How (and How Not) to Find Identity in Your Work
Finding (the Right) Identity in Our Work
Is your life of work balanced appropriately? Would those closest to you define you as a workaholic? How often do you feel torn between the demands of career, the responsibilities of family, and the call to serve the church actively? Could it be that you are asking your job to do for you what it cannot do?1
Your life could be simplified to a triad of three inescapable dimensions of calling: relationships, work, and God. Or, to phrase it another way, you have three intersecting, overlapping domains of godly living: the social domain, the labor domain, and the spiritual domain (although everything is spiritual). Visualize these three areas as overlapping circles, with each circle connecting to the other two. Each of these is a significant expression of how God calls every one of us to live, and to a certain extent none of them is more important than the other since each exists because of divine calling.
It sounds simple enough, right? Yet you have a limited amount of time to devote to these domains—24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. So, if one circle expands over a longer duration of time, it can do so only because you have contracted another circle. Sometimes, without my even realizing it, the demands of work gradually begin to gobble up more and more of my time, and, as they do—because I do not have limitless time—I am left with less time for my family. Likewise, as your commitment to career expands, you will inevitably have little time left to do anything but casually attend church. Almost no one would say, at least publicly, “Work is a greater priority to me than family, so I am going to spend less time investing in my family.” Few believers would declare (or even believe) that career is more important than their relationship with God and his people, yet many of us actively live in this way. It is impossible for one area of my calling to expand without its causing other areas of equally important calling to contract. Ask yourself, and invite others to answer this for you: Has my domain of work expanded to the point that it has caused a harmful contraction of my time with my family and my pursuit of God?
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Career as an Identity
The question of these three domains’ expanding and contracting is a necessary one, but, as helpful as it may be for rearranging schedules and reallocating time, this question does not get at causality—that is, at the heart motivation that explains why so many of us are workaholics. Why are so many of us so driven to an unhealthy degree when it comes to our careers? Why are so many of us invested in our job to the detriment of family and church?
In a word: identity. I do not think that the workaholics among us have first a priority or a scheduling problem; they have an identity problem, which results in a relationally and spiritually detrimental schedule problem. Only a secure identity in Christ can keep work in its rightful place.
Identity in Christ has freed me from looking for identity anywhere else. I am what I am because of who Jesus is for me by grace. In his awesome glory I really do find everything I need. I do not have to look elsewhere for the spiritual resources I need for living. I do not have to hunt elsewhere for meaning and purpose for my life. I do not have to look elsewhere to define who I am. I do not have to look elsewhere to measure my potential. I do not have to look elsewhere to find that inner sense of peace and well-being. Why? Because I have found all those things in him. Identity in Christ liberates me from a life-distorting bondage to identity in anything else.
Identity amnesia will leave you with an identity vacuum that you will fill with something in your life. If you forget who God is, you will not know who you are as his child, and you will subsequently look horizontally for what you have already been given vertically. Naturally, because work and career form such a huge and significant dimension of our lives, it becomes very tempting for us to look for our identity in those places. And, when you look to work for your identity, you will find it very hard to resist its challenges, demands, and promises of reward.
The Horizontal Identities of Work
Work and career, status and success promise multiple false identities to you. I want to highlight two. First, “I am what I have accomplished.” Success makes you feel able and competent. A trail of achievement seems to make a statement about who you are and what you are able to do. We generally celebrate successful people as our personal and cultural heroes. We tend to see success as always a good thing. But what does the true gospel say? “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9).
God’s grace offers you what you did not earn and forgives you for the wrongs you actually did. Grace radically alters your identity and your hope. Your identity is not in what you have achieved or in what the people around you think of what you have achieved. No, as a result of grace, your identity is rooted in the achievements of another. Your hope is based not on how well you are doing but on what Jesus has done for you.
When success becomes your personal savior—that is, the place where you seek life—you can scarcely harness your drive for it. If you look to achievement to feel good about your life, to feel secure, or to have a life of meaning and purpose, then you will be dissatisfied with today’s success. The buzz of today’s success will fade, and you will need the next success to keep you going, and then another success to follow that. You will be looking incessantly for the next mountain to conquer. Without your realizing it, success will have morphed from something you enjoy to something you cannot live without. Your heart that once desired success will now become ruled by it. Because of this you will tend to go where success leads you, willing to invest whatever time, energy, and relationships you need to invest in order to get it. Only when identity in Christ has defined you as his child and given you a lasting and secure identity will you be able to keep something like a natural hunger for success in its proper place.
The second false identity I want to highlight is “I am the size of the pile of stuff I have accumulated.” Because God has given us the capacity to recognize and enjoy beauty, it is tempting to identify the “good life” as a life filled with beautiful things, which is often the result of a successful career and high-earning job. Of course, the desire for beauty and possessions is not evil in itself. In fact, when I appreciate beauty, I mirror the Creator, whose artistic hand is the source of everything beautiful. I am designed to enjoy beautiful things, but I must not attach my identity to how many of those things I possess, and I must not let my heart be ruled by them. If you have attached your identity to material possessions and physical affluence, you will spend the bulk of your waking hours seeking to gain them, maintain them, use them, enjoy them, and keep them. And, because you are constantly working to increase and maintain your pile of stuff, other areas of your life will suffer. Only when you are living securely out of your identity as a child of the one who created and owns everything will you be able to rest as his child in the knowledge that he will faithfully provide every good thing that you need. And only when your heart is satisfied in him can you be freed from looking for spiritual satisfaction in the fleeting pleasures of the physical world. When you are satisfied in him, you will be liberated from working constantly in order to possess more of what you hope will form your identity.
Identity in Christ has freed me from looking for identity anywhere else. I am what I am because of who Jesus is for me by grace.
A Career Shaped by Vertical Identity
A security in your vertical identity in Christ, on the other hand, will teach you eternal truths that help you put and keep work and career in their proper place.
The gifts that you employ and the time that you invest in your work come from and belong to God.
Work is the regular place where God calls you to be a good steward of the gifts, opportunities, and abilities he has given you. Since God has given you these gifts, you must exercise them in submission to his will and for the sake of his glory. God has also created you to live in and for a certain time and place. He is the only being in the universe who exists in timelessness, which means we must do all he has called us to do within the limits of the time he has given us. How can you use these gifts and time in your work in a way that recognizes God as the giver and submits to the commands, values, and principles of his Word?
You are called to live for something bigger than yourself.
By grace God has connected me to things that are huge and eternal. My life is enormously bigger than merely my life. I am not at the center of things. What I want and what I own on earth should not be the principal motivators of what I do and how I spend my time.
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matt. 6:19–21)
The choices and investment I make in my world of work must always submit to the reality that I have been called to the service of an eternal kingdom that is not my own. Success is not about how well I have been able to build my own little kingdom but about the degree to which I have done all I have done in the service of a greater King.
Success is not about accruing power but about resting in God’s power.
The most successful person is the person who knows his place and humbly submits all that he has and all that he does to the power of one greater than himself. Success is not about using my world of work to create personal power or control. Success is about recognizing God’s control and using my gifts for his purpose, accepting the power that comes my way as a stewardship from him. Success also means recognizing that whatever power I have is not independent power to use however I wish to use it. All human power is representative power. God grants me this power and calls me to use it in a way that is consistent with the values he makes clear in his Word.
Conclusion
Let us return to the original illustration of those three overlapping circles. God is too wise and loving to call you to one area of responsibility in a way that will necessitate your being irresponsible in another. God will never call me to a career that makes biblical commitments to my family and my church impossible. If it seems impossible for me to balance my life of work with doing that which God calls me to do in my family and church life, I am in such a situation not because God’s calls are unmanageable but because I am seeking to get things out of work that I should not. We can never blame God for the consequences of our bad choices.
Many of our work lives are out of balance, so it is important for us to remember that this is not a priorities problem but an identity problem. Identity in Christ allows us to rest in the security that we will find everything we need in him. By grace our life of work can now be an expression of rest and not worry. Our lives of work can stop being driven by “I have got to have (fill in the blank)” and can now be shaped by “Look at the amazing things we have been given.” Rather than being driven by anxious need, our work can now be shaped by worshipful gratitude. Yes, you are committed to work because God calls you to labor, but as you work you can rest in his covenantal commitment to meet every one of your needs.
Notes:
- This is adapted from Paul David Tripp, Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 169–81; New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), November 10 entry.
This article is adapted from Everyday Gospel: A Daily Devotional Connecting Scripture to All of Life by Paul David Tripp.
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