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Who Am I

As I drove a backcountry road in Alabama late one night, a thought hit me: Mark, really, you’re a vapor. You’re no bigger than a minute. You’re here and gone. Nobody is going to remember you in a hundred years because you’re not the point here. So the truth that you’re so small and so broken and so self-destructive and so self-absorbed yet God cares about you anyway? That’s what you should share.

I decided to share this message of God’s sovereignty through music.

I’ve realized this song’s big truth is that, before you can truly understand who you are in Christ, you first must understand who you’re not. I believe that is where I had missed it. At different times, I had mistakenly viewed my relationship with God from each of two wrong perspectives:

Entitlement: This occurs when an imperfect, broken person believes he or she deserves something, anything, from a holy God. It surfaces in puffed-up pronouncements like, “I’m God’s chosen child. I’m a royal priesthood. I have the right to claim this in my life.” We get to that point by thinking that we’re something we’re really not because of something thatwe have done: “I came to the Lord. I found Jesus.” The Bible says that no one seeks God. No one. (Psalm 53:2-3)

In the red: I heard Pastor John Piper call this “The Debtor’s Ethic.” It is a works-based approach in which everything a believer does is out of duty to repay Jesus. No one can repay Him. It’s impossible—so this approach to a relationship with God is impossible.

This song reminds us that God says, “I’m huge and you’re not, but I love you anyway. This is all because of me, not because of you. You didn’t do this. It’s not because of who you are. It’s not because of what you’ve done. It’s not because you decided one day, ‘I think I’m going to be noble today and come to God,’ because there was nothing in you that sought me. Yes, you are more than a conqueror now, but not because you did the conquering or already were something worthy.”

In asking ourselves the question “Who am I?” we’re giving God his deserved opportunity to answer, “Just look at who I AM.”