Recently, I read a beautifully written and quite moving article about a celebrity sports figure who entered into a partnership with a global shoe brand to release a sneaker collaboration. The article appeared just as the sneakers dropped, hot off the production line and ready for market. It told of the athlete-designer’s upbringing, the detailed creative process, and his joy in “speaking things into existence.” The sports figure shared his desire that this sneaker would help urban youth “find themselves.”
The piece told the tale of creative genius and the fashioning of a consumer product as an expression of personal identity. It was compelling. Truly.
Inventing yourself, making yourself, finding yourself, and taking yourself to market as if you were a brand exhausts and shackles.
I’m just troubled when I hear the people I pastor speak of themselves like that celebrity spoke of his sneakers. In fact, I was unprepared for how much pastoral ministry would be about helping the souls in my care realize that—though the world tries to convince us otherwise—what works for sneakers doesn’t work for one’s own self-understanding.
Inventing yourself, making yourself, finding yourself, and taking yourself to market as if you were a brand exhausts and shackles.
Thankfully, our faith offers us an alternative that sets us free.
Liberating Truth for a Consumer Culture
To a sneaker-drop culture, Christianity offers something infinitely liberating. In the first chapter of the Bible, we learn two important truths about our humanity. First, we have not made ourselves. Second, we are divine partners, not consumer products. We are made, and we are made to make.
1. We’re creatures, not creations of our own invention.
On the sixth day of creation, Genesis welcomes its readers into the triune mind. We listen in on divine conversation as a decision is announced: “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26). This move comes as the pinnacle of the creation drama, a grand finale of glorious proportion. It’s as if the Lord wanted to say, “Nothing else in all the created order will compare to this living, beautiful, pulsing picture of myself.”
Many things, of course, follow from the fact that we’re made by God. But the implications for our self-understanding are of primary importance today. We’re to see our identity as a gift, one we can receive humbly and joyfully. We’re not meant to define ourselves, discover ourselves, express ourselves, or design our identities according to our own creative genius. No, our existence, plainly said, is derivative, having arisen from the plans of Another.
In other words, we are human beings. And as such, we find who we are extra nos, by discovering the intentions our Maker had in mind when he made us. Extra nos is a classic Reformation category which points to Christ’s righteousness that comes to us from outside ourselves. But it’s not just our saved identity that is given to us; in fact, our very humanity comes to us from outside—as a gift from God.
God’s designs, of course, are thorough—far-reaching from our deepest inner parts to our outer selves, encompassing everything from the longings of our hearts to the hairs of our heads. Even more, we will only find flourishing—we’ll only enjoy what’s true, beautiful, and good—to the degree that we’re in communion with our Creator, with our words, thoughts, feelings, and actions (indeed, the whole of who we are) sitting flush and plumb with his careful plans. We don’t have to come up with anything great. We only need to live and move and have our being one day at a time as the people he made us to be.
2. We’re partners with God, not products to be marketed.
Once we know how we are made, we can begin to understand what we are for.
The Lord makes human persons to be in relationship with him, to share in his divine life, knowing and enjoying him forever. He also knows that we’ll enjoy him deeply and live most fully as participants, not spectators. His divine plans give us the privilege of partnering with him. We’re partners, not pawns in the global economy or products to be used and consumed by the world.
A feature of a living communion with God is the divine commission to be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion. God has given us creative capacity and divine sanction to use his manifold gifts, harnessing all creation into a stream of beauty and glory. The logic goes like this: he is Lord of all, the king of the universe, and he desires to deploy imager-bearers throughout his world, inviting us to cooperate with him by acting diligently and nobly in the sacred duty of extending his making-and-blessing work to the ends of the earth.
Human beings are to rule the world alongside the Lord, creatively coaxing potential out of every thread of the universe, tending the world in a way that pleases him and satisfies us.
Our muscle fibers, neurons, thoughts, longings, and feelings are to be marshaled into divine service. Human beings are to rule the world alongside the Lord, creatively coaxing potential out of every thread of the universe, tending the world in a way that pleases him and satisfies us. Pleasing him, after all, is what it means to be alive in the first place.
The partnership God invites people into, when approached thoughtfully, infuses ordinary moments with a transcendent flavor. As you begin your workday on Monday or care for a small child on Thursday afternoon (or both), you’re entering into a cooperative work with God himself.
You were not created to discover who you are via the path of finding the “you” buried inside. You don’t need to make your own edits or set a reveal date. You’re not a brand releasing a new product called “who I really am.”
No, your life is an extra nos gift. You can take joy in being made by the Creator and then join him, partnering in his creative work. Living in light of this received identity, as a partner with God, will be more freeing and more satisfying than anything the world can offer.
The Gospel Coalition