Finding One's Identity

SERMON: 2016-09-25--ac16162--finding-one-s-identity-part-2 SOURCE DURATION: 00:47:39.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: The entire sequence of candidates constitutes the conclusion of a sermon, moving from theological exposition to prayer and benediction. Candidate 15 is the final concluding phrase ('we pray together in Jesus name amen') and marks the end of the sermon material shown. 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 --- I want to pick up this morning then where we left off last week finding one's identity. Part two, our scripture, is still Ephesians chapter two, verse ten. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. And before we get into that again, join me in just a moment of prayer. Father, your word tells us that in Christ we are sons and daughters of God most high. We are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. We are seated with him in heavenly places and you have made available to us everything that we need for life and for God lead us. And we acknowledge that often we lose sight of that and we pray, Lord, that this morning again by your word and through your spirit you will rewrite those places in our hearts where we have lost sight of what in Christ Jesus we are. And so we pray for a rich anointing of your Holy Spirit to bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, that nothing but nothing can separate us from the love of God. And Lord, we pray that when sometimes the journey is difficult and the pain is great, that you'll hold on to us as you've promised and that you will help us to persevere knowing that when the curtain falls on history we will see you face to face and we will share in your glory forever. So Lord, we just rebuke any spirit of rejection that lounges around our hearts so often and pray that we may know that we know that we know that you're our God and Father and that we are your children forever because of Jesus. So bless these moments together. Help me as I share the message you've laid in my heart and build us up, Lord, in the most holy faith to the end that the world may know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. We pray it together in his name. Amen. Well, as I said, I want to pick up this morning where we left off last week and last week we were looking at Eric Erickson's chart outlining the stages of psychosocial development. And we looked at that chart not as an end in itself, but as a tool to help us understand how the Holy Spirit makes real in our lives the identity that is ours in Christ Jesus. Our text, as I mentioned a moment ago, is still Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. As I pointed out last week, I believe that that verse means that for each person who is in Christ or who is a child of God, God has a specific place and destiny in life for which we were uniquely created and redeemed. And the job of the Holy Spirit is to make that real in our lives and to do so in the face of many forces and powers in the universe that want to undermine our confidence, our identity in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes this real. And He makes this real, I believe, in two ways. Number one, He restores what has been broken, which is why we're going to look at how God made it originally and then how it broke. And secondly, He does that by helping us to experience the blessings of God in those places that have been healed. So with that in mind, let's pick up where we left off last week. Last week we looked at, first of all, legacy. Legacy being what you and I are born into the world with, who your parents are, what you inherit genetically, how you were welcomed or not into the world makes a huge difference in how you fare in life. You have a good start, you have an excellent foundation. You have a bad start, it's going to haunt you possibly for the rest of your life. And I was thinking about that the other day. There are children who are born with what we know as fetal alcohol syndrome. It messes up the wiring in your brain. You have no say about whether your mom or your dad drank too much before you were born. But you live with those limitations unless God supernaturally heals you for the rest of your life. So we looked at legacy. And part of the legacy of being God's people is that we inherit the promised blessings of God if our parents were godly parents. The next step then, if we can put that back up, is that choice of trust versus distrust. The first 18 months of your life you have to make a decision. Am I wanted? Will I let people into my life? Can I trust that people want me and that they will do me good even if they are not perfect all the time? If you open up your heart, let people into your life, that establishes who you are. The opposite of trust is distrust. And distrust is the kind of person who says, "I didn't want to be born. I shouldn't be here. Nobody's going to look after me. I've got to look after myself." Some of you may remember, years ago I did a survey at our congregation and discovered we had 45, at the time, preemies who were incubator babies. 45. Now you've got to remember that what happens with, that until the 1990s, the medical profession knew very little about the importance of the mother-child bond. And so in order to keep these children alive, they were snatched from their mother's womb, of course, and then they had to be incubated in order to physically survive. But they weren't bonding with their parents. Many people who have not bonded with their parents go through life with an undefined rage. They're often angry. They don't know why they're angry. They have a deep sense of insecurity that says, "I don't know why I am in the world." And they have a hard time receiving input from somebody else because they're so used to parenting themselves. All of those decisions are made on a very deep subconscious level, very early in life. And how you respond to those things makes a huge difference. Well, that brings us this morning, then, to stage number two in Erickson's stages of psychosocial development, and that is autonomy versus shame. Now the word "autonomy" means literally a law to oneself. And that sounds bad, particularly in Christian circles, but it isn't. Autonomy means that having bonded with a parent, having a secure place in the world, and knowing that he or she is loved, the child can now step out and be a separate individual. And so in the stage of autonomy, the child has to learn to negotiate three lessons in particular. The first is I can be emotionally attached without having to give up a sense of self. I can say no and still be loved, and I can be told no without having to withdraw emotionally. Understand how important that is, because this means that a child is now allowed to be his or her own person. I know that I have a relationship with my parents, but I don't have to give up my sense of identity just to receive their love. The opposite of this is a thing called shame. Shame means, it's more than guilt, shame is feeling fundamentally defective. It means feeling I don't have a right to exist. And people who are shame-based tend to respond in one of two ways. They either become compliant, that is to say they hide their own personality, they hide their own wishes, they just allow other people to dominate their lives, or they swing the other way and they become controlling because they fear life is out of control. And then there are a lot of people who actually become both, and we call that passive-aggressive. You'll have met people like that. They're the nicest people in the world. They let it go and they let it go and they let it go and they let it go until they can let it go no more, and they blow. And of course, that leaves a chaos behind, and so that just reinforces the idea I can't have my own opinion, I can't have my own feelings, I've made a mess of things, and they dive even deeper into compliance. Does that make sense? But then you see the pressure builds up and it builds up and it builds up until it blows again. So at this stage in life, a child has to make the decision between autonomy and shame. And so, let me just read you what this looks like. Show me somebody who doesn't know how to do boundaries, exhibits compliant, controlling, or passive-aggressive behavior, and I'll show you someone who hasn't successfully managed to negotiate this second stage of psychosocial development. Who do you know in your life who is the nicest person in the world but has no backbone? Who do you know in your life is impossible to have relationships with because they always want to boss you around and will never receive from you? Or who do you know in your life who lets it go and lets it go and lets it go until they blow, and now you know the result is again chaos. So that's stage number two, and stage number three is initiative versus guilt. Initiative means you're learning to step out and undertake life because you are secure and it is safe for you to try new things. You are encouraged to be your own person. You are encouraged to live. Your gifts are recognized. You are just learning how to be yourself and how to do things. The operative word there is purpose, says Erickson, and purpose he defines as the courage to imagine and to pursue valued intangible goals guided by conscience but not paralyzed by guilt or fear of punishment. In other words, you learn to dream and plan and take chances even though sometimes you may fail or get into trouble. And a child who has successfully negotiated this stage has a healthy ability to learn and to try new things. Now the opposite of that is guilt, and guilt means that you feel wrong for even thinking that you can do something and fear sets in that paralyzes you. It's the kind of thinking that says, what did I think, who did I think I was anyway? And why did I even bother having an opinion? Why did I even bother trying to do something? Because somebody always knows better. So a child who grows up in the shadow of a very capable child will often just fall into that mode and sometimes children who are very gifted and who stand out because of their giftedness have to dumb down because people don't like them or they feel unloved because they are making everybody else feel badly. Initiative versus guilt. And there's a lot of people that have never gotten off the ground to live because nobody encouraged them to live and they didn't feel free to do so. Now the next step then that he talks about is industry versus inferiority. And that runs from ages 6 to 12. Probably can't read that on the chart. And as I've said before, this chart is in my book Blessings and Curses. It's not in olive shoots, but it is explained in considerable detail, actually more detail in olive shoots around your table and as I mentioned last week too, if you don't have a copy of that book, we have extra complimentary copies available for you at the resource center if you're interested in picking one up. Industry is discovering what you're good at or what you are not good at. And the operative or the definitive word here says Erickson is, let me find it here, the definitive word is competency. And competency he defines as the free exercise of dexterity and intelligence in the completion of serious tasks. It is the basis for cooperative participation in some segment of culture. So you're saying there is you learn what you're good at. And when you discover what you're good at, there is a place in the world for you where you are valued for the skills that you have. So that's an important stage in a child's life. I remember, I was thinking about this the other day when I was in grade 3, I think, we had, now you've got to remember that I've never been very good at sports. I excelled academically, but sports was not my strong suit. But I remember we had a number of exercises in phys ed class in grade 3 that involved running and high jumping. And at that stage in my life, I was fast and I was high. And everybody in my class in terms of the distance run and in the high jump. And I remember what an affirming thing that was in my life. It wasn't, you know, like a major accomplishment. But compare that to the person who goes through life feeling that you're never good at anything. You're always second best to somebody else. It changes how you view yourself and how you look at life. The alternative to competency is inferiority. And that is a deep or an abiding sense of being less than. And so show me a person who's always down on himself, who is afraid to try new things or tries them and then never finishes them. And I will show you a person who has never managed successfully to navigate this fourth stage of psychosocial development. Remember they all build on the stage that has gone previously. Which brings us then to where it is that we want to go with all of this, which is identity versus role confusion. Identity is who you are and how comfortable you are in your skin. And there is nothing more important, I believe, in the world than knowing who you are. Because if you don't successfully accomplish this stage, you will go through life looking for other people to define you. And you will always be at the mercy of social trends, at the mercy of friends, or at the mercy of society at large who is trying to impose their views upon you. Now there are at least three elements to identity formation that we need to successfully accomplish. I can be real quick about that. The first is you need to get a grip on your sexual identity and your appearance. There is simply nothing more important in the world than knowing whether you're a boy or a girl. And the confusion in today's society about gender issues ties in directly with this whole process of identity formation. Because role confusion comes out of brokenness rather than health. And we'll talk more about that a little bit later. The second area is personality and character. Personality is who you are. Character is who you are on the inside. Do you like yourself? Do you like not only -- let me just backtrack a minute and say in terms of sexuality and appearance, one of the most important things for a person to discover in life is I'm okay with how I have been made. And in a world that is obsessed with body image, particularly for our youth and young people, that is an incredibly important area because you can always find somebody who is smarter. You can always find somebody who is more beautiful. You can always find somebody who has more than you can bring to the table. And identity formation is being comfortable in your own skin, not only with what you look like and who you are, but also with your personality. And so a good question to ask is do I like who I am? Do I like the gifts that God has given me? Do I despise the gifting that he has given me? Am I jealous of other people who have more of whatever than I have? And remember, I've learned a long time ago how a person sees himself or herself in fact has nothing to do with what you bring to the table. Some of the most beautiful people in the world are the most neurotic and some of the smartest people in the world are the most insecure because it's all about who determines what the standard ought to be and who determines who I am. So there's sexuality in appearance, there is personality and character and then of course we have still a third one which is values and beliefs and that's a very important part of life because a child growing up at home tends to believe what his parents believe. And most of us come to this stage in life usually early teenage years where you start thinking through what do I believe? Do I believe the Bible? Do I believe what the Bible says about life? Do I want to live by the values of scripture? Do I want to be part of Christian community? Do I love the world? Do I love the values of the world? And those are very decisive life changing moments where you decide often on the fly but sometimes you know in the form of a crisis I decide who I am, what I believe and how I want to do life. And for some people gender identity comes into that place. Am I a boy? Am I a girl? Am I a man? Who am I? What do I believe and who shapes what I believe? And the opposite of that or the definitive word here I should say, let me backtrack for just a moment, the definitive word here is fidelity. And fidelity is defined as the ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems. The ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems. That sounds very complicated but it's really very simple. What it means is I can stick to my guns about who I am, what I stand for and what I believe despite the pressure that is brought about upon me by the people around me. It's hard enough for adults, it's especially difficult for our children growing up when they are moving away from the safety of a family into living in the broader world and so the value of their friendship and the opinions of their friendships are what parents are often fighting in terms of where their kids are going as their kids are growing up. A person who has a keen sense of identity knows he, who he or she is, what he or she believes and what he or she is prepared to fight for despite the disapproval of people around him. Do you get that? The opposite of that is real confusion which is a failure to remain true to myself. And we all know people like that. They blow whichever direction the wind is blowing from. They are like in biblical language children tossed to and fro back and forth. You can never lean on them because they're just so, it is so important for them to be understood and to be loved that they will compromise their values at the drop of a hat simply because they want people to get along with them. People like that are easy to get along with but they're extremely frustrating if you're trying to engage them because they will never stand up for anything and so show me a person who constantly adapts to their environment like a chameleon or who struggle with significant gender issues or consistently engages in self-destructive behavior such as eating disorders or slashing and I will show you a person who has not yet successfully negotiated this fifth stage of psychosocial development. How many people do you know even as an adult who don't know who they are? That's huge. Now before I draw some very practical conclusions from all of that, I want to take you one step further into the next phase. It isn't really something that I had planned on talking about but it's so important for us to understand because what is the next phase of life? It is intimacy or isolation. Intimacy is the ability to do relationships with other people. How many people do you know who are friendless? How many people do you know who feel like they never ever belong? How many people do you know who go through friendship after friendship because they don't know how to sustain deep and lasting friendships? Well here is the issue. They have never learned the stages that lead up to it because you have to know who you are before you can develop a significant and meaningful relationship with people around you. So just very quickly, making friends involves three elements. Keep this in mind. Keep this in mind not just for yourself but keep this in mind for every kid or every young person that you know, an ability to tune in to someone else's needs. Have you ever noticed there are certain people you meet up with them and all they ever do is talk about themselves? Your life could be falling apart. They don't, they're just totally clueless because they are so terribly totally self-absorbed. If you know who you are and you can know how to make friends and do relationships then you have an ability to tune in to someone else's need. Second phase is you learn an appropriate degree of self-disclosure. People fall into two extremes. Some people will never ever show you what lives in their hearts and then they wonder why nobody ever sees them, nobody ever comes to their help, nobody cares about them and other people they have diarrhea of the mouth and they are, particularly in today's culture, it's all out there and it's way too much for people to handle and so people disappear. They don't want to be their friends. Appropriate self-disclosure means that you can share wisely from your heart appropriate to the degree of the relationship that you have, flows out of a clear sense of identity. And then the third one is an ability to resolve conflict. Don't know about you but I doubt if I've ever had a friendship or a relationship that didn't run into a conflict sooner or later, wouldn't you agree that's true? That's true in marriage, that's true in friendship, that's true in church. Some people think the absence of conflict is a sign of a good relationship. That's not true at all. Resolves means that somebody is hiding themselves and they don't have the courage to step into expressing themselves and having an opinion because the minute you do, somebody is going to disagree with you and you're going to have a conflict on your hands. So the issue is not do we have a conflict? The issue is not are we going to have a fight? The issue is can we work our way through the conflict to come to resolution because that's how you keep friends. If you don't know how to resolve conflict, I know people who go through one friendship after another friendship and it's all great and wonderful and peaceful until they're misunderstood or some conflict arises and they don't know how to handle it so I'm out of here and they just develop serial friendships one after the other because they can't sustain true intimacy. What happens when you can't sustain true intimacy? Well, you end up in isolation. You're the kind of person that nobody sees. You're the kind of person who nobody understands. You're the kind of person that nobody ever visits. You're the kind of person who wonders what in the world is wrong with all the rest of the world. Show me a person who has a deep and abiding sense of loneliness, who has difficulty making and keeping friends, and I will show you a person who has not managed to negotiate this stage of psychosocial development. There have never been more people in the world than now, yet one of the tragedies of our day is that many are more lonely than ever and you can be in the middle of a huge crowd and be as alone as alone can possibly be. Now in case you're wondering where all of this is going, there are three lessons that flow out of this that I want to share with you as in a little bit we'll bring this to a close. And the first is this, we live, we'll go back to that for a moment, intimacy in isolation, the definitive word is love, a mutuality of devotion greater than the antagonism's inherent in divided function, again complicated language but what he is saying there is what I've just shared with you, love means the relationship is worth fighting for and no matter how many forces there are that try to break your relationship you have learned how to overcome and stay connected even in the midst of conflict. Three lessons now that flow out of this and the first is this, we live in a fallen world, you know this, but the implications to that are huge because what that means is that none of us lives up here perfectly, maybe you're listening to what we've been talking about this week and last week and you say you know my life's a mess, I haven't really learned how to trust anybody, I haven't really learned how to not be compliant or controlling, I haven't really learned even in my adult life what I'm good at, where my gifts lie, I haven't really learned who I am, I don't know how to stand up in the face of powerful noisy and loud people and I haven't really learned how to make friends and what hope is there for me, I want you to understand we live in a fallen world and because we live in a fallen world none of us lives up here perfectly, none of us have a perfect legacy, our parents may have been good but I can guarantee you they were not perfect and we haven't always in life made the right kind of life affirming choices and so for all of us life is a mixture of all of this, sometimes I trust but frankly sometimes I don't trust, sometimes I have a sense of my own identity in moving forward and other times I'm lost in shame, sometimes I'm guilted, sometimes I feel inferior, sometimes I just feel like I don't belong and sometimes I feel nobody ever sees me, welcome to the real world, we are sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we share in humanity's brokenness, now that said and this also needs to be said, while we are all broken some are more broken than others and for those of us who have had the privilege of living, of having had pretty decent parents and having had a pretty good upbringing and having a pretty keen sense of identity and having a good circle of friends, don't always understand people who have not been equally gifted as you or I and what happens then it's very easy to look down our noses at the struggles that other people have and say why don't they just smarten up and get their act together, it's easy for the Christian community to be very self-righteous about people who struggle with gender identity issues, very easy for us to look down our noses at people who struggle with same-sex attraction or people who gravitate towards same-sex marriage but for the grace of God you and I might have similar issues to struggle with in fact even in a church this large there will be people who struggle with those issues to one degree or another and instead of being ignorant or unkind we need to understand that we live in a fallen world and not everybody has had the kind of blessing in the course of life that you or I might have experienced and so humility and compassion is an incredibly important virtue that none of us should ever lose sight of the second thing that balances that off is that we live in a world that increasingly normalizes brokenness we normalize brokenness and we call it normal and some of you've heard me tell one of my favorite stories John Wimber founder of the vineyard family of churches tells the story where he had hired somebody to carpet clean for him and the guy left a mess behind him and so he took him to task and he pointed to the floor a big dirty stripe on the carpet and he said what is that and the guy started making all kinds of excuses the vacuum cleaner wasn't working well blah blah blah etc etc and Wimber kept taking him back to what is that and finally he got the point and he said well that's dirt and Wimber said to him that's good because if you don't recognize that that is dirt you can't possibly fix it or clean it up and that's a foundational issue in the world people when we normalize sin or we normalize brokenness even if we do it out of compassion we place ourselves in situations where there is no need or no ability to fix things that are wrong with the world and that is not a demonstration of love because at the end of the day we will all still stand before God and have to give account of the reality of sin and the need for redemption even Christians and I talked about this last time we tend to normalize our own places of brokenness and and justify who we are in our places of sin because we either cannot or will not overcome them and then we remain stuck where we are and that's why the third lesson is so incredibly important notice we've just added the cross Jesus came to do what redeem us and I often say to people I don't care what nest you come out of I don't care what decisions you've made in the course of your life I don't care how deeply you've been into sin and into brokenness I want you to know that where sin abounds grace abounds more Jesus Christ Valerie loves the expression nothing is bigger than Jesus and Jesus has come to redeem us from all the power of hell to restore us as the children of God a couple of verses just to drive this home one Peter chapter 1 verse 18 you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from your from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers but with the precious blood of Christ a lamb without blemish or defect and the Apostle Paul he drives it home in the words of Galatians 3 13 and 14 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us for it is written cursed is everyone who was hung on a tree he redeemed us in order that the blessing giving to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus so that by faith we might receive the promise of the spirit it is the spirit of God who establishes our identity and when next time Lord willing we come back to this topic we're going to look in practical ways how the Lord takes you and me with our strengths and with our weaknesses with the places where we know who we are and the places where we have no clue who we are how the Holy Spirit comes along and he reveals to us the Father heart of God he reveals to us what it is to be in Christ and he shows us in practical literal ways that the redemption that has been brought about by Jesus is big enough to change us no matter how broken or wounded we have been I'm going to close with these verses that some of you will recognize but they're powerful verses particularly in the ongoing discussions in our culture about gender identity this sounds grim but wait until the conclusion 1 Corinthians 6 9 10 and 11 do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God do not be deceived neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God now listen to 11 and that is what some of you were but you were washed you were sanctified you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and how by the spirit of our God let's leave it at that join me in prayer father oh father nothing is more foundational than knowing who it is that we are in Christ Jesus and nothing is harder to arrive at because we need your revelation and the work of your Holy Spirit and Lord we sit here this morning and we hear all of these things and we do some self-reflecting and Lord that may be good that may be bad but we want to grow in the security that comes from knowing you as our father we as your children and the fact that in Christ Jesus we have been redeemed from death and hell thank you for these moments together Lord apply this word deeply into our hearts give us hope and encouragement that there is coming a day when you will present us before yourself without spot or wrinkle or blemish for the glory of your name thank you for hearing us [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:47:32.360; remove through 00:47:39.000] we pray together in Jesus name amen [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:47:39.000; resume after this marked segment]