by Sarah Deutscher
The World We Live In
Living in today’s world, we have everything at our fingertips. We’ve never been richer or had access to more opportunities. We’ve experienced a 16 year financial boom, which means we have grown up in era with a lot of money to spend and without the struggles and hardship known to previous generations. If there was ever an era to be born you’d choose this one, prosperity plus! Yet internally, psychologically, things have never been more desperate. The average teenager today is living with high levels of anxiety, so high that if they’d had them in 1957 they would have been committed to psychiatric care.
This is reason for great concern. How could we be living in such an affluent time and yet be so depressed?
Young people especially, burdened with anxiety and a low sense of self worth, are turning to materials and marketing promises of ‘happiness’ ‘identity’ and ‘meaning’ for answers - which are only leaving them more lonely and confused than ever. At the heart of this is the fact that we don’t know who we are. Instead we know who we are not and and are riddled and motivated by the ‘I am not statements’: I am not beautiful enough, I am not good enough, I am not cool enough. Put plain and simply people’s wellbeing and sense of self is shot. We do not know who we are. We have a massive image problem.
This search for identity and image is the number one concern of young people today. Research into the spirituality of young people has discovered that the usual Christian terms of sin and salvation have become irrelevant. Many are simply not phased by the concept of right and wrong behaviour., Instead they’re torn within by the search for identity. In today’s world it’s culture and materials that drive us - it’s what we base our beliefs and values on in a hyper-consumerism world. We match our identity with what we own materially. We don’t care if we sin, there’s no accountability, no responsibility and no sense of consequence. But there is great consequence if we don’t fit in, aren’t cool enough or don’t have the right products.
Anxious? Look Within
Anxiety comes from ‘I am not’ statements and when we put forward the message that ‘we are sinners’ it just reinforces this negativity. A lot of our understanding of what Jesus did pivots around the concept of sin. Largely our presentation of the gospel sets us apart as ‘sinners.’ That is our identity; You are a sinner. I am a sinner. This is true and we don’t want to underestimate the grose consequences of sin in our lives and in the world. It is a dark and disgusting reality. But I fear that we neglect to realise that before we were sinners we were image bearers of the prised love and glory of God. When we look at verses in the bible about what Jesus did as the ‘perfect’ image we get a fresh taste of things. As the ‘perfect’ image he restores us into relationship with God and restores our original identity (2 Cor 4-5). Because of Jesus when God looks at you he doesn’t see you as a sinner. He sees you as someone set apart, who bears his image of love and glory … uniquely.
But, as I said before sin is still a potent reality and force on our lives. There is always a war going on within us. Because of the digusting nature of sin the pure love we were made in the image of has become selfishness and the pure glory has become pride. Everyone desires love and glory, which is partly why we’re obsessed by fame, but equally we are driven by selfishness and pride. A perversion of the image in which we are made. The war that goes on within us is the tension between what we are called to live out of and what we do live out of..
We sinned when we exchanged the glory of God for a lie (Rom 1:25). That lie has been operating in us ever since. Because of what Jesus did that lie has been bought back. Extinguished. A major part of His work in your life is to now rework your thinking (Rom 12:1-2) and restore the truth back into who you are, not who you are not.. 
…they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused…instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols….instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies. Romans 1:21-25
Jeremiah 2:11: ‘Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols.
Empty Promises
Those ‘I am’ statements are lies – lies that are compounded and reinforced by advertising that feeds off the knowledge that people are desperate to find themselves, true love and freedom..Advertisers are clever at appealing to our emotions. In fact they are taught not to aim for our ‘reason’our ‘intellect;’but always aim for the primary emtions of love, joy, sorrow, fear, guilt, shame and jealously, because these are the emotions that motivate us. Advertising is what it is because it works. We consume these products because they promise us so much, and we feel they hold the key to who we are. Spending then becomes an addiction because it never delivers on the product or the promise. Someone is getting very rich on your search for identity. Ah the emotional marketing tools. They are a lie…but we fall for it.
However, looking to celebrities, fashion and possessions only feeds the ‘I am not’ statements.In the Bible, Jeremiah tells us how they exchanged their glory for idols. Idols are primarily void of meaning, be they gold, stone or human. The perfect world that fame, wealth and possessions promise does not exist - it’s a void. But we consistently choose this over what God promises us. Maybe this in part is why we have such an image problem and why we are suffering such high levels of anxiety and depression.
All this focussing on ourselves hasn’t really gotten us anywhere. It would appear we’ve gone backwards. Maybe we need to be looking at a story bigger than ourselves and our own understanding of life.
In an absence of God we look for something outside ourselves and that’s our peers and our culture. But our peers don’t know who they are either, in fact they are in the same boat and looking to them only compounds the culture. We look from peer to peer, celebrity to celebrity, product to product, because we’ve cut God out of the picture and we don’t have a higher being telling us who we are.. We’ve replaced God with ourselves and we feed off the lies of culture. Yet we are left ravenously hungry for image.
Australian women spend $935 million a month on fashion. That is a massive symptom that shows we don’t know who we are. At the heart of this is not ‘fashion,’ it’s about the desperate desire for image and beauty. In the Bible, the message in Isaiah still resounds in today’s world. Isaiah 1 and 2 talks about the consequences of having idols. In Isaiah 3 it speaks of the absence of real beauty. That instead of beauty there will be branding.. Branding, a marketing term, originates from cattle owners using heated metal to brand their animals. Signifying which cattle belonged to who. Branding in the marketing world is a way of saying that get them to emotionally attach and you’ll have their loyalty forever. They are yours. In a world captive to brandng there is a void of true genuine beauty.
My Sto
ry
Going against the grain of this hyper-consumerism for a while I went for the puritan life. I didn’t especially care for my appearance and denied myself the latest trends. I became anti-fashion. But it’s not about what we wear or what we refuse to wear, it’s to do with our internal being. I realised that my puritan, withheld behaviour was just as bad and oppressive as someone who was a slave to the latest trends. It was just the opposite extreme. I wasn’t being my true self and suffered for it I clearly felt God speak to me on this issue, ‘you’re not being the person I created you to be.’ By not expressing myself I was limiting myself. The journey to wholenss comes from being true to who you really are. Not what other’s say, not what culture prescribes, but by living out of the unique image of God in you. The only way to discover that and impact others through that is through knowing Him. In active relationship with him his Spirit unleashes our spirit within. For me now it’s what’s coming out of my heart. My journey was to discover that if God had blessed me with creativity and a passion for the arts, then I needed to express that on some level, not suppress it. It has absolutely nothing to do with what you wear on the outside, but everything to do with ‘who’ you are and how and why you are expressing yourself. Not making an idol of fashion, but rather healthily reflecting the glory of God within me. It is about His image in me. It’s about real transformation, which comes from the inside out … not the outside in.
What’s Next For Me?
Part of the solution to our identity crisis is coming back to who God is really. We think we’ve heard it all before – we think “yeah, yeah we know that story,” but do we? Sometimes I feel we know the story rationally but it doesn’t impact us anymore. We know the story but compared to the seductive voice of culture it leaves us wanitng. Maybe we’ve missed something vital to who God is. In my reflections I’ve realised that who you think you are directly stems from ‘who’ you think God is. Do you think God is a being/something that needs to be appeased? Then you will see yourself as someone who is not good enough, and your life will be full of striving. Do you think God is some distant being that doesn’t really care? Then your life will reflect that. Do you think God is love? Then you will begin to see yourself in light of that love, and live as someone who is truly loved and just as exciting will discover yourself as an unique image bearer of that love that brings it to others.
The interesting thing about today’s generation is that the predominant view of God that they have is that of a Butler (“Thanks Jeeves, on your way, I have what I want now”). Someone who comes and serves their needs when needed and then is sent away. This certainly shifts the stakes in whose got the authority on who here. Maybe our warped views on God have got something to do with our warped views of ourselves. Part of the solution to our identity crisis is coming back to ‘who’ God is. Maybe the more we unpack the wrapping that surrounds that beautiful mystery the more we can’t help but become true individuals.
We were made in the glory of God. God has been cultivating the making of humans for thousands of years but we’re all different. Not one person is the same. Our qualties are unique and we all reflect something different about God. This is why I love people. Every single person I meet reflects something new about God’s character and can teach me something new as to who this God is.
We’re perfect because we reflect something in God. We each need to find God again for ourselves and in each other, and in rediscovering God we need to rediscover the love and glory we were made in the image of..
When it comes to identity if you view yourself as someone who is an image bearer of the love and glory of God, you will live your life very differently than if you view yourself as a sinner … am ‘I am not good enough’ person. Similarly if we exchanged the glory of God for a lie and this glory is the image that we are made in then the I am not statements you believer about yourself are exactly that, a lie. Void, vapour and as non-existent as the meaning the idols we have pretend to give us.
We need to come back to a bigger story. The other one, the little one that consists of ‘me, myself and I’ just isn’t working. Young people today know they’re not happy but don’t know there’s another story. That is why sin and salvation are off the radar of today’s youth. There is nothing to be kept accountable to, no higher standard or purpose for living. They have never been shown another alternative. What is this alternative story and where are the people who know it in such a way that it transforms their lives and inspires transformation in others?
The death of the big story means the death of true self. The story that needs to be seen again is about the creator who made this universe and every single image bearer on this planet and who is at work to restore and renew what happened when the glory was exchanged for that lie.
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