Who am I? All cultures, human philosophies, and religious systems try to answer this question in a way that leads to a meaningful life. We want to find in them a path that allows us to say, “Who am I? I’m a good person. I’m someone who is living a good and right life.”
What paths toward goodness and righteousness are being offered today? They’re as vast and varied as ever. One popular path is to optimize your life via medical improvements, ranging from plastic surgery to GLP-1s. The more you can “humanmaxx” your body to look healthier and be stronger, the more likely you’ll be considered an ideal human being—a good person to hire, to be friends with, to date or marry.
Political engagement is another common path. Your goodness is determined by how connected you are to particular political movements. You can feel like you’re a good person when you make sure you quickly like and repost all Zohran Mamdani’s videos. Or alternatively, you’ll be affirmed as a good person by how aggressively you go after or insult people who like Mamdani.
Paths our culture offers to the good life are often combined. Your sense of how good a person you are is measured by a mixture of how long you’ve engaged in therapy, how many hours you volunteer at your children’s school, and how long your streak is on your mindfulness app.
Tara Isabella Burton, in her book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, argues that people have formed their own religious systems by drawing from various religions and philosophies. People have become “creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions.” We’re doing a DIY project, grabbing and piecing together whatever’s around us, hoping we can come up with something to help us in our journey.
So, what path does Christianity offer to assure us we’re living a good and righteous life?
Keeping Score
The Christian approach is to address what the Bible calls the heart. The heart is the Bible’s shorthand term for describing the part of you that drives and motivates you, what dictates your thoughts and emotions. Christianity starts with the heart because this is the only real way by which you can determine who you are and what needs to change.
We see the contrast between the religious and cultural approach and the Christian approach in Jesus’s interaction with the Pharisees in Matthew 15:1–20. The Pharisees confront Jesus to ask him why his disciples don’t wash their hands before eating. Handwashing before meals was one of the many religious rules the Pharisees had developed, practiced, and called others to practice.
For the Pharisees, the best answer to the question “Who am I?” was based on how well they followed their set standards. If a person kept the standard and had a life that could be observed to follow all the rules, then that person could definitively say to themselves and those around them, “I’m a good person who is living a good and right life.”
Jesus’s story about the Pharisee in Luke 18:9–14 is another example. The Pharisee intently notes in his prayer how he, unlike the tax collector praying next to him, fasts twice a week and always gives the full tithe. Jesus describes the Pharisees in Matthew 6 as people who make sure their regular prayers can be seen and affirmed by all.
The Pharisees weren’t alone in this approach. Greco-Roman religion had its own rules and standards to follow. Its gods demanded rituals, sacrifices, and festivals to appease and honor them. Performed rightly, they’d result in people securing the blessing they needed from the gods, thus assuring them their lives were good and righteous.
Jesus, however, reframes the Pharisees’ questioning by showing that their approach doesn’t go far enough. Right living and human flourishing demands more than one’s outward actions. It requires harder interior examination. And that means looking at the heart. Jesus says, “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart” (Matt. 15:18)—who we are is revealed only when we ask questions that get at the primary motives and desires within our hearts.
Right living and human flourishing demands more than one’s outward actions. It requires harder interior examination.
It’s not enough to obey the sixth commandment, “Do not murder,” by simply performing your nonviolent lifestyle to others for their approval. Jesus says we can’t say what kind of person we are until we’ve asked if anger, aggression, or violence reside within our heart (Matt. 5:21–22).
Similarly, the Pharisees said that we are to love our neighbor but hate our enemy (Matt. 5:43). But Jesus presses deeper when he tells the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), positing that we aren’t people who love our neighbor unless we’re willing to cross cultural and racial boundaries, to be radically generous, to put ourselves and our resources at risk for the sake of others. And we won’t do those things unless we look beneath our performance and interrogate our hearts.
Report-Card Life
This heart-based approach remains relevant and helpful to us living within today’s culture. The Pharisaic system and Greco-Roman religion are no longer popularly practiced. But the thought that we can positively answer the question “Who am I?” through external practices and obedience to observable practices remains the norm.
Though the standards and the gods look different, people are still looking to “follow the rules” toward becoming a person who lives a good life. It’s just that now there are more options and more bespoke standards.
This isn’t to say our modern efforts are insignificant. Many of the examples I listed earlier can bring mental, social, and physical improvements—in some cases better than anything our world has offered before. But the problem remains the same as in Jesus’s day: These efforts ultimately don’t go deep enough.
The Christian approach is that being able to know you’re a good person won’t happen by doing more and better things. To answer the question “Who am I?” in a way where I truly know that I’m living a good and right life always begins by asking, “What’s the state of my heart?”
Modern trends and philosophies tend to frame life around practices, rituals, procedures, or routines. It’s a report-card framework: How many times have I prayed or meditated this week? How much money have I donated this year? How many times have I worked out this week?
From Report Card to Relationship
Christianity presents a different framework, one that gets at the heart. Christianity helps us see our hearts through a relational lens: “Whom or what do you worship? Whom or what do you love?” It then leads us to the answer we need for those questions: “We need a heart that will worship and love what’s good and right.”
This is why the gospel stands out as the most complete story and the most effective way to answer the question “Who am I?” The doctrine of sin examines our heart and diagnoses the real problem. It shows us how God is the source of all that’s good and right and how human beings, in having sinned against God, are now far away from him. This means that even our best efforts toward being good come up short.
The gospel stands out as the most complete story and the most effective way to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’
The doctrine of Christ’s sacrificial death and atonement for sins then shows the way to fix the problem. Christ, in giving up his life and atoning for our sin, bridged the gap between us and God, a bridge we can cross by faith and trust in Christ.
Finally, the doctrine of redemption and regeneration by the Holy Spirit shows us that our reconnection to God through Jesus also is about transformation. We get new hearts, ones no longer compromised or enslaved by our sinful motives and desires. These new hearts help us live into what’s good and right, because we now have hearts that truly do worship and love God.
As Titus 3:5–6 says, we’re saved “not because of works done by us in righteousness” but by “the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom [God] poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.”
Here, then, is the only real and lasting way to be able to say, “I’m a good person who lives in a good and right way.” It’s when we can first say, “Because I am with God in and through Jesus Christ.”
The Gospel Coalition