Will We Lose Our Identities in Heaven?

No, but this seems to concern some believers. Author Randy Alcorn, in his book Heaven, deals with this question.

A man wrote me expressing his fear of losing his identity in Heaven: “Will being like Jesus mean the obliteration of self?” He was afraid that we’d all be alike, that he and his treasured friends would lose their distinguishing traits and eccentricities that make them special.

But he needn’t worry. We can all be like Jesus in character yet remain very different from each other in personality. Distinctiveness is God’s creation, not Satan’s. What makes us unique will survive. In fact, much of our uniqueness may be uncovered for the first time.

At the very end of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, “Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints. . . . Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him , and with Him everything else thrown in.”

There is a profound lesson here. The more like Christ we become, or the more we approach the good, the true, and the beautiful, the more unique, fascinating, and special we become. The farther away we move from Christ, or the more we move toward the evil, the false, and the ugly, the more dull and monotonous we become.

God brings out the best in us, and so we can never reach our full, glorious potential away from Him.