Finding One's Identity

SERMON: 2016-09-18--ac16161--finding-one-s-identity-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:35:31.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 14 ('In Jesus name, Amen.') is the final formal closing of the sermon/prayer. Candidate 15 is marked as [BLANK_AUDIO], indicating a transition to non-sermon material (silence or music cue). ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- What are the most profound questions that any human being can ask is the question, "Who am I?" And as we continue this morning in our series of studies on the Holy Spirit, we're going to take just a little bit of a detour as we look at finding one's identity. Who am I? What does it mean to be a child of God? How does that work its way out in my life, and what difference does that make? So to set the stage for that, this morning we're going to read from the book of Ephesians once again, and we're going to read the first ten verses, and then verse ten is really the substance of my talk with you this morning. The theme of Ephesians, you will recall, is that God's purpose in Christ is to unite all things in heaven and on earth. He is the one who breaks down the dividing walls of division. He is the one who gives His Holy Spirit, helps us all to find our place in God's world and in God's kingdom. So Ephesians 2.1 begins with these familiar words, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live. When you follow the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient." That's the spiritual power that fills the atmosphere that makes people think what they think and do what they do. Satan is said to be the God of this world. We all experience his grip outside of Christ. Verse three, "All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath." That includes good people like the Apostle Paul, who was the most devoted of Jews before he came to Jesus, were all by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ. Even when we were dead in transgressions, it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that in the coming ages, he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. In verse 10, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do." Pray with me. Father, what a foundational question it is. Who am I? And for many of us, that's defined by the families that we come out of, good or bad. It's defined by the experiences that we've had in life, good or bad. It's defined by what we have accomplished in life, good or bad. And Lord, we live in a day and age where there is great confusion about who it is that we are. Are we merely the offspring of some mindless evolutionary process? Are we sons and daughters of God most high, and if so, what does that look like? How do we live it? How do we experience it? And I pray this morning that as we reflect on those themes, and as we hear from you calling us by name, placing us in the world and in the kingdom, help us to give ourselves to you with confidence and with assurance, knowing that you're a good, good father and you know us better than we know ourselves. And in a world where there is so much confusion, help us to let our light shine and to speak the truth in love so that many might find their way back home because of who you are and because of what you've done. So bless us in these moments together. Give me freedom and liberty, Lord, to spell out clearly what it is that you've laid in my heart and help all of us to lay aside whatever distractions or irritations that we sometimes bring with ourselves into this place. May we hear you speak, and may your word change us at the core of our heart in ways that we've never been changed before. We pray this for your glory and in the name of Jesus, amen. We live, as I'm sure you know, in a time of great confusion. Nowhere is that confusion more clearly evident than in the area of sexual identity. Used to be you were born as either a boy or a girl and grew up to either be a man or a woman and generally speaking, with rare exceptions, society quite understood what that looked like. That's no longer the case today. As recently as 1214, Facebook gave you two options to express your sexual identity, male or female. A year later, they broadened that description to 58 with an option to fill in the blank in North America and now in some parts of the world they've just expanded that list to 71. You can go online, you can see what all the options are. I don't even profess to know what they are, but I tell you we live in a day of great confusion. No longer is your identity determined by your biology, it is how you self-define. That caused one young boy in a class that was being taught this, he caught it better than a lot of other people and he said to the teacher, "So are you trying to tell me that if I self-define as an 18-year-old, I can get a driver's license and drive my parent's car?" Clever kid, because he understood what the principles were. And I don't mention these things so that we can roll our eyes or not have sympathy for people who struggle with gender identity issues, I mention these because it produces tremendous social confusion because we have social engineers who are trying to normalize what the Bible calls brokenness. First we went through it, as you know, with same-sex attraction, then we went through it with same-sex marriage, and now we're in the throes of going through this with transgenderism. And time and time again in the media you will find stories that push the agenda of those who want to promote transgenderism. There's a story out of Australia just this month. A four-year-old boy has entered into a gender dysphoria program to undergo gender changes. Four years old. Four years old. And there's a hospital that specializes, a clinic that specializes in this in Victoria in Australia, that says they have 250 kids who are lined up for their gender dysphoria clinic unit. I don't know if you can appreciate the chaos that's going to produce. Study out of Sweden tells us that those who have undergone transgenderism have a suicide rate 20 times higher than those who have not. And so clearly that doesn't solve the problems of gender identity, does it? So the big question is, where does this all come from? And more importantly, does the gospel have an answer? Does Jesus have an answer? Is there a place in this for the Holy Spirit? And I submit to you that there is. And that's what we want to talk about this morning in terms of finding our identity as we try to pick up on still a fourth characteristic of how the Holy Spirit applies to our lives, what it is that we have in Christ. And that is, if we can get that up. He helps us find our place in life. Quick review, last week we said we looked at three out of four things that the Holy Spirit does in our lives in applying to us the grace of Jesus. He makes us alive so that we can tune in to the things of God and see through the confusion that is sown by the principalities and the powers of this present age. And then He increases our hunger for the things of God. And then thirdly, we saw He increases our faculties. He is, in the words of Scripture, at work within us both to will and to work for His good pleasure. He makes us stronger in loving God and loving our neighbor. So that brings us back then to this fourth thing. If we can put that back up for just a moment. He helps me to find my place in life, or to put it in the context of what we're talking about this morning, He helps me to find my identity. He helps me to answer the question, "Who am I?" And the verse that is sort of powerful in that regard is the verse that I mentioned earlier, Ephesians 2, 10, it's the verse we quote often around here. It is, I believe, Valerie's life verse, "Where God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." "Where God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Four phrases in that little verse that are very important for our consideration. The first phrase is, "We are God's workmanship." The Greek word there is a word that means handy work. It's God creating something, it's the Greek word, poeima, it is used only one other time in the New Testament, and that is in Romans 1, verse 20, where it talks about God creating the world. We are God's workmanship, we are God's handy work. Why is that important? Because it is God who has made us, we are the sheep of His pasture, the people of His flock, as scripture puts it. He is the one who defines us, and He is the one then who decides who we are. And the reason that's important is that according to Romans chapter 1, we've talked about this in the past, the world is sliding into confusion and darkness because it always begins by rejecting God as creator. When we reject God as creator, then we can self-define. But when God is our creator, He is the one who defines. He is the one who decides, "Am I a boy? Am I a girl? What does it mean to be a male? What does it mean to be a female? How is the human race supposed to relate to each other?" Where God's workmanship, and then Paul goes on to say, "Created in Christ Jesus." Created in Christ Jesus, double meaning, we've seen a couple of weeks ago. In the original creation, God the Father worked through Jesus to call us forth. That is to say, it is Jesus who defined the original creation, made it good. You know the story, we fell into sin, God sent His Son. Now He recreates creation. And that's the Christian message. We're all dead in trespasses and sins as we saw last week. We've been made alive in Christ, and in Christ our lives are transformed and empowered. Why is that important? I'll tell you why it's important. Because even Christians, and this is my experience, have a hard time believing that God is big enough to transform sinners. If you don't believe that, look at your own life. Look at the besitting sins in your own life, or if it's easier, look at somebody that you know well whose character traits bother you, and you've been trying to change them for 10, 20, 30 years, and you'll discover that many of us in deep places of our hearts do not believe that God in Christ can make all things near. That's unbelief. And Paul's argument here is that where his workmanship created in Christ Jesus, he recreated and creates us from the inside out. Then he goes on to say, to do good works, where God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, to do good works. Good works are things that are done for God, through God, to bless him and to bless people around us. I love the way, actually, the Heidelberg Catechism defines good works in Lord's Day 33, Question and Answer 91. It asks the question, what do we do that is good? This is in the third section of the Catechism, where it talks about a renewed life because of union with Christ. What do we do that is good? And the answer, only that which arises out of true faith conforms to God's law and is done for his glory, and not that which is based on what we think is right or on established human tradition. When I look today at the whole field of human sexuality and the way our values are changing, then I can tell you that one of the motivations for many people is compassion for those who feel they do not fit in. I had a conversation earlier this week with a good friend of ours, and we got a talking about a young man in this person's congregation who struggles with same-sex attraction. And we had this conversation of what ought our response to be and what does love look like? And I can tell you that time and time again, our love tends to be conditioned by a human perspective as opposed to a divine perspective. God wants to transform us from the inside out, if not in time, then in eternity, so that we can really live for God. So good works, good works are defined as being, you know, we sang it earlier in the song, from him, through him, and to him are all things. All our thinking, all our loves, all our affections must be yielded to the authority of Scripture and to the authority of God, because God is the one who has the right to define humanity. Does that make sense? Where his workmanship, he has the right, offensive as it is sometimes to our deceived minds, he has the right to say, this is what I want of you, because this is what's good for you. Then, Paul goes on to say, not only that where his workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, but then he goes on to say that these good works have been prepared for us in advance. Now think about that. Before you and I were a gleam in our parents' eyes, we were conceived in the heart of God. And in the heart of God, before time began, he determined the time and the place of our birth, who it is that we would be, what our gifts, what our challenges, what our opportunities would be, and what he wanted to use us for in the accomplishment of his kingdom purposes. In other words, he knew before the beginning of time, that no matter how broken the world was, that in Christ, where his workmanship created to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. And the challenge for your life and my life, and certainly the challenge for our children and for our youth, is to find out who am I in God's plan, in God's purpose? What is it that he is calling me to, and what is it that he is equipping me for? In other words, who am I? What is my identity? So the question then is how do I find what that identity is? Let me talk about that, see how far we can get in the time that we have available. If you have read or have a copy of either Blessings and Curses or Olive Shoots around the Table, then you may recognize this chart as being extremely insightful into how identity is shaped in the natural, and because regeneration or renewal is not a nullification of the original, but a healing and a restoration, it's very important that we understand how the process works. Now this particular chart, as you might know, stems from a fellow by the name of Erich Erikson, a German-born American psychoanalyst who lived in the early part of the last century, not a Christian to the best of my knowledge, but incredibly insightful in his understanding of how human personality is shaped and developed. His argument is that it doesn't matter what culture you go to, where in the world you look at people, people go through what he described as eight essential stages that help them to find out who they were and that determined whether their life was successful in worldly terms or if it were unsuccessful in worldly terms. Notice that it actually, let me back up, notice that in the middle of his eight stages, which are eight choices that every person makes in the course of life, in the middle of that is identity versus role confusion. Show me the difference between somebody who knows who they are and somebody like that young woman who I mentioned in her congregational prayer who killed herself with a fentanyl overdose just this past week, filled with role confusion, and I'll show you two people who have gone to very different paths beginning with what I would call legacy. Legacy, biblically, is what you are born with in the world. You do not have control over it. It's who your parents are. It's the time and the place in history in which you're born. It is your genetic material that you inherit from your forebears. Many blessings or curses on your forebears that you inherit are part of that legacy, and it makes a huge difference in your life. Many of us who go sailing through life go sailing through life because we had a good beginning. Many people whose lives are a nightmare of despair and destruction do so because their legacy was so broken, very, very painful, and that's why it's so important for us to have compassion for people who struggle, whether that be with sexual identity or any other issue, because but for the grace of God, that could be you. Or it means the world of a difference if you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth or if you're born with a lot of disadvantage, brokenness, drug addiction, alcohol, parents who weren't there for you or for each other. So now you're born. You're born with that legacy over which you have no control, which, as we'll see later on, God has promised to redeem through faith in Christ. Now the first lesson you learn in life is a choice between trust and distrust. Trust, the best definition of basic trust comes from John and Paula Sanford. I mentioned it in the book. It's the ability to open your heart to others even when they disappoint you and even if you cannot believe they mean to do you good all the time. After 18 months of an infant's life, you decide can I trust my parents, can I trust my mother especially or not? And if I make the decision that I can and it's amazing the power of infants to make decisions, then I learn two very foundational lessons in life. Here is the first. I can allow people into my life. I can let you know me because I'm not afraid that you're going to hurt me. Second lesson is I can accept myself for who I am because you see if you love me and have a parental bond with me, then I know that I'm wanted. I know that I'm valued. I know that I matter. If that doesn't happen, then I learn what's known as basic distrust. And basic distrust says the opposite of this. It says I won't let people into my life and I don't like myself. And I tell you the world is filled with people who have never bonded with their mothers and who because they have never bonded with their mothers are filled with rage and anger and pain and they have no idea, no idea where it is coming from. So I conclude that particular section in my book and if you don't have the book or if you do have the book, I recommend that you reread those chapters. If you don't have it, get it or get a copy of it's also in a different form in olive shoots around the table. We have lots of copies of that and I'd be happy to give you a complimentary copy of that. Show me a man or a woman who is fundamentally secure, first in relationship with the Lord and then with other people, who is willing to open his heart and to do relationships even if they're painful sometimes and I'll show you a person who has learned basic trust. By the same token, show me someone who has a deep underlying sense of insecurity, who has a hard time accepting love from God and love from other people and therefore a hard time doing relationships appropriately and I will show you a person who has failed to successfully master this first stage of psychosocial development. And you see why in a world of broken parenting, we are raising a generation of people who are totally adrift, who don't know if they're wanted, who don't know who they are and who don't know where they're going with life. Because you see, life is built on building blocks. If you're in construction, you lay a footing and you lay a foundation and you build the walls and then you put the roof on. Bad foundation will make for bad walls, which will make for a bad roof. A bad beginning in life, apart from God's grace, and this is all in the context of God's power to change, as we'll see later on, a bad beginning will bear bad fruit and a lot of people struggle with things, they don't know where they come from, they don't know where the solution lies, they're filled with anger and even coming to Christ, for a lot of them, doesn't change that underlying place of pain and brokenness unless we can learn how to help them find those places of healing and restoration. It all begins here. Now, I had wanted to say a lot more about that this morning because I want to go through all those next stages, but we're running out of time and so I'm going to draw to a close here, but I want you to think it through. Look at the beginning of your own life, then ask yourself the question, "What kind of start in life did I have and how did it affect who I am and what difference has Jesus made in who I am and where I find myself?" Because as you can well imagine where this is going, Jesus makes all the difference and Jesus can do things in time and space that you and I cannot touch on and he is the one who redeems us from the futile ways inherited from our parents so that we can be the workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. That's what makes the gospel such incredible good news. And not only do we need to know that, not only do we need to know how to experience that and help each other with it, but it's our message to the world because the world increasingly does not know how to get beyond the reality of where we find ourselves today. Good enough? Stand with me. Let's pray. Father, nothing comes closer than who we are. And Lord, for some of us, our legacy is cause for Thanksgiving. For sure our parents or our upbringing wasn't perfect maybe, but that was pretty good. We were wanted, we were loved, we were allowed to be who we are and we've been encouraged and supported along the way and we've become pretty comfortable in our own skin in a good way and Lord, we're so grateful for that. And sometimes when we see the struggles that other people have, we just can't quite understand it and wonder why aren't people just pulling themselves up by their socks. Get on with it just like we did and help us Lord to understand we don't all come into the world with the same foundation laid. Some of us were conceived by accident. Some of us were a distinct disadvantage, unwanted and Lord, some of us sensed very early on in life that we were maybe the wrong gender or a disappointment to our parents or it was just hard. And then Lord, early on life just reinforced those painful places that we weren't wanted. Maybe our birth was difficult or we failed to bond with mother or we were abandoned and left alone or given up for adoption. Lord, we know that none of us is an accident. We know that even the worst of the worst of parents still did some good things and that above all you had your eye on us in Christ Jesus before we were even born. And you've watched over us and you've brought us to yourself and you're now busy helping us answer the question of who we are or your workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you have prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So Lord, help us to receive by faith what you have accomplished in Christ. Help us to know that we know that we know that we are sons and daughters of God Most High and that nothing but nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So Father, continue to manifest that love to us in the course of this coming week and then when we come back next week Lord help us to grow in our understanding and in our experience of what has made us who we are and what you've done in Christ to change us in all the places of our brokenness because Lord we all have those places. So thank you for hearing us now. In Jesus name, Amen. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:35:24.560; remove through 00:35:31.000] [ [CUT]BLANK_AUDIO] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:35:31.000; resume after this marked segment]