Living ‘from the gospel’ means not living from other things

In Sunday’s sermon, I said that a ‘gospel work’ is something we do from the gospel. In other words, it is any activity (dropping off the kids at school, visiting a friend in the hospital, cleaning the toilet, winning a contract at work) that we pursue from our identity as forgiven sinners and children of God. A ‘gospel work’ is never intended to earn our status as children of God – it always flows from that identity. In other words, gospel works are always the goal of the gospel and never the ground.

I was talking about this with a few Christian men on Sunday evening and the conversation really helped me. What these guys helped me to see with fresh insight was that living from the gospel is a radical thing. It is radical, because we so commonly find our identity not in the gospel but in other things. One guy said, ‘We invest a lot of our identity in our jobs. If you take away our work, there’s not much left.’ What an insightful statement. It’s true. For many of us guys, our job constitutes a huge portion of our identity. We live from our careers instead of from the gospel.

What does it mean to live from your career? It means that if you’re having a bad day, or an argument with your spouse, or if you’re feeling insecure, you think, ‘At least I’m successful at my job…I’m worth something, anyway, because things are going well at work.’ Living from your career means that you are making your career a core part of your identity. If you wonder whether you’re doing this, imagine that you will lose your job tomorrow. How does that make you feel? Some of you don’t need to imagine this, because it has already happened to you. If we feel naked, unworthy, inadequate, and inferior without our job that means that we have been living from our job. Of course our identities are influenced by the work we do and the relationships we have – but these other things are constantly vying to get down into the core of how we conceive ourselves and define us.

The gospel comes to us and it says, ‘You must live from me, not from your job, not from your children, not from any other relationship. You must not let these other things define you. Your core identity is this: you are a forgiven sinner and a child of God. And that will never change.’

Living from the gospel means not living from other things. That may be a scary reality for you if you have defined yourself for many years by living from other things. But it is incredibly liberating. Don’t let those other things define you. Live from the gospel.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Dec 7, 01:40 PM