Your Identity Explained

Close your eyes for a moment.

Imagine you’re walking through an art gallery.

Painting after painting.

Portrait after portrait.

Then you turn a corner and see one more.

It’s you.

Not a photograph.

A painting that somehow captures who you really are.

What do you see?

Confidence?

Fear?

Success?

Failure?

A smile?

Chains?

Now imagine somebody asks you a simple question:

Who is that person?

How would you answer?

Maybe you’d start with your name.

Your job.

Your nationality.

Your personality.

Husband.

Wife.

Father.

Mother.

Founder.

Designer.

Musician.

Student.

Christian.

They’re all things that can describe us.

But they don’t quite answer the question.

Because take the job away and you’re still you.

Take the achievements away and you’re still you.

Take the possessions away.

The status.

The followers.

Even the roles other people know you for.

Who are you underneath all of that?

If purpose answers what am I here to do?

Identity asks an even deeper question.

Who was I made to be?

And the Bible answers that question almost immediately.

You Were Made as an Image

Right at the beginning of the Bible we read:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27

You were made in the image of God.

Which sounds important.

But what does it actually mean?

Think again about that painting in the gallery.

A great portrait points beyond itself.

You look at it and learn something about the person being painted.

Their character.

Their emotion.

Their presence.

The painting isn’t the person.

It reflects the person.

And I think that’s a helpful way of understanding what it means to be made in God’s image.

We were created to point beyond ourselves towards Him.

To reflect something of His character.

His goodness.

His creativity.

His love.

His justice.

His beauty.

His worth.

Isaiah puts it like this:

Everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.

Isaiah 43:7

Created for His glory.

That doesn’t mean God was somehow lacking glory and created humans to top it up.

We’re not improving God.

We’re displaying Him.

Like thousands of mirrors scattered throughout creation, humanity was designed to reflect its Creator.

To fill the world with pointers back towards Him.

That was our original identity.

Then We Turned the Mirror Around

The problem comes when the image decides it would rather be the subject.

Instead of:

“Look at Him.”

We say:

“Look at me.”

Instead of displaying God’s greatness, beauty and worth, humanity becomes obsessed with displaying its own.

My greatness.

My beauty.

My worth.

My status.

My platform.

My success.

My kingdom.

The mirror turns around.

And that is essentially what happens in the fall of humanity.

Our identity becomes distorted.

We’re still made in God’s image, but instead of living from that identity, we build replacements.

We begin asking everything around us to tell us who we are.

Work.

Money.

Relationships.

Success.

Appearance.

Attention.

Approval.

And those things make terrible foundations for identity because they can all disappear.

If my identity is my success, what happens when I fail?

If my identity is being needed, what happens when nobody needs me?

If my identity is being admired, what happens when people criticise me?

If my identity is my career, who am I when the job ends?

Anything temporary makes a fragile identity.

Which brings us to Jesus.

Jesus Restores What Was Distorted

The Christian story isn’t simply that Jesus came to make bad people behave better.

Something much deeper is happening.

Jesus comes to restore us.

Paul writes:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

2 Corinthians 5:17

A new creation.

And elsewhere:

And have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Colossians 3:10

Notice that phrase.

After the image of its Creator.

Through Jesus, something is being restored.

We’re becoming again what humanity was designed to be.

The Holy Spirit begins reshaping us into people who reflect God.

And our identity becomes rooted in something far stronger than achievement.

We’re adopted.

Chosen.

Loved.

Made new.

Peter writes:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession…

1 Peter 2:9

But the verse doesn’t stop there.

There’s a reason for this restored identity:

…that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

There it is again.

Pointing beyond ourselves.

Displaying Him.

Our restored identity leads us back to our original design.

So What Is Our Identity?

If I had to reduce it down, I’d say this:

You are created by God, in the image of God, restored through Jesus, to reflect God.

That’s deeper than your profession.

Deeper than your personality type.

Deeper than your achievements.

Before you build anything.

Before you earn anything.

Before anybody applauds you.

You belong to God.

And your life becomes a canvas through which something of Him can be seen.

Which raises another question.

How?

How exactly do we glorify God?

Because “glorify God” can sound incredibly religious.

Does it mean singing worship songs all day?

Talking about God constantly?

Trying harder to be good?

Here’s where the original question becomes much more interesting.

Did God create us simply to use us?

Or did He create us to love us?

God Is Not Most Glorified By Miserable Christians

Imagine I buy my wife flowers.

She says:

“Thank you! Why did you get these for me?”

And I reply:

“Because I read in a marriage book that husbands are supposed to buy flowers.”

Romantic.

Technically, I’ve done the right thing.

But somehow I’ve completely ruined it.

Now imagine instead I say:

“I saw these and wanted to get them for you. Making you happy makes me happy.”

Completely different.

Why?

Because delight honours the person.

Or imagine saying to someone you love:

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here with you.”

That honours them far more than:

“I’m here because I’m required to be.”

The same principle applies to our relationship with God.

God isn’t looking for reluctant compliance from people secretly wishing they were somewhere else.

Again and again, Scripture talks about delight, joy, hunger, thirst and treasure.

Delight yourself in the Lord.

Psalm 37:4

Jesus says:

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

Jeremiah describes God as:

The fountain of living waters.

Jeremiah 2:13

And Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to treasure hidden in a field.

A man discovers it and:

Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Matthew 13:44

In his joy.

He gives everything up because he has discovered something better.

That’s very different from miserable self-denial.

He isn’t reluctantly losing everything.

He’s joyfully gaining the treasure.

What Do You Treasure?

This is where identity and desire collide.

Because what we delight in reveals what we believe is valuable.

Paul takes this idea to its extreme.

Facing the possibility of death, he writes that Christ will be honoured in his body whether by life or by death.

Then comes that famous line:

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Philippians 1

How can death possibly be gain?

Think about everything death removes.

Money.

Possessions.

Status.

Career.

Comfort.

Achievements.

Everything gets stripped away.

But Paul essentially says:

Take everything.

If I still have Christ, I have gained.

That tells you something about Paul’s identity.

His deepest treasure wasn’t his circumstances.

It was Jesus.

And this leads to one of the strongest ideas from the talk this article came from:

When we find our deepest satisfaction in God, our lives display His worth.

Why?

Because satisfaction says:

“You are enough.”

Joy says:

“You are valuable.”

Delight says:

“I actually want You.”

God isn’t glorified by us pretending everything else is more satisfying while dutifully choosing Him anyway.

He wants to become our treasure.

But What About Sacrifice?

This doesn’t mean following Jesus always feels comfortable.

Jesus says:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

Mark 8:34

There will be losses.

There will be sacrifice.

There will be moments where obedience costs something.

But Christianity makes a strange claim.

Sometimes we surrender temporary things because we’ve discovered something infinitely more valuable.

Jesus even tells people who are persecuted because of Him to:

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

The Christian pursuit of joy isn’t about maximising comfort today.

It’s about discovering where lasting joy is actually found.

And that changes how we live.

Because if God really is the fountain of living water, we stop desperately asking broken wells to satisfy us.

Career can be enjoyed without becoming our identity.

Money can be stewarded without becoming our security.

Relationships can be treasured without asking another person to tell us we’re valuable.

Success can be celebrated without needing it to prove that we matter.

We become free to enjoy created things without asking them to do the job of the Creator.

The Painting

So let’s return to the gallery.

You walk towards that painting of yourself.

Maybe earlier you saw everything that’s gone wrong.

Your insecurities.

Your failures.

The labels people have given you.

The things you’ve achieved.

The things you haven’t.

But perhaps there’s another way to see the painting.

You weren’t created to be the centre of it.

You were created to be an image.

A reflection.

A pointer.

Created by God.

Made in His image.

Restored through Jesus.

Being renewed by the Holy Spirit.

And increasingly displaying the goodness, beauty and worth of the One who made you.

Paul writes:

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

1 Corinthians 10:31

Whatever you do.

The ordinary things too.

Work.

Parenting.

Building.

Creating.

Serving.

Eating.

Drinking.

Living.

Our entire lives can point somewhere.

The question is where.

Your Identity Explained

You don’t have to invent your identity.

You receive it.

You’re not valuable because you’ve made yourself impressive enough.

You’re valuable because you were created by God.

You’re not defined by everything you’ve done wrong.

In Christ, you’re being made new.

And you don’t glorify God by reluctantly performing for Him.

You glorify Him by increasingly discovering that He really is worth enjoying.

Your identity is not:

“Look how great I am.”

It’s:

“Look how great He is.”

You were designed to reflect Him.

And perhaps one of the greatest transformations that can happen in your life is when following God stops being something you’re merely supposed to do…

and He becomes the One you genuinely want.

Because you were made to give God glory.

And one of the greatest ways you do that is by enjoying Him.