Is there a danger in rooting our identities in our calls to salvation? If our calling is real why is it not intended to be our identity? In this message, Pastor David Platt discusses why the identity of the believer is to be found in Christ alone.
- Place Your Identity in Christ
Watch Full Message Of “Defining Calling“
We must always be careful to root our identity in our call to salvation. Here’s why this is important. We’ve got to be careful not to root our identity in a calling to some particular task or some particular job or some particular thing that we’re called to do at a particular point. So yes, that call is real, but at the same time, that’s not intended to be our identity.
Place Your Identity in Christ
Our identity is intended to be found in Christ alone. Because 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, we may not be in that place, we may not be in that job, that may not be there, but 10 billion years from now, we’ll still be in Christ. And so this is the unshakable foundation for our identity forever.
I think about my own life. Just a couple of years ago, I was pastoring a church and loving pastoring that church and would’ve loved to do that for the next 40 years. But the Lord called me to a different role and not pastoring a church in the same way. So it’s a good thing that my identity was not found in being pastor of that particular church because I wouldn’t have known what to do once that was gone.
In the same way that now my identity is not in the role I have in the International Mission Board. We need to root our identity in the fact that God has called us to Himself, and before we’re anything else, we are children of His. We have a security that is more important than anything else this world could ever offer us. The call to salvation, identity in Christ, that’s where we’ve got to start in our understanding of the calling.
David Platt serves as a Lead Pastor for McLean Bible Church. He is also the Founder of Radical, an organization that makes Jesus known among the nations.
David received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and M.Div., Th.M., and Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Some of his published works include Radical, Radical Together, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Don’t Hold Back, and How to Read the Bible.
He lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area with his wife and children.
