Who Am I?

Who Am I?

Our Value As Created Ones

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. - Matthew 11:29

The printing press, the optical lens, the combustion engine, the Copernican model of a sun-centered solar system. What do these have in common?  This sounds like the start of a joke...but the straight answer is that they are all highly valuable inventions.  

It is at times helpful to think of people, too, as inventions.  You were invented by Someone.  A personal mind thought you up (similar to the way Gutenberg thought up the printing press) and decided it was a good idea to actualize what it thought.  That is how it came to be that you are what you are.

Moreover, what’s unique about you as an invention is that you are also an inventor. God created you a sub-creator.  God’s human creations, being made in His likeness, in turn, create.  After man is made in God’s likeness in the garden, one of his first actions is to invent names for the fauna (Genesis 2:20).

But there is something very undemocratic about human inventions that sets them apart from the humans God invents— human inventions are not all created equal.   For the famished, there is a glaring difference in utility between the single-egg sized pan and a 17-inch cast iron skillet.   Not all inventions are good.   This is not only true of man’s material inventions, but also man’s mental inventions:  man can invent a valuableness or an identity for his life that doesn’t fit with God’s design or identity for his life.

C.S. Lewis wrote, in That Hideous Strength, “suppose you are a thing after all— a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what you had decided to regard as your true self...” (Adjusted to fit the second personal singular).  Lewis is gesturing toward the biblically-rooted notion that we are, fundamentally, ultimately, and most importantly, what God says we are, not what we say or think we are (1 Cor. 5:7).

In a contextually practical sense that is the definition of faith— trusting what Another tells us about ourselves. And this is another way of saying that faith is learning from Christ and resting in what we learn.

The scriptures say value is intrinsic to you, apart from what you do or can do (and most likely despite it), because it is His good pleasure to love you.  Your value is in the fact that you are loved by your Inventor (Eph. 2:4)— No questions asked and no conditions met.

Because our value starts here— in the unmerited, undeserving love the Father has for his inventions— our value cannot be reversed or diminished by any mistake we make. Neither can it be added to for that matter, anymore than a drop of condensation on your glass of iced tea can add to the body of the Noahic flood. Your value is not ultimately determined by your ability or inability; by your success or failure; by your strengths or your weaknesses, but by God’s good pleasure in you made possible by Jesus’ blood (Ephesians 2:13-14).

We need a Copernican Revolution in the way we value ourselves.  Let us put off the habit of inventing our own identities and valuableness, and trust in what the loving Inventor declares about us, that we may find rest.  You and I are valuable because we are loved.

Thoughts for Reflection

How have you invented novel valuableness about who you are or how you are to be? How does Scripture address that perspective on value in particular?

How does this concept of your intrinsic value through God’s love for you in Christ relate to Galatians 1:10? 

Is there a sense in which those in Christ can still win or lose God’s approval?  How?  Are there varying layers of God’s approval? Tease this out.

All Saints Contributor - Kaidon Hempton