Oh, to be 17 again! No longer a child yet filled with wonder and questions about life as an adult – who am I and how will I live?
One young man invested himself in sports. His identity was “athlete.” He played quarterback on his high school team until suffering a knee injury. The devastation was not just physical. “What I thought was going to be my life, sports,” he said, “I felt like was being stripped away from me.” Who was he, if not an athlete?
One following Sunday in church with his family, he listened carefully to the sermon. “The Lord is looking for a few good men,” the pastor said, “to live the life that He had planned for them.” In that moment of challenge, he received Jesus Christ as Savior realizing, “There was something bigger planned for me than just sports.”
Another young man had no plans for what was next in life. It made him touchy and irritable. A friend urged him to attend meetings led by the colorful preacher Mordecai Ham. At one of those meetings, he prayed to receive Christ. “I had little inkling of what I might do with my life,” he wrote, “but down inside I knew something was different.”
Both of these young men were turning 17 when they began their life with Christ. The first is Drew Brees, who found his calling as an NFL quarterback. He proclaimed his identity and purpose in Christ during his recent hall of fame speech. The second is Billy Graham, called by God to proclaim the gospel of Christ around the world. “If we don’t know who we are,” he wrote, “we’ll never know how we ought to live.”
In other words, your identity and purpose are linked. Whether you are 17 or 67, what you do next is grounded in who you are. To identify with Christ is to find your purpose here: “He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (2 Cor. 5:15).