Identity in a Machine Age: Rooted in Christ

It's rarely the stuff that's, like, so terrible that we're going, I'm gonna put my entire life on that. Maybe it happens, but it's a slide and we see it as one. But when we have really good things, it's so easy for us to let those good things become ultimate, and when we do, they go from good to bad. And so here's the question I want us to think about. What do you do when the identity that you've built collapses? Because if you built it, it will collapse. Every misplaced identity eventually meets an expiration date. And the question is not whether your identity will crash. It's what's underneath your false identity when it does. [00:43:00] (36 seconds)  #MisplacedIdentity

My calling is real. It matters. It's gonna change the world. The things that I'm doing are really, really significant. And here's the thing, I'm not disagreeing with you. You're probably right. I'm not telling you to stop building. I'm not telling you to stop making a difference. I'm telling you that the building was never supposed to become the builder. The work in your life was never supposed to become the worker. Elijah's story is here to remind us that even good things become bad when we make them ultimate. And we are so good at making good things ultimate in our life. [00:42:32] (29 seconds)  #CallingNotIdentity

And so, God, he doesn't send Elijah a sermon. He doesn't send him a strategic plan. He doesn't send him some printed directions for what's next. Now this is what we see happen next. It says, and he lay down and slept under a broom tree, and behold, an angel touched him and said, arise and eat. And he looked and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And then it says, and he ate and drank and lay down again. This is nap number two. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, arise and eat for the journey is too great for you. In other words, you can't do this alone. [00:44:55] (42 seconds)  #YouCantDoItAlone

Not just the productive ones, not just the religious ones, not just the optimized ones, every single person. This is true for you whether you walked into this room as a follower of Jesus or if you walked in because someone you love asked you to be here, or you walked in and you're not really sure what you're doing here. God sees you. He loves you, and he made you in his image. Nothing can change that. This status with God, it wasn't earned, and it never expires. No work crisis, no health diagnosis can change it. Elijah was just as much an image bearer of God in the wilderness under a tree as he was on the mountain wielding divine fire. And so are you. [00:51:42] (42 seconds)  #ImageBearerAlways

When I say that your body is God's design, I'm not saying that you can just rest and fix all that. What I'm saying is that actually a loving God, even if those things are true of you, will not give up on you simply because there's a problem. He made you and he loves you, body and all. And so for Elijah, the angel of the Lord shows up with bread, with water, not to fix him, but just to feed him as a companion, not a cure. And I mentioned this before, but for some of you, you need to hear it again. Burnout is often not a sign of faithlessness. Burnout is oftentimes evidence of faithfulness, turned up too loud. [00:47:46] (41 seconds)  #BurnoutIsNotFailure

And then the moment that the thing, the pursuit, the success that you have, that you focused on most takes a hit, you crash, just like Elijah did or a founder in my office. Or maybe for you, it's like a parent whose last kid is about to head off to college, or an athlete whose body finally comes up short, or like a pastor who built his identity on a church that just voted a decision that he didn't see coming. Right? This can happen to any of us. Because here's the thing, every misplaced identity every misplaced identity has a sentence just like the one Elijah heard waiting for it. It can come crashing down overnight. [00:41:28] (40 seconds)  #IdentityCanCrashOvernight

One chapter earlier, this fire from heaven is happening, and now he's asking God to kill him. The prophet who couldn't be stopped on the mountaintop hears one sentence and begs for a death sentence from God. So how does that happen? Well, Elijah did exactly what my friend in the office did. He let what he did slowly become who he was. He thought that he was the prophet who wins. He thought his life was up and to the right. He it became his entire identity. So when that role was threatened, when that future success seemed in jeopardy, it felt like his entire life was. [00:40:08] (41 seconds)  #DontBecomeYourRole

When we let other people in our life and we let other priorities steal our real identity, it isn't as obvious as a forced check, but it's way more dangerous. People are, whether you realize it or not, withdrawing from your account of resources that God has a call on your life for and a love by which he wants you to live from. Now don't get me wrong. AI and technology didn't do any of this. It just accelerated it, and we need to take our identity back. It will be us reminding ourselves over and over and over again of who we are. So here's the sentence that I hope you'll carry with you into the week ahead. We've already looked at it once. I want you to look at it a slightly different way. In Christ, you can risk anything because it's not up for debate. It's fine. It's not going anywhere. [00:57:04] (54 seconds)  #ReclaimYourIdentity

Here's what's at stake that I don't want us to forget, not just now, but kind of into the week ahead. Whether you know this to be true yet, or I'm gonna hopefully convince you of it over the next few minutes, in Christ, you can risk anything. As a matter of fact, if you have a if you have a relationship with Jesus, this relationship that you have, you didn't earn it, you didn't discover it, it was a gift from a gracious God. And because of that, it's unshakable. But in your output, in your career, in that season of life, in that accomplishment, you can risk nothing because you have everything to lose. Every misplaced identity is a problem here. Right? [00:43:37] (38 seconds)  #SecureEnoughToRisk

His marriage went hungry while he fed on meetings. His kids learned to expect his absence, and they built a life that assumed it. He couldn't see any of it because he'd sort of lost the forest through the trees of his own life. He was living in anticipation of a moment he had achieved and didn't even realize. Then one morning, shortly before we met, the board called a meeting that he was not invited to. Turns out it was a coup. By the end of that week, he was out of the company that he had given everything to for nearly a decade. [00:30:04] (35 seconds)  #FamilyOverCareer

I have conversations like this not every week, but certainly at least a couple times a month. And I think that if we're not careful, we're gonna find ourselves very, very confused in a season of great disruption. But the more clear we are on what it means to be human, I think the greater we can walk through these realities ourselves. His story is the story of a misplaced identity meeting its expiration date, And it's the story that our region is gonna keep telling itself until we know what to do with it, until we understand what it means to be human in a machine age. [00:31:50] (34 seconds)  #HumanInMachineAge

If you could look at the metrics, right, if he was wearing, like, a Whoop band, he was crushing it. Everything was great. His brand was everywhere. Everybody was like, man, Elijah was right this whole time. We were wrong. He's the best. His platform seemed limitless. His future seemed so bright. He had every reason to feel like what he did was who he was. His reputation of the success of that day would be who he was for the rest of his life. That's what everybody talked about. Now, let's look what happens in the very next chapter on the very next day. Queen Jezebel, she hears what Elijah did to 450 of her prophets, and she doesn't form a committee. [00:37:57] (37 seconds)  #PlatformIsFragile

That if we don't do that, we can't do this. That there are so many competing identities, so many different things that we might lean into or over index on, but it's actually figuring out what does it mean for me to live out my identity in Christ as an undivided follower. He gets access to every part of my life. And as he does that, hope naturally flows from my life to the people around me. See, our identity in Christ being lived out every single day is central. The only identity that doesn't collapse when everything else does is that one, That one that my friend was still trying to figure out how to put his life back around rebuilding from the basement in is the identity that God whispered back into Elijah's ear under the broom tree all those years ago. [00:59:26] (43 seconds)  #IdentityThatLasts

And really, for him, it was like he'd rather die than face a different vision of his future than he had for himself. He didn't have a marriage to go home to or kids to get down on the ground with or a friend to text or a vacation schedule to look forward, or a hobby. For Elijah, being a prophet was his entire world. So when that life got threatened, it's the only life he knew. It was the whole thing up for grabs. This is what misplaced identity looks like, not just for him, but for us. It tells us that the highest version of us is the most dedicated and the most productive version. [00:40:50] (38 seconds)  #WorthBeyondProductivity

After a decade in which he slowly let what he did become who he was, it was all gone. And for him in that moment, it felt like he was too. His very identity no longer had a place to live in his own life. And that's the challenge that I want us to look at today. With AI disrupting entire industries, what he's describing and feeling is something that many will have in common. Now AI is not the only thing that's causing this. It's been happening for a long time, but our current moment and the technology that it is characterized by is significantly accelerating the crises that I'm describing. [00:31:13] (38 seconds)  #IdentityInAIera

I don't think that it was his strength or his physical appetite, although that was a part of it. I think he was reminding Elijah that he was more than a prophet, not less. And whatever false identity you have constructed as the most important thing about you, I think that God wants to remind you today, he sees you as more than that thing, not less. Now I'm not gonna be able to give you an exhaustive list of passages in the Bible that speak on the details of what our identity in Christ means, but I do wanna show you three that we see in Elijah's story as a way for you and me to see that we are more than our performance. [00:50:23] (37 seconds)  #MoreThanYourRole

Identity in Christ is one of those things that if we're not careful, we hear it enough times in church that we think, well, I'm not sure I'm allowed to ask a question about that. I think I'm already supposed to have known what the definition is. So I'm gonna give you three things that hopefully will be handles for you this week as you remember who you actually are. The first one is that your identity in Christ, you are an image bearer. If you've been around Menlo for a little while, you've heard me say this. Every person was created in the image of God with infinite dignity, value, and worth. We hear a lot of people right now saying, hey. We're all equal. Let's let's let's just remember that everybody's equal. I would say, oh, it's better than that. We're infinite because we are created by the same infinite creator even in a broken world. [00:51:00] (42 seconds)  #ImageBearerIdentity

Menlo Church, you were made by awe, you were made for agency, and your identity is in the one that you receive, not achieve. Next week, we're gonna look at one more aspect of what it means to be human in a machine world. I hope you'll check it out. But in the meantime, you have one more layer in these sixty minute periods of screen free time, these little resets that I hope you'll schedule into your week, maybe some sixty second ones too. We're gonna ask the Holy Spirit to show you what you're not currently seeing to give you nourishment and rest just like the angel did for Elijah. Someone you're gonna take a nap this afternoon and tell a loved one I'm doing it because my pastor told me to. Whatever it takes. [01:00:08] (42 seconds)  #RestAndAgency

Our bodies, they have purposeful limits. Limits to our bodies that existed before the fall of mankind, limits to our bodies that will exist in eternity. Our body has needs. Our body has limits. It's on purpose to remind us that we are not God. Your body needs sleep. Your body needs food. Your body needs touch. Your body needs friends. Your body needs rest. None of that seems helpful when we're living in this increasingly optimized productivity machine world. We've allowed ourselves into this season to let it shift over time, to just go, well, how do I how do I figure out how to do less of that? How do figure out how to need less of that? How do I figure out how to optimize more than that? But I'm telling you, your body is going to restrain you on purpose, and it is the grace of God. Your body is a warning system from God. It reminds you and me of our limitations. [00:46:31] (53 seconds)  #BodyIsGrace