Your Sense of Identity Depends on Your Grasp of Time

“What, then, is time?” Augustine asks in The Confessions. “If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

The same could be said about identity. We all intuitively understand what identity is. I have one, you have one, and every sane person who has ever lived has some sense of identity. If you lose your sense of identity, you’re losing your handle on the world itself. But what is identity? How is it something you always have with you, yet at the same time has open-endedness—a sense that you are forming it right now?

Here is the best definition I’ve come up with:

 “Identity is your sense of self that connects who you are as a product of your past with who you wish to be in the future.”

Notice how integral one’s perception of time is to identity. Identity depends on your ability to look both backward and project forward. The more deeply and thoroughly you grasp that, the stronger your sense of identity is. This is why, for example, young children and older people descending into senility have a less robust sense of identity. Their perception of time—either memory or future possibilities is not as strong. This is not at all to say they have less value or dignity as human beings created in God’s image, but this makes clear what precisely we have in mind when we talk about identity.

Identity grasps the continuity of your self as a time-bound creature with a past and future. You make sense of your past in order to live into who you wish to be in the future. As a child progresses in her comprehension of time, so she progresses in her ability to contemplate her identity. On the other side of the spectrum, the immutability (unchangingness) of God’s identity appears connected to Him standing outside of time. God created all other things within time and space and therefore they all experience some degree of mutability (consider Satan and the fallen angels).

So What?

Maybe you find these connections between grasp of time and identity interesting, or quite possibly you’re thinking, “Who cares?” I want to suggest three applications for becoming your best self on the basis of your time-bound identity.

1) Look out into eternity

What prevents man from living bestially? What holds people back from living merely and entirely for the pleasure of the moment? It is an awareness of the future. Paul himself acknowledges this: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (I Corinthians 15:32).

If the basest and most corrupted identities come from disregarding eternity, that means the highest and best identity develops out of thinking the most about eternity. Moses pleads with God, “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). A wise heart means wise identity formation, and it comes from a firm grasp on the brevity of life in the scope of eternity. Solomon echoes this advice: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). Wise use of your daily time comes from a deep-settled awareness of your transience and Heaven’s permanence.

2)Trust God as Your Author

You are not the author of your life, birth, circumstances, or the people you interact with. God is. The more we can get ahold of the givenness and giftedness of all of life, the more we live with gratitude and contentment in our identities.

You have accountability for your choices. God calls you to wisdom and discernment. But we all tend to give ourselves a little too much credit for our successes and rejections. That puts quite a burden on your back. We need to remember our time-boundness in a story that God is authoring. “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16). God has not made a mistake in any of the places you’ve been or things you’ve been through.

Living into the best identity God has for you today means trusting him with your future, and (often harder) with your regrets and wistfulness. Not a single sparrow has fallen in your life without Him knowing it (Matthew 10:29).

3)Tether yourself to the unchanging

Because your identity depends on your grasp of time, and time is always running forward, you experience constant fluidity to your identity. Your sense of identity ten seconds from now will be slightly different from what it is now. If this (hypothetically) were not the case, you would be stuck—unable to learn or feel anything new. Time races on, with every present certainty bringing fresh awareness of future uncertainty.

If you focus on this transience and constant uncertainty, you will feel anxious, depressed, powerless, and overwhelmed by self-doubt. How can you be certain of anything when tomorrow may disprove what you feel so confident in today? In order to flourish in your identity, you have to tether yourself to things you know will not and cannot change. There’s not many of those.

Look to God and his Word. God’s grace, goodness, wisdom, glory, and power are eternal. They always have been and always will be. Look to his salvation which he has written in a book before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). If you’ve trusted in Jesus, he will never let go of you. You will always be his creation and his redeemed child.

You have the Bible. God’s Word for our guidance is fixed in the heavens (Psalm 119:89). “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our god will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8). As time-bound creatures, we can only form eternally beautiful identities around eternally beautiful truths.

Why I’m Writing a Book on Christian Identity Formation

Bonus Archive: The Abortion Debate: right to quality of life versus right to life

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