ODJ: who are you?
June 24, 2011
He said, “I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!” (v.21).
READ: Job 1:1-22
Charles Taylor has a big ego. The former president of Liberia once attended an African conference in full combat gear, riding into town as his armed bodyguards jogged alongside his car. When he was accused of being a gunrunner and diamond smuggler, Taylor shamelessly addressed his people clothed in angelic white. But Taylor’s atrocities finally caught up with him and he was put on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Alone, separated from companions, cash, and clout, Taylor now confronts the question of his identity. Who is he really?
Many of us know the feeling. From the moment we’re born, we slowly accumulate the people, possessions, and skills that form our identity. We’re someone’s child and sibling, and we eventually become someone’s friend, spouse, parent, and employee. But then we’re laid off from work or we lose a loved one through death or divorce, and we’re not sure who we are anymore.
Such tragic losses are a prelude to the main event. Someday we will die, and then “we must all stand before Christ to be judged” (2 Corinthians 5:10). Stripped of everything that shaped our identity, the question of the moment will be, “Who are you?”
The only answer that will do, as the Heidelberg Catechism declares, is that “I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” The only relationship that death can’t sever is the most important one. Paul exclaimed that “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person” (2 Cor. 5:17), and we who “are united with Christ” receive “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:3).
When Jesus asks who you are, reply that you find yourself in Him.
—Mike Wittmer
What does it mean to find your identity in Jesus? How can your identity in Him steady you when your world is rocked by unemployment, divorce, death?
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