I can't communicate how much I love to listen to Beautiful Eulogy. Not only because they are a collection of incredibly talented artists, but because they do such a wonderful job speaking truth. Their new album is full of the Gospel, and I've pretty much been listening to it on reply since it came out. Today, the song According to God is resonating. Because for all the talk about "finding your identity in Christ," it is too frequently brushed over and ill-explained. I remember being told to find my identity in Christ without any idea what that meant. So I will attempt to explain it now. At the base of all humanity is the concept of identity. Everything comes down to our identity, and where we place it. Do we define ourselves firstly by our occupation? By our race? By our sexual orientation? By our last name? By the campus organization we are part of? By what we oppose? By the local church we attend? Each of these may make up a part of us, but how do we encompass our entire being? I have read, listened, talked, and written a lot about identity because it is so central to everything. I can connect everything I do to my identity, and how I am defining myself. I'm going to be a little meta here and define the word "definition." I can think of two main explanations. The first, as used in explaining meaning. A definition is something that communicates the meaning, the nature, or the character of a thing. Definition can also be used when thinking about pictures; definition refers to clarity, sharpness, or distinctness. So when talking about defining myself, I'm talking about explaining my meaning, my nature, my character, and my distinctness. This is the essence of who I am. Note that definition is not just the words used to talk about whatever the thing is, but instead reflects the actual meaning, nature, character, distinctness of the thing. That is why defining oneself is so important, and so incredibly dangerous. It is astonishingly easy to accidentally define yourself by something else. I may say with my tongue, "I am defined by Christ," which is indeed what Christians believe and strive to know. But I may find that my actions and character are not reflecting that. And if they aren't, then maybe I'm defining myself a different way. In high school, I was easily defined by fear and shame. Now, if you had asked me how I define myself, I probably would have said something along the lines of "white, female, honor's student, theater person." But none of those things can actually tell me what my character is, or what the meaning of my person is. And even if I tried to define myself by those things, my actions didn't actually reflect whatever standards may or may not be entailed by those titles. My actions and thoughts reflected someone ruled by fear and shame. I was terrified almost all the time. My greatest fear was that someone would discover my greatest shame. It kept me constantly self-presenting the image I thought would make people less suspicious of my secrets and make them like me. I defined myself by what I had done because I allowed it to rule me. And it felt like it kept shifting underneath me. Shifting identities never work; a stable foundation is the only thing that keeps a building standing, roots are what keep trees upright in storms. Your meaning, nature, and character have to be centered around something unchanging in order to be stable. Problem is, humans are anything but stable. We change our definitions of things all of the time. Even relatively distinct concepts like gender/sex or race are defined differently over time. That is the major battle of any civil rights movement--getting the majority to change their definition of the minority. Any identity built on any human-created concept will always shift, will always crack, will always collapse eventually. And since identity is the core of our nature, character, the meaning of who we are, we collapse. When we define ourselves by our job and we are fired, we are a mess. When we define ourselves by the relationships we have with those around us and, for whatever reason, they end, we are inconsolable. We are confused, lost, fearful, angry, bitter, cynical. We all know this is true. We all know that others fail us. We all know that we have failed. That we have done wrong. God is the only immutable, the only one who does not change like shifting shadows. To define yourself by him is to find a stable identity. Your identity in God is this: to find your identity in Christ. I'm not being redundant. According to God, though everything is unstable and we have done wrong, we were worth the death of a perfect man. If he had not done so, we would not have known what perfect looked like. We would not have looked for it, would not have desired God. And therefore we would not have found him, and would have spent eternity in an anguish we didn't understand because we were cut off from the origin of every good and perfect thing. Instead, he showed us what true love is by dying, winning over our hearts by ihs selfless, undeserved love. We worth that because he declared it. Just like we declared diamond are worth incredible wealth despite not being useful. To define ourselves in Christ is to accept his terms of our meaning, our nature, our character. And those will not change. Rachel Fruit and Labor
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