What Defines You?

Romans 8:38-39- For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I haven’t been on social media in a while. It wasn’t a New Year’s resolution or anything. I just stopped at some point last year.

One of the reasons I decided to back away was the seemingly constant barrage of “encouraging” posts that may have served as a quick pick-me-up when scrolling through a news feed, but were at best pretty shallow, and at worst downright false. Posts like the one that said, “You’re better than they think you are”. Or the one that said something to the effect of “Do what you want. Live your truth.” All I could think was, what if you aren’tbetter than everyone else thinks you are? What if doing what you want was something negative like punching your neighbor because yourtruth was that he/she was a jerk–and what if he felt like he was betterthan you thought he was? It gets tricky, shallow, and false pretty quickly.

I get it, though. We all need encouragement, especially as we come into a New Year. Many of us have goals that we want to accomplish or changes that we want to make. Some of us are looking at career changes or big life decisions and we know we could use someone to give us confidence along the way. One of the reasons that we don’t proceed and accomplish more is that we never start. We delay because of the possibility we might fail. What’s the solution? 

It isn’t convincing ourselves that we won’tfail or convincing ourselves that we’re stronger than failure or any other thing that those self-help posts might try to tell you. It’s foolish and dangerous to think that we are above failure. 

The solution is to understand that failure doesn’t define you. It doesn’t have to stop you or classify who you are. You might fail, but it doesn’t matter, because it won’t change your fundamental identity, so long as your fundamental identity is found in Christ. And that’s the key.

Paul’s message to all of us is that when who we are is rooted in who Christ is, then there is nothing that can come in between us and who we really are in Christ. Not even failure!

I don’t know what you’re setting out to do this year, but don’t let the fear of failure be the reason you didn’t try!