For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

- Ephesians 2:10

This past Sunday we touched on the question of where we find our identity. How do you identify yourself? Imagine you’re at a party and you’re bold enough to walk up and introduce yourself to someone. What do you say about yourself?

Humans naturally draw their identity from a number of places:

• the work we do
• the skillset we carry
• the community we’re a part of
• the things we have.

Each of these things is good and, ultimately, is from God. He gave us our stuff and our family and our skill/talents/abilities and even our work. But these good things, should they become our source for our identity, will ultimately enslave us.

When we put our identity in our work or our skillset or our community or our stuff it eventually undermines our health, our relationships and (catch this) even the thing we have enthroned itself.

Building our lives around anything other than Jesus eventually collapses—destroying the thing we had (wrongly) put at the center and doing collateral damage to everything else.

And, ultimately, this entrenches us deeper into darkness—further from God, further from salvation, further from the rescue and redemption and help that has been offered to us in Jesus.

When God invites us to place our identity in him and not our work, he invites us to experience freedom.

Where are you tempted to draw your identity from? What might it look like to take off those things and move towards wrapping your identity in Jesus?