I’d been a believer for decades, and I was still living out of lies that got planted in me when I was a wounded thirteen-year-old kid.

Go West

In May of 2019, Meagan looked at me in a restless season and said, “I think you need to go away for a few days. Just go spend time with the Lord. You need to let your heavenly Father wrap His arms around you and love you and remind you who you are.” So I did something that will sound strange if you’ve never lived by the leading of the Holy Spirit: I pulled out of the driveway with no destination, and I asked, “All right, Lord — where am I supposed to go?”

And I just heard: Go west.

So I turned west. And as I started driving, I felt like the Lord told me to put on an old worship CD, an album from 2001 that I hadn’t listened to in probably eight or nine years. Okay, Lord. I put it on, and it played in the background while I drove and prayed. And the route kept getting more specific: past the area I grew up in. Past my old childhood house. Lord, why are we in the old neighborhood? What are You doing? Then, up ahead, the entrance to the Greenfield Dam Wildlife Area. Turn in there.

I pulled into, as far as I can recall, the same exact parking spot where my dad parked with me the day I told him. And before I even understood what was happening, I was weeping. And the Lord said, Turn up the radio. That CD had been playing for a while now, and it had arrived, in that parking spot, at the exact track where the music quiets down and the singer goes into a prophetic moment, declaring over and over that I am God’s beloved — asking if I could hear the voice of my heavenly Father saying that I’m His beloved. Then he went on to say not to let anything or anyone keep me back from what the Lord was calling me to.

And I felt the tangible love of God wash all over me and sensed His healing balm cleansing away those old wounds. The Holy Spirit gave me a verse that has become one of my life scriptures:

For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. (John 3:17)

And then the Lord spoke to my heart, so gently: I never condemned you for any of that. I was there with you, through all of it.

Then the Lord reminded me of John chapter eight:

The scribes and Pharisees, however, brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before them and said, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such a woman. So what do You say?”

They said this to test Him, in order to have a basis for accusing Him. But Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with His finger.

When they continued to question Him, He straightened up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” And again He bent down and wrote on the ground.

When they heard this, they began to go away one by one, beginning with the older ones, until only Jesus was left, with the woman standing there. Then Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, Lord,” she answered.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no more.” (John 8:3–11)

I realized in that moment it wasn’t just the things that happened to me that God hadn’t condemned me for — it was also the sins I had voluntarily committed throughout my life. In all of it, God was saying, “Then neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more.”

And all of a sudden, my whole understanding of God started shifting. He’s not the father watching over my shoulder for every time I get it wrong. For over twenty years I had served God, believing He was frequently disappointed in me — and in one parking spot, He used the truth of His Word to reveal His heart toward me. He never condemned me. Not once. For the first time in my life, I was getting a deep revelation of grace.

Before I left, I walked around the lake and prayed, and I declared that every lie spoken over me in that place was broken and dead in the name of Jesus — and that from that day on, that spot would be a spot of remembrance: a reminder that I am His beloved.

I’m so thankful to serve such a loving God. The place of the wound became the place of the healing. That’s who our heavenly Father is.

Transformed by Truth

That day started a journey I’m still on. In the years that followed, the Lord and I went to that chained closet together. He turned the light on, and we went through it, took those hurts out one by one. Gone. I can talk about all of it today because I’m not that same person anymore. God has transformed my life, and what used to be my shame is now just part of my testimony.

And that healing touched everything. It changed my picture of God, and when God being harsh turned out to be a lie, the harsh dad started softening too. It changed the way I serve Him, because sons serve differently than slaves (there’s a whole chapter on that ahead). Things I couldn’t break in years of trying just lost their grip as I came to know His grace. And before that weekend was over, the same weekend that started at the dam, I found myself standing at a hotel window looking out over a city I had no idea God would one day call us to. There He gave me the assignment we now live, but I’m saving that story for chapters seventeen and nineteen.

I spent thirty years living out of lies about who I was, and I’ve spent years since watching God replace them, one truth at a time, with what His Word actually says about me. I know what the lies do to a life. And I know what the truth does.

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Introduction: Are You REAL ID Ready?

For years, the Department of Homeland Security ran an advertising campaign with a memorable tagline: Be Your REAL ID Self.

Here’s what it was all about. As of May 7, 2025, any adult flying domestically in the United States or entering certain federal facilities needs a REAL ID–compliant driver’s license or another federally approved form of identification, like a passport. Before that, any state driver’s license would do. You could walk up to airport security with the same everyday license you’d been carrying in your wallet for years and fly anywhere in the country. Not anymore. Without a REAL ID, you can’t go where you want to go.

Spiritually speaking, I believe there are many Christians in exactly that position. They are not spiritually REAL ID ready, because they have never taken the time to put together the proper documentation that shows them who they really are. They love God. They believe in Jesus. But they don’t know their true identity, and because they don’t know it, they can’t go where God is calling them to go.

Standing in Line

This whole thing became very real when we moved to Illinois.

When you move to a new state, you have to transfer your vehicle registrations and get new driver’s licenses. Meagan and I had done this in other states before, and everywhere we had lived previously, you could just walk in, wait in line, and walk out with your new driver’s license. So we didn’t do our research. We didn’t know that in Lake County, Illinois, getting your driver’s license at the Secretary of State facility requires an appointment.

We showed up, and there was a line out the door, down the block — in the rain.

Thankfully, we realized the outdoor line was only for driver’s licenses. To transfer our vehicle titles we could go inside and wait in a different line. So we went in, and while we stood there, we began praying for favor: “Okay, God, we need some favor here, because we would really like to get our driver’s licenses today and not have to come back and do all this again.”

While we were waiting, we struck up a conversation with the security guard standing near the line. We asked some questions. He explained the appointment system. And the more we chatted, the friendlier the conversation got. Before we reached the front of our line, he said, “You know what? I happen to know some people on the driver’s license side. Let me see what I can do to get you in as a walk-in.”

So we finished transferring our titles, paid our taxes, and when we were done, the security guard came up and said, “Come on — follow me.” He walked us right past that line of people and got us in as walk-ins. Thank You, God.

But here’s where things turned. When we got to the counter, the lady helping us said, “We can give you a driver’s license — but we cannot give you a REAL ID driver’s license. You don’t have enough documentation.”

My license would still work. But after May 7, 2025, I wouldn’t be able to use it to board a plane. Then she handed me a two-sided paper, listing all the documentation I would need to bring back in order to get my REAL ID.

The Documentation

I looked at that list, and as I read it, I started thinking about it spiritually. Look at what the government requires, and ask the questions with me:

1. Proof of identity, such as a passport or birth certificate. Spiritually speaking: do you have proof of your true identity in Christ? Could you show it if someone asked?

2. Proof of your Social Security number. Spiritually: do you know the chapter and verse numbers that tell you who you are as a born-again believer? Not a vague sense that “the Bible says something about that somewhere” — the actual documentation.

3. Proof of residency. Spiritually: do you know your true citizenship? Do you know where you actually belong?

4. Legal name-change documentation and proof of signature. Spiritually: do you know what you are now called as a born-again believer? Do you know the names God has given you?

Most Christians I know couldn’t produce that file. They’ve heard sermons about identity. They’ve sung songs about who they are in Christ. But if you asked them to open their Bible and document it — proof of identity, chapter and verse, proof of citizenship, proof of their new name — the folder would be pretty thin.

That’s what this book is for. By the time you finish it, my prayer is that you will have the documentation you need to know your REAL ID, your real identity as a born-again believer. Not confidence borrowed from a worship song or somebody else’s testimony — your own documentation, chapter and verse. Truth you can stand on when everything around you starts to shake.

How to Use This Book

This book has grown out of a sermon series I preached with the same title, and it keeps the shape of that journey: twenty-one chapters, building your file chapter by chapter. You can read it straight through, take a chapter a day for three weeks, or walk through it weekly with a small group (there’s a Leader Guide at the back). The truth in this book first changed my life, and now by the grace of God, I believe if you allow it to, it will also bring transformation to your life.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:2)

A few suggestions as you go:

Read with your Bible open. I quote the Scriptures throughout this book because the Word of God is what transforms us. Sometimes I only quote part of a passage, so don’t stop at what’s on the page: look up the reference, read the whole thing, mark it, and make it yours. Unless noted otherwise, quotations come from the Berean Standard Bible.

Make it your own. This isn’t your typical book, one you read once and then set on the shelf. It’s a Bible study and reference guide for life. Highlight, underline, or mark the places that speak to you the most in each chapter, so you can quickly go back and review those spots as you continue studying that truth throughout the Word of God.

Use the Documentation. At the end of each chapter you’ll find Your Documentation, the key verses that prove that chapter’s identity truth. That’s your file. By the end of the book, you’ll have your spiritual REAL ID paperwork in order, chapter and verse.

Rest at every seventh chapter. The book moves in three sets of seven, and each seventh chapter is built as a Sabbath rest — a place to stop, review your file, and reflect on what you’ve been learning — and the third rest sends you out. That rhythm is deliberate: we don’t change our identity by striving. We change it by resting in the finished work of Christ and receiving by faith what God’s grace has already provided.

There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following the same pattern of disobedience. (Hebrews 4:9–11)

Go deeper online. You’ll find additional resources for this book at YourREALID.com.

Don’t rush past the questions and prayers. Information alone doesn’t transform anyone. This book will do you good only to the degree that you believe what God says about you and act on it. And we’ll talk about why that is in the first chapter.

Because before we can talk about your true identity, we have to settle a bigger question first: the one a Roman governor asked Jesus two thousand years ago, and the one our whole culture is still asking today.

What is truth?

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About the Author

Excerpted from Your REAL ID: Discovering the Truth of Your Identity in Christ. Copyright © 2026 by Timothy A. Howe. All rights reserved.