Who Am I?
I’ve had a secret desire to speak at the NFL Buffalo Bills chapel service. Why the Bills? Josh Allen is their quarterback and he played college football in Laramie, Wyoming where I was a pastor for 21 years. Wyoming is not a football factory like the Ducks or USC. We’re overly proud of our players because there’s so few of them that have success.
And I know what I’d talk about: identity. Perhaps more than the rest of us, professional athletes base their identity on what they do. It’s a “what have you done for me lately” kind of environment. And when the inevitable injury or declining performance comes, what’s left?
In chapter 6, p.118 of his Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, late author and pastor Timothy Keller identifies two components to identity: “First, it consists of a sense of self that is durable…identity also includes a sense of worth, and assessment of your own value.”
I believe the Bible answers the question of Who am I with the answer Whose am I. The fundamental identity combining sense of self and sense of worth are welded together in the nature and work of God.
First, the Bible says we are of infinite worth and value because we’ve been made in God’s image and likeness, Genesis 1:26-27:
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.”
The word ‘make’ in v.26 comes from a word for ‘do’. It implies intentional creative action. The word ‘created’ used twice in v.27 is only used with God as its subject. It too implies personal, intentional, completed, created action.
No matter what you have or haven’t done, your marital status, addictions that haunt you, whatever it is: God has singled you out as of infinite worth and value because you’re created in his image and likeness. Theologians use the term ‘image bearer’ even though our sinful nature has blurred it.
The apostle Paul bolsters this idea in his address to the Athenians in Acts 17:29-31:
“Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Paul, quoting a Greek poet Aratus, affirms what the Bible says is true about us: we are God’s children by creation, that we are formed and fashioned by him as something special.
But secondly and more importantly, by faith in Jesus Christ, we become God’s children through adoption into his family.
Theologian J.I. Packer summarized the message of the Bible in three words: adoption through propitiation. Adoption is self-evident, but propitiation means Someone has made the sacrifice for sin to enable us to enter God’s family through faith. Thus, it’s not a question of Who Am I but Whose I Am.
This identity is entirely God’s doing. To use Keller’s term, it’s an identity that’s durable. This identity also provides an enduring sense of worth because it’s not based on fickle feelings or uneven performance.
And it’s ours by faith:
“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
John 1:12-13 ESV
I’ll probably never speak to a professional sports team. But I know that many of us struggle with identity because we ground it on an unstable foundation. Nevertheless, we have an unshakable foundation in the nature of God and what he has done:
“But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: ‘The Lord knows those who are his,’ and, ‘Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.’”
2 Timothy 2:19 ESV