Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”- Matthew 28:18-20
Who are you? That’s not a question we deal with often, but ultimately it is a question we all have to answer.
Your first impulse might be to state what you do. “I’m a business man. I’m a contractor. I’m a secretary.” But as long as we see ourselves through the lens of what we do, we risk an identity crisis every time our performance doesn’t meet up with our expectations. When we do well, we feel good about ourselves. When we do not, well, lets not talk about it…
The question, “Who are you?” is a question of identity. What we believe about ourselves determines what we believe we are worth, what we will settle for, what we will strive for, and who we’ll associate with. But the most important thing our identity does is it defines to whom we belong.
After Jesus rose from the dead He gave His closest followers an assignment: to go and make disciples. The first part of the discipleship process? Baptize them. What’s baptism? Identification.
When you get baptized, you make a statement of identification. You are saying to yourself, to God, and to the world you no longer belong to who and what you belonged to before. You now belong to God, Jesus Christ and His church. You are making a public declaration that you now have a new tribe.
What makes this important is that we have a habit of slipping back to our old ways. When we do, it is much too easy to let our behavior tear down our identity. We are quickly convinced of our lack of worth. It is in that moment that we need to look back on that day when we were baptized and say, “I am of infinite worth. Not because of what I have done or will do, but because of the infinite love of the infinite One who loves and values me infinitely.”
