Who are you? What defines you? If you are anything like me, you can easily find your identity in God-given roles. While these are from God, they shouldn’t be what ultimately defines us. Don’t get me wrong, we should be great friends, spouses, parents, and take pride in whatever work the Lord has entrusted us with. However, finding our identity in anything other than Christ immediately sets us up for things like disappointment, striving, and shame. If our job is our identity, we can easily worship success and money, or we can feel like a failure if we don’t get the promotion we’ve been longing for. The same goes for any other role that we may find ourselves in.
How do we battle this? Let our identity as a child of God be where we draw from. Galatians 2:20 is an incredible reminder that to be “in Christ” is to receive a new identity. Living our lives in light of this will change our perspective and give us the power and ability we need to do all the things the Lord has called us to do. When we mess up as parents, we know we are ultimately forgiven and can repent and move forward. When we don’t get the job we strived for or don’t perform how we wanted to, we know our worth isn’t found in a title or career but in Christ. Even if every ability we had was stripped from us, we can know that we have tremendous worth and value because of who we belong to.