(sorry, no video this week)

I must have been eleven or twelve.

I was lip-syncing a Beatles song in a school talent show. There was a moment in the song when someone laughed, so I threw my head back and gave the biggest, most dramatic fake laugh I could.

The room erupted.

They weren’t laughing at me. They were enjoying me.

I remember thinking, Oh my gosh. I can move a room.

For years, I called that purpose.

Entertainment became music. Music became worship leading. The stage changed, but the conviction remained: This is what I’m here to do.

But I’m beginning to wonder if my search for purpose was really a search for identity.

We ask:

What am I supposed to do with my life?

But underneath that question, we may be asking:

Who am I? Do I matter? Is there a reason I’m here?

Purpose becomes a proxy for identity.

We hope that if we can discover the right assignment, we’ll finally know our value. So when someone asks who we are, we answer with what we do:

“I’m a doctor.”

“I’m a parent.”

“I’m a worship leader.”

Purpose matters—but it is secondary.

An apple seed doesn’t discover what it is by deciding what fruit to produce. It produces apples because it came from an apple.

Its identity comes from its origin.

Its fruit is the byproduct.

The same is true of Jesus.

Before He preached, healed anyone or went to the cross, the Father said:

You are My beloved Son.

The Father answered the identity question before Jesus began His public work.

Jesus didn’t do those things to become the Son. He did them because He was the Son.

What He did flowed from who He was.

So perhaps the first question isn’t:

What am I here to do?

Perhaps it is:

Who am I—and who told me?

That school audience told me I could move a room. But the same room could have changed its mind the moment I stopped entertaining it.

Conditional sources give us conditional identities.

The Father’s voice is different.

He speaks before the performance.

Purpose is not the path to identity. Purpose is what grows when identity takes root.

I still love moving a room. I still love leading worship.

But the room no longer gets to name me.

see you next Friday.