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As a sociology major in both undergraduate and graduate school, I have always been fascinated with human-to-human interaction. I had a communications professor who told me that once she wandered around the Cornell University campus and when people asked her how she was, she would reply, “I’m dead” – just to see who would respond. Most people said, “That’s nice. Well, see you around.” Along those same lines, I’ve always been intrigued by how we begin conversations with people we’ve never met before. Isn’t it interesting that when we meet someone new, we almost always begin the conversation by asking “What do you do?” We want to know what a person does because we somehow think that knowing the occupation a person holds will tell us about who that person is.
But pause to think about it – how many of us have held jobs that just touch the surface of describing who we truly are? When I worked in Pennsylvania in student affairs at Penn College, saying that I was ‘a residence life coordinator’ would tell you very little about what I valued, how I spent my time, or who God was to me. And for many people, a job is just a way to pay the bills, so to attempt to define those people by knowing what they do from 9-to-5 would be almost completely missing the mark.
Where do we find our worth and identity? Certainly many them in the friends they have, in the jobs they hold, in the grades they score, or in the social circles where they might be found. Let me be direct here in stating that the language of success is rather limited in the Bible. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, but much more prevalent are the languages of faithfulness and relationship. People who are described in the Bible as having achieved much are often described in terms of how well they loved God or how true they were to His calling on their lives. You’ll also read a lot of language related to ‘son-ship’ – the idea that we are defined by our relationship to our Heavenly Father. We are called children, chosen, beloved, and the list goes on. For a great list of who we are in Christ, just hop on Google and type in “who I am in Christ”, and you’ll find a list of the verses that tell us about our relationship to God.
The reason we must grasp the centrality of identity is that self-esteem defined by anything other than Christ will eventually fail us. We will live from experience-to-experience, standing on the edge of the cliff of failure, wondering if one day we might fall off and be seen as not good enough. If you are a Christian, you are called to work hard and live well for Christ’s glory, but not to do so in order to be loved by Him – He already loves us without end.
What might it look like if you were so grounded in your identity in Christ that all the other things in life for which so many strive became worthwhile but not worth-giving? A life that has found self-esteem and identity in Christ is one filled with “peace that passes all understanding” (Phil. 4).
But pause to think about it – how many of us have held jobs that just touch the surface of describing who we truly are? When I worked in Pennsylvania in student affairs at Penn College, saying that I was ‘a residence life coordinator’ would tell you very little about what I valued, how I spent my time, or who God was to me. And for many people, a job is just a way to pay the bills, so to attempt to define those people by knowing what they do from 9-to-5 would be almost completely missing the mark.
Where do we find our worth and identity? Certainly many them in the friends they have, in the jobs they hold, in the grades they score, or in the social circles where they might be found. Let me be direct here in stating that the language of success is rather limited in the Bible. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, but much more prevalent are the languages of faithfulness and relationship. People who are described in the Bible as having achieved much are often described in terms of how well they loved God or how true they were to His calling on their lives. You’ll also read a lot of language related to ‘son-ship’ – the idea that we are defined by our relationship to our Heavenly Father. We are called children, chosen, beloved, and the list goes on. For a great list of who we are in Christ, just hop on Google and type in “who I am in Christ”, and you’ll find a list of the verses that tell us about our relationship to God.
The reason we must grasp the centrality of identity is that self-esteem defined by anything other than Christ will eventually fail us. We will live from experience-to-experience, standing on the edge of the cliff of failure, wondering if one day we might fall off and be seen as not good enough. If you are a Christian, you are called to work hard and live well for Christ’s glory, but not to do so in order to be loved by Him – He already loves us without end.
What might it look like if you were so grounded in your identity in Christ that all the other things in life for which so many strive became worthwhile but not worth-giving? A life that has found self-esteem and identity in Christ is one filled with “peace that passes all understanding” (Phil. 4).
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