Here’s a helpful book about what it means to find your identity in Christ: Identity Theft edited by Melissa Kruger. It is specifically aimed at women, but I’ve found it helpful as a resource for my sermons on image and identity. There are ten chapters on biblical topics that have to do with the Christian’s identity, including freedom in Christ, being a child of God, being redeemed, reflecting God’s image, and so forth.
The second chapter, written by Hannah Anderson, is a short explanation of what it means to find identity in being image bearers – made in the image of God. At one point Anderson talks about today’s “identity politics.” This is a phrase used to describe a person’s tendency to find identity in social categories:
This term is not limited to government or policy debates but speaks more broadly to how we center our sense of self on one particular attribute of our identity and then define everything else by it.
To be fair, categories themselves are not wrong. We use the categories of occupation, relationships, family, and biography to communicate how we spend our days and the work we have been called to on this earth. The problem comes when we ask these categories to do more than they can do – when we ask them to hold all that we are. After all, if we try to stuff complicated, diverse, fully formed living beings into small, inanimate categories, we shouldn’t be surprised when they feel tight and cramped and begin to suffocate us.
Worse still, when we define ourselves with limited categories, any shift in those categories can destabilize our sense of self. What happens to us when life doesn’t play out in the way we expected – when a marriage ends or never happens in the first place? What happens to us when we’re laid off or fail in the marketplace? What happens to us when motherhood doesn’t come easily?
If we invested our sense of self in something small, temporal, and unstable, we will become small, temporal, and unstable people. When they collapse or come to a natural end (as even good things do), we enter a crisis of identity. For without them, how will we know our sense of purpose, calling, and direction? Life will become meaningless and empty.
Anderson goes on to explain the stability of one’s identity when found in the Lord:
The truth about our core identity is so much richer, more glorious, and more soul satisfying than any category or role we could conceive for ourselves. God…calls us to find ourselves in something more than earthly categories. He calls us to find our identity in Him. (Being made in the image of God [Gen. 1:27] means that) our deepest sense of self must be found in God. Not in categories, not in roles, not in successes or failure. In him. …Because by making us in his image, God did more than simply confirm value on our lives; he also instilled in us a deep sense of purpose and calling. As image bearers of God, we too are called to show forth the glory, power, and might our king. Our deepest sense of purpose and identity is so bound up in this calling that everything about our lives – from the work we do, to the people we love, to the place we live – all somehow connect back to him.
Hannah Anderson, “Reflection: Made in God’s Image” in Identity Theft, edited by Melissa Kruger.
Shane Lems
Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC)
Hammond, WI, 54015
