Through our salvation, Christ has given us a new identity in him. We are no longer strangers or orphans before God; we are sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters and best friends with Christ. And as God’s children, we’ve been given specific gifts for use in his kingdom.
Isn’t that a better status than any identity you can get from your job? “For whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:10 ESV). We no longer labor to gain an identity, because we’ve been given one through Christ.
Our souls have a hard time actually accepting this. We carry around an ingrained sense of unworthiness, a shame that resulted from the fall. The very first experience of shame was over our nakedness. Before the fall, we were naked but not ashamed about it because we felt clothed in the love of God. But afterward we felt naked, and now every soul feels the need to find some garment in which to hide.
We do this in a thousand different ways, but one of the most common is by looking to our work for significance.
One of the best pictures of this is the epic movie Chariots of Fire, which chronicles the rise of two Scottish sprinters at the 1924 Olympics. Eric Liddell was a fully committed man of God and (in the movie) uttered the famous line, “I run to glorify God, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
For the movie’s counter-hero, Harold Abrahams, running wasn’t about pleasing God; it was about proving that he mattered. Running gave him, he said, “10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.”
All of your work will be done for one of these two ends: as an offering to glorify God or as a way to justify yourself. And if your work is really just your 10 lonely seconds—or 70 lonely hours a week—to justify your whole existence, “rest” will be out of the question. You will never be able to rest because you will always be wondering, “Have I done enough? Am I significant enough? Do I matter now?”
The gospel says you have a new identity in Christ. You are a chosen son or daughter of the King of kings, who saved you and had a plan to use you in his kingdom before the foundation of the world—and that is a better identity than any success could give you.
I’ve tried to embrace this through “The Gospel Prayer,” something I wrote years ago for my own walk with God and meditate on continually. The prayer has four phrases, but the first two are about identity:
“In Christ, there is nothing I could do that makes you love me more; nothing I have done that makes you love me less.” “You are all I need for everlasting joy.”
I am chosen, appointed in him. If I have his approval, I don’t need everyone else’s. In fact, I don’t need anyone else’s.
For a long time, I found my identity in how good and successful my work was. The way I felt about myself was always in direct proportion to how good I thought my most recent sermon was. If I preached a bad sermon, my wife, Veronica, could scrape me up off the floor with a spatula on Monday morning. Sunday mornings gave me 45 lonely minutes to justify my existence.
Even if the sermons were okay, how I felt about myself depended on how well the church was doing. If there was a dip in attendance, or some major crisis going on with our members, I was just depressed. It led to constant worry and pressure and irrational fears. I used to pull up to church and wonder if today was the day everybody would decide to go to another church, and I’d be all alone in that building except for my wife, Veronica, sitting on the front row, headphones in, and listening to Matt Chandler (because she thinks he’s funnier anyway).
My identity depended on success, a success I had to create for myself, so even when I was on vacation, I was always wondering, “Have I done enough? I have to get back to it.” Even when I took time off, I wasn’t really at rest, because my soul was still anxious. I was just being overwhelmed and burdened in a new location.
And yet.
“In Christ, there is nothing I could do that makes you love me more; nothing I have done that makes you love me less.”
“You are all I need for everlasting joy.”
The Sabbath that Moses and Joshua instituted in the Old Testament did not provide the ultimate rest—it pointed forward to Jesus, who would himself be our ultimate rest.
Apart from Christ, you will “work” even when you are resting. With Christ, you can rest even while you are working.
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