Identity

Because my son is almost two weeks old, my wife's and my sleeping schedules are very off at the moment. To compensate, we have been (late at night) making our way through the The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Phenomenal. It is laughable that I would add my praise to a series of movies that has received so many awards from the big boys. Yet, these movies are simply incredible.

Tolkien's masterpiece is so rich with meaning that I don't understand how all who watch it aren't instantly turned inward to their own hearts. I have found myself wondering about the folks who made the movie: Did they ever consider the serious truth with which they were playing? It was all around them: every sequel, every movie, every scene, every take. I even asked the manager at Blockbuster if he was aware that Christian theology undergirded this movie. To which he replied he was not looking for that.

The movie presents a powerful theme of man's desire for evil as the ring has destroyed middle earth and is threatening to destroy all of mankind. All who come close to the ring want it. It offers everything our sinful heart could ever want: control, power, etc. Yet, just as every person pursues the ring it destroys them. That which every character thinks will satisfy does nothing more than destroy their very soul. The ring dominates every man's quest for identity. It is only through its destruction that middle earth and man will have life. As we await the finish of the last movie tonight, it is absolutely clear that it will be worth Froto's death to destroy the ring. It his death that will bring life.

As it is in middle earth, so it is on earth. We are looking for identity wherever we can find it. Unfortunately, some of us spend our entire lives pursuing the ring, and we don't even know it. We pursue amazing reputations, money, moralism, safe neighborhoods, "nice" neighbors, good jobs, easy relationships in which conversation never steers toward anything that makes us uncomfortable. In short, we have lost our life and our identity, and we are looking in so many wrong places to find it. When we look at all the amazing things Jesus said in the Gospels, our first inclination is to believe that those words were very good for those people back then, for the pagans in other countries, for the people that live on the bad side of town. So it hit me that the folks who made LOTR are no different than we are. We are constantly around infinite truth and apart from God's grace, we will not see it either. Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. (John 10:10). Such a statement implies explicitly that we don't have life. We stand in need of it. Imagine the shock that statement must have been to Jesus' hearers then. How could this eccentric rabbi imply that the sons and daughters of Abraham needed life? How could he say that nice, middle-class Americans need life? He could say it because Jesus saw what we will, apart from his sovereign grace, never see: the utter depravity of our hearts. He didn't come because we weren't nice people. He came because we were dead people. To miss the infinite seriousness of the incarnation is to miss the deep reality of sin. Jesus pursues guilty people, dead people. And once he catches us, our identity is changed.

We go from being outside of Christ to being in Christ. To understand this is to be changed. Thus, no mater what we do: whether we are a high-power CEO, a celebrity, a teacher, or a stay-at-home mom, if we are in Christ, our first identity is as a child of the great King. Because Jesus has given us true and living life, we don't have to look for life in other things: our jobs, our money, our reputations, our things. We have our reputation complete in Him!

There is not a doubt in my mind that once this brief life passes, we will not long for people to think of us in any of the small ways we long for them to think of us now. Instead, we will be fully satisfied to be known by one title: Child of God. By the mercy and grace of the great King, this is our new identity.