“Imagine if you had to spend a bunch of time with someone that you don’t like. You are forced to wake up with them, hang out with them all day, and end your day with them. That is as close as I can describe to how I've experienced ‘depression’. It’s having to spend every day with someone you don’t like. And for this woman, she finally found something that she liked about herself. She was a winner. She was badass. She was at the top of her game. And then she wasn’t. And so what she liked about herself was now gone, and she was left with other things that she still liked, but that she had to wrap her head around to really determine, ‘do I like myself because of these things.’ She has a loving husband, she wants to have his kids, etc. But the thing that she really liked about herself is gone."
The conversation on the radio was about “identity”, but they didn’t know it. The hosts were discussing a famous female fighter who was struggling with what they assumed was depression. I don’t know all of the details, and for the sake of this post they aren’t important. One of the hosts finally weighed in on the situation, and gave his opinion regarding her condition, which is paraphrased above.
If only he had found the word “identity”, he would have been able to sum it up more succinctly. The woman he is referring to had lost her identity, and when it was over–in her words–she “didn’t know who she was anymore”. Not that she didn’t enjoy certain aspects of her life. She still loved her husband. She loved other things that she had done. She loved the sport she played. But she realized that her identity was so wrapped up in that one thing–being a winner; at the top of her game–that when she wasn’t those things anymore, she felt like she didn’t have any self-worth.
Her problem is not unique. Every single person has a primary identity, and secondary identities, and both are important. Our primary identity is the main thing that defines us and gives us a sense of self-worth. Our secondary identities are the things that may also define us and may contribute to our self-worth, but don’t carry the same sense of ultimate fulfillment in our lives.
All of us have a primary identity whether or not we know what it is. When it’s clear, we feel on top of the world; when it’s gone, we’re crushed. For this woman, it was being a winner and at the top of her sport. For others, it might be “daddy’s girl” or “workaholic” or “great athlete” or whatever. Those might suffice for awhile, but it’s nearly inevitable that at some point, those identities run their course and they can’t continue to provide us with the self-worth we had hoped. At some point, a parent might die. Or we might lose a job. And it’s a guarantee that eventually, our body will betray us and no matter how good of an athlete we used to be, we aren’t any longer. When those things happen we end up feeling like we don’t matter anymore; we no longer know who we are. In that moment we are faced with a choice: do I resort to depression? Or do I begin to define myself in some other way? What will be our primary identity going forward?
Having a chief identifier for our self-worth is human nature. We want to define ourselves. We want to stand out. We want to know what gives us worth. In biblical terms, the word we are looking for is “justification”. I know that I’m okay, because this thing–my primary identity–tells me I’m okay. I can point to that, and I like that about myself. The problem is that we try to justify ourselves with a bunch of flimsy objects that are all passing away–at best, they are fit to be secondary identities, but not primary. They can’t stand up under that weight.
When the Bible says that we are justified, this is what it is talking about. It is saying that we are okay, because we have been given a new primary identity. All of the other identities that we have are shifted to the secondary position; they aren’t gone, they aren’t unimportant, but they aren’t the chief thing that makes us who we are. They aren’t the things we point to to say, “we’re okay”. The new identity we’ve been given in Jesus is “son or daughter of God”. We are in Christ. We are new creations. We are adopted. We are redeemed. And a whole host of others descriptors for what we are offered when we begin to see the world through the lens of Jesus and put our confidence in Him.
The best part is that it’s an identity that can never be revoked. Nothing can change it. That’s what gave the early Christians the confidence to literally be plundered of all their possessions (Hebrews 10:32-34) because they understood that their chief identity was not in their “stuff” anymore, or in their reputation. You could take everything from them tomorrow, and they would be fundamentally no different than they were today, because you could never take away who they were in Christ. When Paul says that there is no “greek nor jew, male nor female, slave nor free”, he doesn’t mean that those secondary identities cease, he simply means that they aren’t the primary element that gives us our self-worth. You didn’t actually cease being Jewish or cease being a male. It was just a less important piece of who you were than your sonship in Christ, and not worth causing division over.
In fact, understanding ourselves through that lens of identity in Christ doesn’t diminish our secondary identities at all, it actually enhances them. It enhances them precisely because we are free to lose them. They don’t hold sway over us. We don’t need them to feel okay about ourselves. We can operate in the space of those identities without feeling like someone will crush our very soul if they are taken from us. The woman referenced above can still think of herself as a winner, or a badass, or at the top of her sport, but if/when that identity is challenged, her world isn’t crushed. That’s not really who she was, it was just something that was true about her for a time.
My secondary identities are my marriage, my kids, my occupation (pastor), my reputation (smart guy…hopefully), my gifting (good speaker and writer?), my personality (funny?), and other things. I might be tempted to stake my self-worth on my occupation, for example, but the truth is, I don’t need this occupation or this job to feel okay about myself. I’ll still know who I am when my kids have moved out of the house. And I also don’t need others to think well of me in any of those things to be okay. Because at the end of the day, God not only thinks I’m okay, but he really, really likes me. And that’s more than enough.