UNLEASHED
“If you knew you wouldn’t fail, what would you attempt to the glory of God?”
I love this question.
It has resonated with me since I first heard it asked at a conference when I was still a wet-behind-the-ears believer, fresh off of my conversion to Jesus on a mountaintop in Colorado in 1980. Yep, do the math. That was a long time ago.
Let’s answer this well because we have only one life to live for our Savior. One life.
Since I wasn’t brought up in a Christian home—or more likely, since I was a big partier who knew I was lost—when I became a Christ-follower, I went “all-in.” The world, as I saw it, was lost. My friends were lost, my baseball teammates were lost, even my dog was lost…everyone was lost. Everyone except me, it seemed. I wanted the world to know the love of God that I had experienced.
I love this question because the conference speaker used it to place me squarely in front of the most significant moment in history, our atonement through the cross of King Jesus. In my mind, I stood before the bruised and bloodied body of the self-crucifying God of love.
I love this question because it brought me into the real world; Jesus’s death was real. Sin is real. Salvation is real. Because these things are real, God has called us to live for his glory, to make a difference in our world.
Yet, I also hate this question.
I hate it because of how it affects me on an emotional level. Yes, it challenges, provokes, and thrills me. But if I’m honest, I’d say it does something else to me as well.
It haunts me.
This question haunts me because it tells me that something is still wrong. Something is still wrong with me. If I knew I wouldn’t fail, I’d attempt all sorts of things I’m not doing now. I’d be bold, I’d be fearless, I’d live as if the God of the universe was for me.
Sigh.
The truth is, my identity as a child of the King has been stunted by my fear of failure. Now, the fear of failure is my thing. Maybe it’s not your thing. Maybe your haunting question is:
Am I lovable?
Am I competent?
Am I enough?
Am I significant?
Am I expendable?
But that haunting question has the same effect, regardless of how it is voiced. We end up living much of life bound by the chains of fear, shame, or feelings of inadequacy.
Are there invisible chains that bind your heart?
It’s as if we instinctively know that we were meant for more but still we walk underneath the grey, overcast skies of mediocrity.
And this struggle seems universal. Almost everyone I know admits to having a haunting question. Almost everyone.
Maybe that should give us a clue about the world we live in. Maybe that should point us to the reality of a sinister assault against who we are; a great battle that rages precisely in the place of our identity.
IMAGO DEI
What exactly does it mean to be made as the Imago Dei, Latin for “the image of God?” Imagine Jesus in the garden of Eden at the dawn of human history. In the center of this garden is a massive slab of marble. By the sweat on his brow and the chisel in his hand, you know that he has been at work for some time, sculpting something truly magnificent. Jesus carefully gives a final tap to the chisel and the masterpiece is finished. It is awesome in the literal sense of the word. “Perfect,” he says, “a statue of God.” Then, Jesus simply breathes upon it, saying, “Awake.” And the statue of God begins to walk and talk.
It is then that you realize the statue is you.
You, yourself, are a living statue of the living God. A work of art. A sculpture of God himself. G.K. Chesterton described humanity as “a statue of God walking about in the garden.”[i] As much as I love towering snow-capped mountains, the serenity of a starlit night sky, and the vibrant green glimmer of a mahi-mahi (especially on my fishing line), only humanity is described in this majestic way. You, my friend, are epic.
You are a one-of-a-kind statue of God.
Yet, we have fallen from this great height—from this status as walking talking statues of God. You know the Bible story. There in the garden, when sin entered the world, we fell from this awe-inspiring glory, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). What theologians call “the fall of humanity” left the walking, talking statue of God marred, broken, and not-so-glorious after all. It’s as if the serpent, through his deception, shattered the Imago Dei, leaving it in pieces—shards of the original sculpture hardly reflecting the glory of God at all. This left the human race feeling quite insecure about how to relate to this great God we’ve sinned against.
But that’s not where our story ends.
Thank God that’s not where our story ends. Because of the cross, God begins to tell us anew who we are now that salvation has come and the broken shards have been pieced back together into “a new self, created after the likeness of God” (Eph. 4:24). God speaks specifically into your identity. It’s as if he knows the insecurities are still there as he reveals:
· You are a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).
· You are a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19).
· You are a work of art (Eph. 2:10).
Or this one; “You are a letter from Christ to the world, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God.” (2 Cor. 3:3). Why would Scripture employ such over-the-top language, such insecurity-destroying imagery, except that we live in a combat zone? There is a war intended to keep you from embracing what God says about you. After all, you are who God says you are.
But we’re prone to forget that. At least I am. I’m prone to forget that something magical happened for me, and to me. “Awake,” the Savior spoke, and out of my slumber, I arose, embraced salvation, and entered God’s great story.
THE WAR FOR OUR IDENTITY
Confession time. Do you struggle to live out who you are in Christ? I do…deeply. I remember the precise moment when I realized, perhaps for the first time, that I had a problem. A very big, very deep, problem. I was sitting in my office, preparing for a sermon, when I read this quote from Madonna that sparked an epiphany.
“I have an iron will, and all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. . . I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being, and then I get to another stage and think I'm mediocre and uninteresting… Again and again. My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that's always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I've become Somebody, I still have to prove I'm Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.”[ii]
In that moment, it was as if the heavens parted, and a peculiar and most unwelcome insight descended upon me. I realized…
I am Madonna.
I shared this with a friend, secretly desiring a scoffing rejection of any resemblance between me and this cultural icon. I didn’t quite get what I was hoping for. “Yep. Totally see it. You and Madonna, cut from the same cloth. It’s uncanny, isn’t it?” Not what I wanted to hear.
How can this be? How is it that those who’ve received God’s grace struggle to remember, to receive, and to revel in that grace? Yet it seems that so many of us struggle right here. Whether it is the need to succeed, feelings of shame or guilt, struggling with people-pleasing, playing small, or acting larger-than-life, we’re all the same.
We are all Madonna.
At least to the extent that we struggle with identity. How is it that someone so wildly successful in the eyes of the world would struggle with how she feels about herself? Then again, how is it that people saved from their sin through the cross of Christ, by a lavish display of love, would struggle to believe…
that God enjoys them?
That he actually delights in them?
How is it that I constantly struggle with how I feel about…me?
As if God is disappointed. As if God—when he looks at me—is not impressed.
Am I alone in this? Am I the only one who feels such a disconnect between what I believe about God’s love and how I feel? What’s wrong?
Maybe nothing.
Identity struggle simply seems to be the human condition ever since the serpent entered the garden and set his sights on us. Again, a war is raging against us knowing who we really are. This is because our status as God’s sons and daughters is meant to fuel our lives—not our personality or looks, not our accomplishments, nor our ambitions. Not our Facebook status or the number of likes we got for our most recent Instagram post.
Our identity is meant to fuel our lives.
Let me say that again. The power for living a fearless and free life of moment-by-moment engagement comes from your identity. Knowing who we are is intended to empower us with the passion, perspective, and hope that comes from being deeply loved by the Father.
But if assaulted by the serpent, you can live as if you are a “normal” human being, “a mere mortal” as C.S. Lewis put it.[iii] If wounded by the enemy, you can become crippled with small thinking and imprisoned within the limits of your abilities. You can end up paralyzed by the perceived obstacles of your weaknesses, playing mental tapes in your mind, over and over again, with thoughts such as…
I am unlovable.
I am unworthy.
I need to be perfect.
I must succeed.
I must have everyone’s approval.
This internal battle snakes its way from the garden through the pages of Scripture until there is war in heaven and at last “the accuser” is thrown down (Rev. 12:10). We live in between these two great events of fall and restoration. Indeed, we live in a war-torn land where our sense of having a glorious identity can be stolen, killed, or destroyed (John 10:10). In a land where the weapons of hell itself— the “flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16)—are aimed at your heart, intended to subvert your identity, to sabotage your sense of self as God’s beloved.
Have you not underestimated the war against you?
Make no mistake about it, there are dark schemes afoot (2 Cor. 2:11), directed against you, precisely targeting who you believe yourself to be. A plot and strategy to rob you of your glory. A “roaring lion roams, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8), and the person he seeks is… you.
My Madonna epiphany revealed a strange disparity between my thoughts of who I am in Christ and my private feelings about myself. I intellectually believed that God loved me, but didn't feel delighted in. I embraced the truth of the Atonement, but its transformative power hadn’t healed my identity. This conflict—which countless Christians have—creates a deadly dissonance within us. It is deadly because it kills our glory, even as it numbs us to its presence. We become spiritually anesthetized, asleep to the story we are in.
We believe big things about God, but live and feel very small things. And what do we do with that?
OUR EXODUS TO FREEDOM
Have you ever considered that perhaps your feelings reveal what you really believe about yourself, about God’s love for you, and about your role in this world? That your emotions are actually messengers from your soul, revelations of what is actually going on down in your heart?
What does the amount of joy you have on a daily basis tell you about the extent that you really “get” what God has done for you?
If you’re hesitant to risk failing, what does that say about how grounded you actually are in God’s delighting love and grace?
These are questions of identity, aren’t they? Do these questions hit home with you as they do for me?
Why can’t we just believe what the Bible says and be fixed? Isn’t that would you’ve been taught? Just learn your new identity; learn who you are in Christ, and the grey, overcast skies of mediocrity will be replaced by the truth statements in your mind. I am redeemed. I am a new creation. I am more than a conqueror. I am…still feeling an emptiness within me.
Am I allowed to be that honest?
If you’re like me, you’ve bought into Jesus. There is something alluring about his words, something captivating about his life; his intimate engagement with people even in the madness of busyness, his compassion for those who are hurting, his touch of the untouchables. And at times, when you think about the cross, you’re undone. You’re simply unraveled by the self-sacrifice, the mystery, the beauty of God.
And yet, there seems to be something missing. For all the Bible studies you’ve attended, all the sermons you’ve heard preached, it can feel like all the talk about transformation is…overstated. It seems that your growth is oh-so-slow, that it’s a battle, and at times you feel stuck. Not that you would ever argue with Jesus when he said, “…if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). It’s just that you don’t feel…you know…free indeed. Maybe free sort of. I wish he’d said that.
“Follow Me! I promise you meh. I will even die to make you…somewhat-but-not-really free.”
It’s as if there’s some part of you that hasn’t been reached yet. There’s that nagging internal conflict between what you believe and how you feel. That untouched place within.
Let’s face it, we all struggle with this new identity. And God knows we struggle. The reason we struggle, the reason we’re not free, is that we forget who we are.
So, God told a story. A story of slavery, of love, of deliverance.
And that story—the exodus—tells us our story. Our story of being enslaved to stuff that destroys who we are. Our story of God sending us a great deliverer to rescue us. Our story of facing life difficulties that reveal, confront, and heal our identity. Yep, that’s right there in the exodus story, the meta-narrative of Scripture.
It’s our exodus to freedom.
In the exodus, we see that our identity is formed by a story and for a relationship. The Scriptures tell us where we are—in a great story, of a great deliverance, by a great God. They also tell us who we are—beloved sons and daughters of the Father—called into freedom and joy and delight by the God of the universe.
As we’ll see, the exodus story from the Old Testament is the deliverance God accomplished then to inform us about our salvation and wilderness experiences now. It’s not merely an ancient story about slavery, and deliverance, and walking across a desert to the Promised Land. It’s not merely about Pharaoh and Moses, the ten plagues, and the Ten Commandments.
It’s about us.
It’s a roadmap for our lives, an app to guide us to our destination. This story is meant to take us from A to Z. And get this:
It’s all about identity.
What? Wait. No one told me that. Did I miss a class? You’re telling me that this story will help me find freedom?
That’s right. This story—the exodus—is about a nation of people who struggled mightily with their self-understanding, and how God lovingly guided them in the process of becoming a new version of themselves—a 2.0 version. At least some of them became 2.0.
But even those who did were not immediately changed by the good news that God loved them. How they felt and thought and acted wasn’t healed simply by being delivered.
This process took time.
This process required difficulty and testing and hardships.
All the things we like to avoid.
Spoiler alert—part of what you’ve been told about who you are in Christ simply isn’t true. Or maybe it is true, it’s just incomplete. Yes, you are a new creation in Jesus, but honestly, learning a few Bible verses is simply not going to heal the insecurities of your soul.
If no one has spoken honestly with you about this internal conflict, don’t be alarmed. It’s easier to speak of the benefits of salvation than it is to admit that sometimes I still feel empty. Sometimes I feel very alone in this fallen world where life just doesn’t make sense.
That’s ok.
Nothing’s wrong.
Salvation is still real. But allowing that reality to sink into your soul is something more. The gospel bringing you forgiveness and eternal life is one thing. The gospel getting down deep, into the core of who you are—into your identity—is another thing altogether.
Let me say that again; the gospel getting into the core of who you are is what the journey is all about. And that changes the question to this:
“Will you allow Me to redefine you?”
It’s unlikely that anyone told you that this identity stuff is pretty deeply rooted, at least for some of us. Transforming it will take time, a process, a story. But take heart! The Jesus that you find alluring and captivating is also dangerous, but in the best of ways. If you let him, he will lead you into circumstances that will not only mess with your heart, but will re-shape you into the real you, the person you’re meant to become.
This holy reconstruction may be difficult, perhaps incredibly so. But if your identity begins to truly grip you—what you feel, say, and do—I promise it will be beautiful. In this war that we call life, the Father knows precisely what we need to become real, to become authentic, to heal the dissonance, to become free indeed.
Maybe this is where we’re stuck. It’s just that the wounding is deep, and the process of connecting the dots from the cross of Jesus to our hearts requires a journey.
To give you a picture of what free indeed looks like in modern life, let me tell you a story about my son, Caleb.
CHEST PUMP
My wife and I are blessed with three beautiful daughters, enabling me to attain the greatly coveted title, “The X-Man.” (My friends just weren’t sure I had a Y-chromosome to pass on.) However, our fourth child was a boy, causing me to lose my coveted title. And one of my favorite stories comes from Caleb’s adventures in soccer. As a “non-biased” dad, I could tell he was probably the best player on the team. He had a strong kick, good footwork, and excellent field awareness. This season was gonna be fun!...
Except the first game wasn’t. I stood on the sidelines, with feelings of anger and embarrassment as my son acted like a child. Yes, yes, he was only eight, but “For goodness’ sake, Caleb, get your head in the game and stop acting like…like…a boy!” Did I really just say that out loud? (And yes, my words are somewhat shaming for me to acknowledge). Now, to the uninitiated, we parent-types can often discern what is going on in the heart of a child, not because we’ve gained some kind of magical wisdom, but simply because that’s what we used to do. Or still do.
My son was scared. I could tell. I’ve been there myself many times. He was covering it up pretty well, but he was afraid to fail, and consequently, wasn’t putting out all that much on the soccer field. I wasn’t about to let my son’s fear control him the way my fears have controlled me. He needed help. He needed Dad.
Over the next few weeks, we worked hard. We focused on corner kicks, breakaways, and shooting on goal, but mostly on simply believing he could do it. I asked him, time and time again, to “man up,” to play without fear of what could go wrong. We even developed a secret signal, a fist pump to the chest that meant, “I’m going for it!”
Game time finally arrived, and he got his first goal of the season. The next game, he scored twice, then three times in the next. His confidence was soaring.
At half-time of the following game, his team was getting shut out, 1-0, when I saw the look of fear in Caleb again. I walked over to him, gazed into his eight-year-old eyes, and I asked, “Son, do you know what your team needs? They need for you to go crazy out there! For you to leave it all on the field, no fear, no holding back. You have what it takes.”
He looked up at me with eyes of faith that his father was telling him the truth and just nodded. Then, as he lined up for the start of the second half—get this—he looked over at me...and gave me the secret signal. With the whistle about to blow to start the second half, he flashed a freedom-filled smile at his dad and gave a fist pump to the chest. It was awesome! Then the explosion happened. He scored with his right foot. Then with his left. He scored off of a throw-in from the sidelines and then on a breakaway. He scored six times in twenty minutes. Parents looked at me in awe and asked, “What did you feed your boy for breakfast?”
I walked off the field with my arm around my son, telling him how proud I was of him, and then I heard it—the whisper of the God who has claimed me as his own— “This is what I am doing in your life, too,” the Voice said. “I want you to live unleashed!”
This could be you.
You could be unleashed from fear, guilt, shame and whatever else holds you back from living “free indeed.”
GOD DELIGHTS IN HIS KIDS
God wrote a story to help you get unleashed. That story, the epic tale of the exodus, is the record of the spiritual journey of the people of Israel out of slavery to Egypt and into freedom. It is a story about love and rescue and adventure and identity. It is a story about the importance of remembering who you are.
To phrase this differently, your roadmap awaits you. It’s been just sitting there, hidden in plain sight, waiting for you to discover it.
I wrote this book with the intention of revealing how our spiritual journey is like their spiritual journey. Though God’s people felt forgotten, and all of their circumstances told them they were forgotten, they were actually smack dab in the middle of a great story, of a great deliverance, by a great God. But this book is meant to be more than just a biblical study of some ancient people group and their struggle. This book is a confession. It is a chronicle of my own heart’s journey, my own battle to emerge into what Christ has done for me and my identity.
It is about my struggles, my failings, my sins. And it is about my healing, recovery, and trust, as God continues to transform my internal conflict.
Ultimately, this is an invitation to go deeper into your own heart, and deeper into God. It is about
your identity
and about your flourishing
and about becoming the best you possible.
God rescued the people of Israel because he loved them. And he called them to a great purpose, leading them to walk across a desert to the Promised Land, a place where they would flourish. An abundant life was promised to them, just as Jesus promised it to us. But they doubted and forgot and failed, because they did not know who they were, just like we do. As a result, they were unable to live with the secure, grounded, daring, reckless faith that comes with being deeply loved.
God delights in his kids.
Embracing that statement just might be the most liberating thing in the world.
It’s time for us, the walking, talking statues of God to learn who we are. It’s time for a chest pump. It’s time to go to war for the freedom of our own hearts. It’s time to move into what Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Fully alive? I wonder what that would look like?
If only we could be like my son in this story. If only we could look up into the eyes of the Father, hear what he declares over us to be true, and respond with a chest pump that says, “Let’s go.”
This book is all about remembering who we truly are so we can live in radical freedom. When we do, we’ll live unleashed, walking alongside the Father, as we engage in the great battle that we call life.
I invite you to take on this journey with me. A journey of introspection about the extent that we’ve allowed the love of God to transform our identities. A journey I trust will focus our hearts upon the cross of Christ. A journey to challenge us to live unleashed for the King of kings.
It’s half time, and you’re the one lined up at midfield. If you knew you wouldn’t fail, what would you attempt to the glory of God?
Identity Rehab
1. “God delights in his kids. Embracing that statement just might be the most liberating thing in the world.” What is your emotional response to this, and what might that tell you about your identity?
2. Do you recognize a dissonance between what you believe about God and yourself, and what you feel about God and yourself? Would you describe yourself more as “free, sort of” or “free indeed?”
3. In what ways do you think your own identity as a child of God has been stolen, killed, or destroyed (John 10:10)? What would you say are your haunting questions?
4. “Our identity as a child of God is intended to empower us with the passion, perspective, and hope that comes from being deeply loved by the Father.” How does this affect you? Do you feel expectant and hopeful? Or wary, even skeptical?
5. What might it look like for you personally to become unleashed?
[i] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1908), 329.
[ii] Hirshberg, Lynn. The Misfit. Vanity Fair, April 1991, 167.
[iii] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 1949), 46.
