When Robert was fourteen, no one noticed him. Although his family was intact, it’s members weren’t exactly a house of overachievers. Robert felt invisible and insignificant.
A growing fire burned within Robert to achieve, to be somebody of significance.
As he looked around, he noticed the athletes in his school. Now they were “somebody”! Robert, on the other hand, was a snapshot of poor nutrition.
He envied the kids driving to school in gleaming F-150s and Cameros, and he thought to himself, “They’re somebody!”
Robert observed how other kids admired undergrads from the university returning home for summer break. Academically, they were lounging in the first class of a jet cruising to success.
Robert felt like a nobody.
Then one day, Robert answered the door of his nondescript, brick, ranch house. A man with a clean face and a white shirt stood there smiling. He invited Robert to church, and Robert was drawn in by the man’s genuine interest in him.
Robert went to church the following Sunday, and three Sundays later, he was saved! While that was the defining moment of his life, it would be another twenty years before Rob fully realized what his new identity meant in a practical way.
Rob still had a gnawing desire to “be somebody”. With time, the list of people whom he held up as significant began to change. Whereas he once viewed academics, athletes, and the wealthy as important, everything in his new world seemed to indicate that the path to significance lay in a position of power at church.
He began serving, no, working in the church. The things he did were good; the reasons he had were empty. His goal was to “be somebody” at church.
He came to admire godly men who were prominent, not because of how they knew God, but because of how people knew them. Rob was still a driven man, climbing from college to a ministry internship to his “own” ministry.
One day, now in his mid-thirties, Rob looked around a packed auditorium of other preachers, and found himself feeling the same insignificance that had haunted him as a teen growing up “on the wrong side of the tracks”.
He looked at the good men on the platform that day and realized that he viewed them in the same way he had once viewed rap stars and college quarterbacks. Robert was still struggling to “be somebody”, and this was his ticket.
During that conference, Rob read in Colossians 3:11 that in Christ, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”
The same Jesus is in every believer regardless of status or station. He alone is God. It began to dawn on Rob that his virtue and value, his very identity, consisted of more than the people he knew and the things he had accomplished.
Today, Rob is not an underachiever or a man absent of ambition. He is a man who would tell you that you will never live higher than your own vices and ambitions if your identity is in anything less than Jesus Christ.