Why Your Identity Is Not the Same as Your Role

Don't Let Your Calling Become an Idol

Pastors, missionaries, and other Christian workers are often liable to a unique pitfall in that the thing that tempts them most is a really good gift. It is the temptation to find your identity in your role.

But the truth is that all of our roles are temporary. They are callings that we have for a season. You won’t have that calling forever. If you build your essential sense of who you are into that role, you will create a monstrosity out of it—at some level, it will become idolatrous.The opposite to creating a distortion in your role is anchoring your identity in things that actually relate more intrinsically to who you are as a person, as a man, as a human being.

For example, the first four Beatitudes in Matthew 5 all portray an essential sense of need for help outside of yourself. If a pastor, a missionary, a teacher, a professor, a counselor, or any kind of Christian worker loses that sense of fundamentally being a dependent and in need of mercy—and starts to attach their identity to a role that they play, as good as that role may be—they will start to skew their self-understanding. They will become prone to possessiveness, owning turf, getting defensive, becoming messianic, or any number of particular temptations that stem from getting too hung up on a calling. When this happens, you have lost sight of the essential identity that is supposed to be the heartbeat of your life.

No matter what your calling is—whether as a pastor or as someone who is on his deathbed and in need of pastoring—the question is the same: have you, throughout your life, cultivated a core identity that is anchored in Christ instead of in your role here on earth?

by David Powlison serves as the executive director of the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation and is a contributor to the ESV Men's Devotional Bible.

U2's Bono Understands the Meaning of Christmas

After returning home from a long tour, Bono, the lead singer for U2, returned to Dublin and attended a Christmas Eve service. At some point in that service, Bono grasped the truth at the heart of the Christmas story: in Jesus, God became a human being. With tears streaming down his face, Bono realized:

"The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself by becoming a child born in poverty … and straw, a child, I just thought, "Wow!" Just the poetry … I saw the genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this … Love needs to find a form, intimacy needs to be whispered … Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh."

Bringing the Gospel to Each Other

One of the best ways men can encourage each other with the gospel is simply with honesty and transparency. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about meeting each other as bringers of the gospel — I need the gospel in my brother, my brother needs the gospel in me. In some ways—this might sound odd but it’s true—the gospel in me is stronger than the one in my brother, and the gospel in my brother is stronger than the one in me.

The gospel is meant to be proclaimed, it’s meant to be shared. So we need to meet each other that way. We need to meet each other within the context of our sinfulness and our brokenness, and with the knowledge that neither one of us measures up apart from Christ. In this way, we give each other the freedom to be honest about our own struggles and our own sin, confessing to one another.

There is a healing component to confession like James 5:16 says. When we meet each other in that context, it really provides a great climate for grace to do the powerful work that it does. I am not meeting you as someone who has figured something out that you can’t figure out. I am meeting you as a humble person—as a beggar who has found bread. In the same way, you are meeting me as a beggar who has found bread. We can help each other and rejoice together.

The gospel shared in the context of honesty and transparency is one of the best things that Christian brothers can provide for each other. 

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Jared C. Wilson is the director of content strategy at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, and a contributor to the ESV Men’s Devotional Bible.