Have you ever had someone ask you that question? Often the question is asked right after you’ve tried to do something that is reserved for others, perhaps for dignitaries or famous people. Or, maybe you’ve tried to cut into a line, like the football player in the pizza commercial. You’ve tried to claim a privilege that you are not due. Who do you think you are?
In today’s post to his blog Jack’s Winning Words, Pastor Freed used this quote – “The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t believe he’s you.” (Anne Lamott)
It’s not so much that we actually believe that we are God as it is that we tend to try to control things in our lives as if we were God. We try to bend things to our will. As Jack put it in his post, we tend to pervert the Lord’s prayer to read “My will be done.” Who do you think you are?
When God gave humankind free will, it also gave birth to man’s ego and that ego grew to believe that men could control their own destinies. One perversion of thinking that comes out of this ego-driven way of thinking is the confusion over what things are privileges and what things are rights. Men who develop God complexes often believe that everything they are doing is their right. It is that ability to forget who we are and assume privileges as rights that allowed the settlers of America to displace the Native Americans that they found here. The settlers and those who followed claimed that it was their “manifest destiny” to take the land. The Native Americans were asking all along- Who do you think you are?
The same God-like ego allowed the introduction of slavery into America. After all, the slave owners told themselves, these slaves were not men and women like us. There was certainly a lot of precedence in the Bible for slavery and, after all, they were God’s good 
Christians, so it was OK. The slaves had a different view of things and asked, Who do you think you are?
In today’s world, we have many people in business and government who assume the mantle for God to tell us what is good for us. They see nothing wrong with raising the price of a drug by 1,000% or evicting homeless people from the hovels in which they found shelter. They pass laws that they say will prevent us from harming ourselves or push products upon us for conditions that we did not know we had. They see nothing wrong with depleting our natural resources and polluting our environment. They get indignant when we ask, Who do you think you are?
Yet, that is the question that we need to continue to ask- of them and of ourselves. It 
starts with getting your own head straight about who you are and how you relate to God. Once you figure out the part about “Thy will be done”; then you can ask the real questions, “How can I help? What is my role?” First, you must correctly answer the question, “Who do you think you are?” Then you are ready to say to God, “Here I am, send me.”
So, think about it, before you set out on another day, Who do you think you are?
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