COME HOME TO FAMILY

How do you identify?

**OPENING JOKE**

What you say about yourself is important. When someone asks you that question, how do you respond?

“Soooo, tell me about yourself.”

Which identity do you choose?

Do you pick your occupation? Your religious affiliation? Your nationality? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation?

What do you say about yourself? How do you choose to identify?

Oftentimes, our identity is rooted in our origin. Who we are is informed by where we came from and, more importantly, who we came from. If you give someone your full name, you’ve already identified yourself to them by who you came from. The name you were given identifies you not only AS someone, but WITH someone.

The title of our series is “How do you identify?” The question I want to pose to you tonight is, “Who do you identify with?”

2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

Who your family of origin is may be a sensitive subject to you. Maybe your experience is good. Maybe it’s bad. Either way, it’s easy to let it define you. We have the opportunity to make an active choice, though, to more closely identify with the new creation than the old one. My identity can be in Shelton or in Christ. Who I identify with determines what I believe is mine.

**STORY ABOUT OWNING A SONIC**

The old man has as much power to identify me as I’ll allow myself to be IN him. The only way to move my identity out of in ME is to identify myself as IN CHRIST.

Being IN CHRIST means that you choose to identify with Him as a child of God and a co-heir with Jesus.

Romans 8:14–17 (ESV)

14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Identifying in HIM and with HIM means not just identifying yourself with God as His son or daughter and as a part of HIS body, which is HIS Church.

Ephesians 2:18–19 (NLT)

18 Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.

19 So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family.

The finished work of the cross means that IN HIM, our most important identity is not in a last name or a family of origin, but in HIS family.

We have the same Holy Spirit that endows us with Christ in us, the hope of glory. We have access to a better Father. You may have a good earthly dad. You may have had a bad earthly dad. Regardless, you have access to a perfect Father who has given you His name. His identity. And what that identity provides you is more than what any earthly name could give you. He gave you the name that’s above every name. He gave you the privilege of identifying with that name above your own. At that name, you have the authority to trample on demons. At that name, you have the authority over sickness and disease. Your first name and last name are irrelevant when you find your identity in the name that is above every name.

That membership in His family is not as only children, though. It’s along with all of God’s people. That means that we decide to be HIS people not as lone rangers, but as the Church of Jesus Christ, His body, working in harmony with one another to be all that God has called us to be. When you identify with Him, you identify with His body, which means we identify with one another as brothers and sisters. And this, Church, is where we have to come up in our decision to love one another and be people that others would want to identify with.

John 13:35 (ESV)

35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

It’s not about how well we love the world. The world will know we are the family of God not by how we love the world. It’s easy to love sinners. They don’t know any better. It’s the guy you sit next to in church every week that’s tough to love. But why would anyone in the world want to identify with this family if there’s nothing that sets us apart?

This is why people find it so easy to belong to the LGBTQ community. It’s easy to belong to that family. Christians disagree on how to interpret certain passages of the Bible and go start new denominations and make enemies of everyone who doesn’t interpret it the exact same way. Meanwhile, the LGBTQ community will just add a letter to their acronym to make you feel comfortable in identifying with them.

When you identify yourself as a son or daughter of Love Himself, it ought to be love that comes out of you. And when Love is the source of your identity, you can move past everything else that defined you for so long. The hurt. The trauma. What you lacked in earthly parents. When a child is adopted, they’re issued a brand new birth certificate with their adopted parents’ names. It’s as if you were in that family all along.

Galatians 4:6 (ESV)

6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

We’ve received adoption into this family, which means that the only bloodline that matters to me is the one drawn by Jesus that covers my sin and iniquity and offers me sonship in His family. It’s not my father or my grandfather’s blood that identifies me, it’s the blood of Jesus. That blood says I’m redeemed. That blood says I’m healed. That blood says I’m delivered. That blood speaks a better word than the blood of my veins. The blood of the Lamb says my identity is hidden with God in Christ and now I’m not a slave to sin, I’m a son of the living God.

Tonight, let’s put down what divides us and be the family of God. United by the common union of the blood as the body. If you feel far from home, don’t worry. You can come home to the place where you belong. You can come home to a new identity. You can come home to your real identity. You can come home to family.