“Introverted or Extraverted, What’s Your Power?”

“Name Your Strengths and Claim Them!”

“How to Be Fine.”

We are obsessed with being better, aren’t we? All these book titles reveal a deep desire for identity. We hope that if we can define ourselves and improve ourselves, we will finally “find ourselves” and be the confident, strong, passionate people we are meant to be.

Self-actualization and “finding oneself” are high values in the U.S. Just look at the self-help section at Barnes and Noble. It is estimated that the self-help market was worth $11 billion in 2018! It can be easy to view these tasks as a steady trajectory, one with fixed results that we can control.

Jesus, however, says something different. In Matthew 16, he is discussing with his disciples: “Who do you think I am? And who, then, are you?” This is the context in which he says, “those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake, will find it.”

You see, with Jesus, we are to identify so completely with Jesus, that he becomes our identity. And here’s the catch, the part therapists and life coaches struggle to accept: It’s not that we identify with Jesus in order to forget who we are: to forget the imperfect childhood, the mistakes we made as teenagers, or the people we’ve hurt along the way. We identify with Jesus in order to remember who we are: children of God, created and loved by God.

So, what of Peter? Peter has just proclaimed that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus proclaims Peter is “the rock on which I will build my church.” And Peter is already trying so hard to protect this newfound identity! So much so, that he forgets how he got it in the first place. It is no wonder that when his hopes for the kingdom are threatened, he jumps up to say, “Wait a minute!”

Jesus diagnoses Peter correctly: he is clinging to his new self-understanding more than clinging to God.

When Jesus says we must lose our lives, he’s not offering a formula or seven-step process to success. Jesus is asking for a willingness to accept something much different from what we’ve planned or expected, a willingness for Peter to let go of what he thinks it means to be “the Rock.”

When we cling to Jesus first and allow our identity as children of God to inform our lives, it is then that we finally “find ourselves.”

Peace,

Intern Pastor Meggie Bjertness

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