'The Truest Thing about You' by David Lomas

There are many true things about you—true things you use to build an identity. Parent. Introvert. Victim. Student. Extrovert. Entrepreneur. Single.

These truths can identify you, your successes and failures, your expectations and disappointments, your secret dreams and hidden shames. But what if your true identity isn't found in any of these smaller truths, but in the grand truth of who God says you are? In other words, lots of things are true about you—but are they the truest?

David Lomas invites you to discover and live out the truth of who God created you to be: you are loved, you are accepted, and you are made in God's image. It's time to move beyond the lesser voices and discover why everything changes when you become who you really are.
 
MY THOUGHTS:
Pastor David Lomas comes across as an insightful, really nice person and I like what he sets out to prove, although it's probably nothing we haven't heard before, or don't know intuitively.

In a nutshell, our identity in Christ has nothing to do with how hard we work or what we manage to achieve. It starts with believing something about Jesus, and then believing something about ourselves in light of what we believe about Jesus. When we truly grasp this, we can 'have' things without things 'having' us.

We are loved for who we are, not for what we can produce. People tend to screw the biblical work mandate up in our minds. We take something which is part of what Lomas calls our 'Imago Dei' (our identity in God)- the call to work, and make it a source of our identity. Or an idol. Or an escape, excuse, or source of self-worth.

I like his example of suddenly finding himself working as a nameless barista and waiter at his local Starbucks coffee shop, instead of being the hot-shot pastor he envisaged himself at the time.

He also addresses those times when we feel a need to complain about all we feel we're unfairly going through in our daily lives, without realising that God is standing by like a mother with a wet washcloth, wanting to scrub our faces clean and completely regenerate us.

Now that I've written this, I see something interesting. Although I wrote in my first paragraph that this material is probably nothing we haven't heard before, it certainly doesn't seem to sink in deeply for several of us, living in our everyday worlds which seem to keep encouraging us to strive, base our value on shallow things and wear ourselves out. It might be healthy to keep reading books like this one, just to remind ourselves of what's really true.

Thanks to NetGalley and David C Cook for a review copy.

3 stars

The Truest Thing about You: Identity, Desire, and Why It All Matters available from Amazon

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