It all comes back to Identity.

Nov 8

When I was a young adult I volunteered in AWANA at the church I grew up at. The group I was placed with were the 3rd-6th graders and I loved them. I can still picture those girls’ faces. One of the things I had the privilege of doing was helping to lead the singing. Now, I am not a singer as in I don’t sing well. Every time I get up on stage to speak I fear someone will turn my headset microphone on while I’m singing and my voice, passionate it may be harmonized it is not, will be loud like the worship teams. Although not a singer, I do love to sing and I love, love to worship. Maybe more than I like to do anything else.

If you don’t know about AWANA, it is a program centered around Bible memory. As a parent I have had mixed feelings about AWANA, only because of what I shared in my previous post about my penchant for people pleasing. When my older kids were younger AWANA felt like another place where I had to try really hard to not fail publicly as a parent. Thankfully as the years have gone on the need to control my kids so they make me look good has begun to melt off. I am a work in progress. I would think you are too, although your issues may look different then mine.

When I would lead the singing, we would end with this AWANA chant. I would lead the letter and the girls would answer with the word it stood for and then we ended all together. It went something like this;

“A - Approved

W - Workmen

A - Are

N - Not

A - Ashamed

That’s how you spell it, here’s how you yell it, AWANA!”

I love being loud and excited, I always have, just ask my mom. I think to this day sometimes my excitement for someone or something overwhelms the people who are recipients. And I love working with kids, giving them a space to be big with themselves, allowing permission to yell, be excited and crazy while also offering expectations and stability, I just love it. Kids are often still some of my favorite audiences.

That chant we did was based on the verses in 2 Timothy 2:14-15 where Paul is encouraging Timothy to do his best to present himself as the approved worker he already is. I like how one commentary put it,

“Grace is not opposed to effort. It is only opposed to earning.”

Walking with God is a partnership of him calling us, restoring us, leading us in the plans he has for us and we have to respond in surrender, faith and trust. We don’t do these things to earn approval, we already are approved because he created us and chose to defeat death on the cross so we could know true life while walking with him. We aren’t approved because of anything we do, but because of everything He is. Because of this we are not ashamed, we don’t have to live in shame, then from this place we desire to work in such a way we then present ourselves as what we already are: approved workmen, not ashamed. Even in this God helps us as we daily surrender and walk with him.

I share all this with you today because the last few days I have written about how the way we view ourselves matters in the context of how we are able to love others here and here. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. On the one hand, there are many of us who take great care of ourselves, we have a high view of self which may or may not be rooted in God’s view of us (his view would be a healthy view of self). The other place our high view of self is rooted in is pride which would be an unhealthy view of self.

Whether we are thinking of ourselves too much because we think we are God’s gift to the world or we are thinking of ourselves too much because we think we are horrible and will never be enough, self is the center of the story. When Jesus said we should love our neighbor as we loved ourselves, maybe a good thought for us to chew on is, what if we considered those around us half as much as we consider ourselves? If we did, we might then be on the right path to be the kind of people Jesus is asking us to be.

Yesterday when I wrote about not living for the approval of man, but instead doing things for me I became keenly aware of what I was not trying to say which is, my approval comes from me, because I would be lying. The reason I can be confident in who I am is because I am confident my identity is rooted, not in my high or low view of myself, but in God’s high view of me.

I am already an approved workman who doesn’t have to walk through life ashamed. God who is perfect and holy created me, defeated death so I could walk with him in life, even though he knew how many times I would turn away from him towards things that don’t satisfy and earn me death. He died to defeat death anyways and pursues me for a relationship with him.

My identity is secure in who God is and what he thinks of me even though he is the only one who is in a position to Justly Judge, he has offered me grace and forgiveness. This means I can live confidently in who He has created me to be and what He is asking me to do. Out of this God confidence I am then able to find rest from my striving and competing. This enables me to create spaces of community and equality where we all matter because we are all created in the image of God to do good works set out for us before the foundations of the world were created.

Whether you believe in the three in one God (God the Father, God the Son-Jesus and God the Holy Spirit) I still believe He created you and has a plan for your life should you choose to surrender and follow him. I firmly believe, because of my own experiences, each of us has the opportunity to turn to him and experience true life, satisfaction and security in identity or turn away from him and live a life of emptiness ending in death, now and in eternity.

How we treat ourselves and where we are looking to for approval stems from whose standards we are trying to achieve. Lisa Whittle in her book “The Hard Good” said something like,

“In God’s economy, the only currency is Jesus death on the cross where he defeated death once and for all. “

The one work when it comes to God’s standards is to believe in Him. He approved us when he chose to defeat death for us on the cross, and now we work with him to present ourselves as these approved workmen. But everything we do must flow out of this identity of approved workmen are not ashamed.

When I was in high school I went to a youth conference where one of the breakout speakers handed us a piece of paper about our worth in God’s eyes with the application being we shouldn’t settle for someone treating us as less than our Creator values us as. Many of us are living with our identity placed in a million other places rather than God and who he says we are.

Will you look with me at where our identity lies? Are we living for what people will say of us, if so, let me tell you from personal experience it will only depress and paralyze you. Are we living for a version of worldly success to approve us? The right job, the right house, the right income, the right education, the right list of things that are “right”? These things are a-moral, neither good nor bad, except if your identity and worth are rooted here. Not only will you come up empty but you will also put these expectations of worth on those you encounter. Finding identity in these places will result in a miss in what we all crave; love of God which leads to authentic love and connection with others, fulfilling the two great commandments.

If you aren’t sure about what God says about you, a simple google search with the words “who I am in Christ” will provide a lot of answers. If you find yourself struggling to believe and live in who God says you are, you are not alone. Today, let’s choose together to live confident in our approved, unashamed identity because God says so and then He can live through us to share this life changing truth with others.