By: Nate Roten

Today, I get the opportunity to tell you a brief story about an amazing thing God has done in my life. This one unfolding truth has completely changed the direction of my career, family life, and pursuit of what is meaningful. This story, like any good story, comes with elements of tragedy, triumph, and an essential moral thread that remains long after the story is finished.

I was asked to give my testimony... a testament to what God has done in my life. As I write this, I am nearly 39 years old. I accepted Jesus as Lord when I was 18 years old, so there is a lot to tell, but if I’m honest, I was struggling to figure out what was important and beneficial enough to be worthy of your time and space on these pages. I couldn’t figure out how to condense 21 years of spiritual trial and error into one impactful story of God’s grace. Until after some thought and prayer, I realized that there is one consistent theme that runs through all of those years like a thread that has been woven throughout an entire stretch of fabric.

Scripture tells us that once we accept Jesus, we are a new creation. The old has passed and the new has come. However, scripture also reveals how we are to be engaged in the life-long pursuit of sanctification, meaning thatwe are not yet conformed perfectly into the image of Christ.

We strive to throw off the old self with its imperfections and shortcomings, but we won’t fully step out of the old self this side of heaven. Like a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel, we are being molded and shaped by the loving hands of the Father, but our entire time on earth is spent on that wheel being bent, pressed down, and crafted.

In a very small nutshell, I grew up in a Christian home with Christian influences all around me, yet I didn’t accept Christ until my freshman year in college. Throughout high school, I was a year- round athlete. By the time I was twenty-five, I had won dozens of medals as a powerlifter, including many consecutive years as a world champion with the AAU. I enjoyed being defined by my athleticism and accomplishments. I graduated from college with a degree in construction technology and became the owner of my own company as a General Contractor. I enjoyed the labels of being a self-made business owner and a knowledgeable builder.

I had constructed an identity for myself that I loved, but little did I know, God would soon humble me by tearing that down.

Beginning in 2008, my world started falling apart. The economic crash hit my company hard. We limped along for another year and a half, but eventually, we had to close our doors. That led to destructive emotional eating habits which led to thirty-plus pounds in weight gain. I was stressed about money because I was out of work, so we were living on my wife’s teacher salary, and we had just welcomed our first child into the world. Stress. Lots of stress.

Soon, I lost all the identities I once knew and enjoyed. I was no longer an athlete and lost my physique. I lost my business which meant I ceased to be an entrepreneur and Building Contractor. And worst of all, I was no longer the breadwinner of my growing family. Everything I thought made me ME, was gone.

As you could imagine, it wasn’t a thrilling time in my life and it produced some rather ugly traits. In wake of all this strife, I became very self-conscious and timid. I no longer trusted my decisions and lost any semblance of self- worth and I carried those struggles with me for years afterward. Honestly, many of those doubts still linger to a certain degree. It felt absolutely horrible. In many ways, I felt naked and vulnerable, lost in an endless fog of doubt and confusion of who I really was. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s accurate. Just ask my wife.

Losing the things that made up my identity was one of the hardest and yet most fruitful times in my life. This is one of those divine miracles where God took a deformed clump of clay and crafted something new. By His grace, God helped me see my previous identity for what it really was: a prideful, self-centered version of who I thought I wanted to be.

But it wasn’t who God wanted me to be, or – to be more biblically accurate — what He had already declared to be true about me.

Once I finally accepted that truth, God began doing the work of reconstruction.

He has done a great miracle in my life by stripping me of those old identities and revealing the new ones that have been purchased for me on the cross. I proved myself to be one of the world’s worst potters, but now, God is back at the wheel forming something new. Over the past several years, His skillful hands have formed me into who I am today, and He is far from finished.

At times the process can be painful because being molded means allowing God to bend me in ways I wouldn’t have thought of or wanted to go, but ultimately, He has the vision of what the end result will be and what it will take to get me there.

Incredibly, as I started to pull out of the tailspin, God began to establish my steps. In 2011, I started working at Samaritan’s Purse. Shortly after, I discerned a call to ministry so I enrolled in Seminary, graduating with a Masters in Discipleship. At the same time, I went through the two-year process of becoming an ordained minister with the Christian & Missionary Alliance. I am also now an Elder at my Church. If you had told me ten years ago that this is what my life was going to look like, I would have laughed in your face (and then probably cried on your shoulder) because I was sure that what I had done with my life wasn’t salvageable.

The truth is that I never regained my original identities. I am still strong, but I am no longer an athlete. I have the skills of building, but I am no longer a Contractor. I have a great job, but I don’t work for myself anymore. Those were earthly identities that can be taken away. They were temporal. But, what God established in me is better... and eternal. He showed me that my life was not only salvageable, but also valuable.

First, I have value and meaning as a redeemed image-bearer of God. This dark time in my story produced a poor self-image and timidity because I had made a mess of my life. Therefore, I couldn’t see myself as valuable. I felt like a failure with no future. Slowly, God began to show me that I am made in His image and therefore am designed to reflect His glory to the people around me. Tragically, man’s image was married by sin in Eden, but this is where the good news of Christ prevails. God reminded me that because Jesus stepped down into human history and literally purchased my redemption with his own blood, I am now just as valuable to Him as that cost he paid. When that reality finally settled in my heart, it was life-altering. I have tremendous worth, not because of anything in me, but because of what Jesus has done. That is a beautiful and weighty truth. And, because it is given by God, it can never be taken away.

Secondly, I have a glorious purpose in life. I’ve come to find that I am driven by purpose. The builder part of me needs a project to accomplish, and God has certainly given me that. I think that is true of all of us. There is a reason books like The Purpose Driven Life impacted millions, because we all long to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. The purpose we have been given is to go into all the world to proclaim and teach others about Christ. That’s the marching order and it comes with an identity by way of a specific job description.

That means I have a realistic set of expectations that I can act on. I love that because I can do something with that. The job description I have learned about so far comes in three parts, which I call a “Representative on mission.”

A Representative on mission is first and foremost an Ambassador. I am a son of the King and therefore a representative of his Kingdom, charged to embody the value system of this Kingdom and act with his authority. We see that in our world today as Ambassadors of other countries interact with our government to make important decisions. That makes sense to me.

Secondly, I am also a Minister of reconciliation. Because I have been reconciled to God, I have direct knowledge of what that is like. I have experienced it first-hand, and therefore am uniquely qualified to tell others about it. I like the simplicity of that statement; it feels more natural and relational to tell someone about Jesus when it is put in that context.

Lastly, the third duty of the job description is that of a Royal Priesthood. If you take a look at scripture (1 Peter 2:9), this Priesthood is an inclusion of a select people who are set apart to declare God’s excellency. In the Old Testament, Priests were assigned to serve at the temple and to be an intermediary advocate between God and the people. Similarly, God has taught me that we still have that role today as believers, but instead of performing the sacrifices, we point others to the one who became the only perfect sacrifice.

Now, these are things I knew in my head. I had read them many times before, but I never knew them in my heart as a literal function of my daily life. It took time for it to sink in. It didn’t happen overnight or even in the course of a few years, but this is the identity we are expected to walk in, so I am taking it seriously and learning how to apply this to my daily life.

So finding my true identity– learning to let go of inferior identities and start walking in biblical, God-given ones — is the main thread that has been woven into the fabric of my life’s story.

I have a feeling many can relate to this. We all want to see ourselves a certain way. We allow our abilities, careers, or positions to define us, but that is not what God wants us to be known for. There is no shame in being proud of these things, but they are things that we DO, not who we ARE. That is an important distinction. As followers of Christ, scripture gives us new identities. Ones that are powerful, holy, and eternal... filled with meaning and purpose. Our life-long pursuit is to grow into these new identities, to mature in our faith, to grow in Christ-likeness, and to proclaim the glory of Christ to the world around us.

This is true for us as individuals, and corporately as the Body of Believers. We live in a world of mistaken identity. Our culture wants to remove any and all labels so that we can be ‘free’ to be whatever we want to be. This has led to confusion about a whole host of issues like gender identity, sexual orientation, the sanctity of marriage, and the definition of life in the womb.

As redeemed image-bearers of God (individually and corporately) who reflect His glory, character, and morality as Representatives on mission, we can bring clarity, hope, and objective truth to those who desperately need to hear the good news of Christ, and that is my encouragement today. May we strive for unity in these truths and as Paul said, “to live worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to one hope at your calling — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”