It is revealing that we call ourselves human beings. We do not call ourselves human achievers, performers, or doers. We are beings. Yet much of life is spent proving that we have earned the right to be here.

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It begins early. A child brings home a report card and discovers that numbers and letters have power. Later there is the team to make, the school to enter, the degree to earn, the job to secure. Before long the questions become more sophisticated but no more merciful. What do you do? How successful are you? Did the children turn out well?

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Without quite deciding to, we begin living before an invisible scoreboard.

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Arthur Brooks, in From Strength to Strength, writes perceptively about the unhappiness that can accompany achievement. “Humans simply aren’t wired to enjoy an achievement long past,” he observes. “Satisfaction from success lasts but an instant.” Yesterday’s achievement becomes today’s expectation. So we climb again, hoping the next accomplishment will finally allow us to say, “Now I am enough.”

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But that verdict never comes.

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Christian theology sees something here that psychology can describe but cannot finally cure. We are creatures forever attempting to justify ourselves.

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Gerhard Forde understood this with unusual clarity. Justification is not an obscure problem belonging to medieval monks. We establish little courts of judgment every day and spend our lives presenting evidence before them. I am worthwhile because I am useful. Because people need me. Because my children succeeded.

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Religion itself can be recruited into the enterprise. I served the church. I taught the class. Surely God has noticed.

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The old Adam is perfectly willing to become religious if religion will let him keep the books.

And there the Gospel becomes offensive before it becomes liberating. God does not improve our system of self-justification. He ends it.

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At the foot of the cross the successful and unsuccessful stand together. The distinguished and forgotten arrive with the same empty hands. Grace can feel insulting because we would still like to contribute something.

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But Christ has not come to congratulate those who have made something of themselves. He comes to raise the dead. And the dead are not much help in their own resurrection.

This is why baptism matters. There God does not congratulate your potential. He puts the old self-justifying creature to death with Christ and raises you by a promise that comes entirely from outside you: you are a child of God.

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And here we begin to understand what Christian being actually means.

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It does not mean merely existing, nor does it mean discovering some authentic self hidden beneath all our activity. Christian being is relational before it is psychological. To be is to receive yourself from God. Your life has been taken out of the anxious business of self-creation and placed in Christ.

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This new being is not the successful outcome of religious improvement. It is not what remains after you have finally become moral enough, spiritual enough, or mature enough. It is bestowed. God’s Word gives you what you cannot produce for yourself.

That means your deepest identity is, strangely enough, outside yourself. You are not finally what you can prove, accomplish, preserve, or remember. You are what God gives you to be in Christ: creature, forgiven sinner, child of promise.

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There begins the strange freedom of the Christian life.

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The work remains, but its burden changes. You can work because the work needs doing rather than because your identity depends upon it. Your good works no longer have to climb toward God. They are free to go sideways, toward the neighbor.

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And perhaps most difficult of all, you can grow old as your powers decline. Age dismantles our scoreboards. The office belongs to someone else. The phone rings less often. The children no longer need us in quite the same way. Strength diminishes. Someone younger accomplishes before lunch what now takes me most of the afternoon.

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For the human doer, this can be terrifying. If I am what I accomplish, what remains when accomplishment disappears? The Gospel answers: you were never your résumé. You were never the position, the applause, the income, or the number of people who remembered your name.

You are God’s creature. And in Christ you are a sinner to whom God has given His verdict: forgiven, justified, free.

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Perhaps this is why Jesus’ pointing to the lilies remains unsettling. They are not working the five-year plan. They establish no careers and accumulate no credentials. They simply receive sunlight, rain, and life.

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“Consider the lilies,” Jesus says.

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There will be work tomorrow. Do it well. Keep your promises. Tend your vocation. Love the people God has placed before you. But do not ask any of that work to tell you who you are. It cannot bear that weight.

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Your life as a Christian rests finally not upon what you have done for God, but upon what God has done for you, what He continues to do, and what He promises yet to do.

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Friend in Christ, you are not first a human doer. You are a human being. And in Christ you are a new being, the one whom God has raised from death by His promise.

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The question is no longer, “What have I managed to make of myself?” The better question is, “What has God made of me in Christ?”

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He has made you a new creation. And that was never your achievement. It is God’s gift in Jesus Christ.