Who Do You Say I Am?
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Who Do You Say I Am?
God proves His love for us in the gifts He gives
He Gives Us His Image
He Gives Us His Salvation
He Gives Us Provision
He Gives Us Proven Weapons
He Gives Us Hope
Westminster Catechism: Man’s Chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.
Glorify God, enjoy Him forever. Glorify Him. Give Him your life, put it all there for Him. Glorify Him by paying tribute, by honoring Him. Glorify Him by praising Him. And so much to praise Him for! The many gifts He gives to us, that prove His love for us. No matter how far gone we think we are, if we still long to please Him, He will accept us because He accepts His Son! If we seek God, as last week we learned He created us to do, to seek Him, we will find Him.
If we desire to have a relationship with the Almighty, and are willing to do what it takes to have that relationship, He is pleased to accept us, but only when we receive all He has for us, and that includes receiving His son as our perfect atonement, the perfect sacrifice to repair the broken relationship we have with our God. He created us to seek Him because He wants to have a relationship with us!
This morning, I want to reflect on what God thinks of us.
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Who do you say that I am? A just question for Jesus to ask. Peter answers with gusto, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God! And the answer is correct. The right answer is always Jesus, and Jesus is the Son of God and the Christ, or the anointed one of God. And Jesus was also a teacher, or a rabbi. Rabbis are famous for answering questions with a question. We see here in scripture who Jesus is. He asks you today, “Who do you say that I am?” and each of us needs to figure out the answer to that! Hopefully, we have faith to make the same statement that Peter did, and hopefully, we go one step further to not only acknowledge Him as Son of God and Christ, but to position Him as Lord of our lives.
Rabbis caused people to think by answering a question with a question. Today, we take the very question Jesus asked his disciples, “who do you say that I am?” and since we know the answer if we believe the scripture, we must also turn the question back on Jesus so we can better understand what He thinks of us. So this morning we ask Jesus the same question that He asked: “Who do you say that I am?”
Would you like to know what God thinks of you? Do you want your soul encouraged this morning by finding out how much God esteems you, and desires His best for you? I don’t mean what you think is best for you, but what He knows is best for you. If you really want to know this morning what God thinks of you, raise your hand.
Those that have raised their hands are indicating that they care about what God thinks about who we are. Now I ask that if you raised your and and you are able, to stand. Now I want this to be your sincere prayer to Him, and out loud, with all of us together, I want us to say to Him “Lord, who do you say that I am?” Let’s say it together:
“Lord, who do you say that I am?”
And now, to answer that question, we look to the Word of God that contains all we need to know about what God thinks of us. He thinks wonderfully of us. He cares deeply for us. He created us to glorify Himself, and created us to seek Him, why? Because He wants us to have a relationship with Him. If man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy Him forever, then what does it mean to enjoy God? It means to have a relationship with Him…forever. You can’t enjoy God forever just having thoughts occasionally about HIm. You can’t enjoy Him forever by simply receiving comforts from Him. To enjoy Him forever, you must have a relationship with Him. That’s how He created us, with relationship in mind. When He completed the creation, and said it was good, it was good because man was, before the first sin, glorifying God and positioned to enjoy Him forever. God loves us so deeply, we really can't fully wrap our heads around it.
Some of you are aware of the Love Languages. There are different love languages. These love languages are Gifts, Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. People who relate to each other, whether in family or friendship, should try and figure out what their own love language is, and also what the love language of those they care about is. God loves us with all of these. He desires quality time with us. No offense to anyone, but if your only quality time with God each day is reading a two paragraph devotional, you are missing out on a deeper relationship with Him. He wants quality time with you, and if you make a priority to have the quality time, you will be blessed for it.
He gives us words of affirmation. This one is easy enough. Scripture is full of the promises of God, His reminders to us of how He loves us. He does acts of service for us. He provides rain, and sun, and breath. He gave us a physical touch through Christ, who came to make direct contact with us. But this morning I want to focus on the first of the love languages, and one that, when we reflect, should increase our understanding of His love for us, and that is gifts. I will focus on 5 gifts:
He Gives Us His Image
He Gives Us His Salvation
He Gives Us Provision
He Gives Us Proven Weapons
He Gives Us Hope
So in answer to your question to God this morning, “Who do you say that I am?”, Here is what we find in scripture about the gifts God gives us to let us know who He says we are.
First,
He gives us His image:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God gives us His image? Do you ever have concerns about your image? Maybe you have been treated cruelly by other people, who have told you awful things about who you are. Perhaps Satan has convinced you that you aren't worthy of love, which is a lie. Maybe you look at other people, or magazines, and think you don’t add up, that you can’t be as beautiful as any of those other people. I have news for you: God says you are beautiful. You are a special creation of His. In the beginning, He made them male and female. He gave us each an imprint of His image.
Theologians call this “Imago Dei”, the image of God. And with His image on each of us. It is why murder is wrong. We look at the phrase in His image and this can be confusing. What does it mean? Scripture says God is Spirit. If He is Spirit, He does not have an image, a picture, or a photo of Him. We don’t know what he looks like because there is nothing to look at in the physical realm that we are confined to. So what is the image of God?
It is that we share some characteristics with Him. We have the ability to have relationships with each other, just like God eternally exists in relationship as 3 in 1, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They exist eternally in relationship with each other. They are in perfect harmony. They have love for one another, and in every purpose they are in agreement. We have the ability to relate to each other, and more importantly, we have the ability to have a relationship with God. In the garden, before sin entered the world, this relationship was, like the Trinitarian relationship, a perfect harmony. Man and woman were in perfect harmony with each other, and with God. This was His desire. This was what He said was good. To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. This chief purpose of man was being fulfilled in Adam and Eve until the Fall.
In Ephesians, we learn that we are to put off the old person and put on the new, and one of the reasons is that the new person, the one in Christ, has the image of God restored. Ephesians 4:24
and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Paul said something similar to the Colossians church: Colossians 3:9–10
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices
and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
The reason murder is wrong is because we are made in God’s image. This includes the unborn, unfit, undesirable, or any other copout reason used today to kill: Genesis 9:6
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
Murder is not the only wrong thing we can do to each other, when we each carry the image of God. What we speak about each other can also be seen as a serious offense, since if we curse someone else, we are cursing someone who has the image of God. James wrote some strong words about how we use our tongues: James 3:9
With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
He gave us His image so we could relate to Him, to have community with Him as the Trinity was in community. Yet, this was disrupted when sin entered. God’s gift of His image that He puts into each person, then, is tarnished. It is damaged. He gave a great gift in the Imago Dei, the image of God, but it was fouled up by sin. Now mankind no longer had the perfect relationship. Adam and Eve responded immediately with a feeling of deep shame and sorrow. They covered themselves because of their nakedness. And the nakedness is often glossed over. We think only of the physical nakedness, but worse than that was the spiritual nakedness. Adam and Eve were naked before God not only because they had no clothing, but what they felt the need to cover was not just their skin, it was an understanding of the damage that was done to the image of God that He had gifted them with.
Those who put their faith in Christ he determined ahead of time to become like Him: Romans 8:29
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
So He gifts us with His image, yet the image of God in us is tarnished because of sin. As terrible as this is for man, it was also a loss for God. He had created mankind to have a relationship with Him, yet in His holiness and justice, He no longer could be in communion with mankind. So He gave us another gift: His Salvation.
God first gave a sacrificial system, to point people to the seriousness of their sin. He gave them the law so that they would understand how far removed from His standards they were. He gave them priests to mediate between Him and the people, since they were no longer worth to come to Him because of sin. And then in the incarnation, He completed the work of salvation through Jesus Christ. No one else could have done it.
God gave life to mankind. God gave His image to mankind. Yet, sin took away the perfection He had designed us for. Sin brought death. Romans 3:21–26
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—
the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction:
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.
It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
So God offers us salvation from our predicament. Faith in Jesus Christ brings the cure for the curse. Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This free gift is not a marketing gimmick. I once got a call on my phone that I could get a free gift, a new TV. It wasn't really free, though. I had to go and sit for a time share sales pitch. And boy, was this guy good. He presented in such a convincing way, that had we not forgotten our checkbook, we would have signed away on the spot, though we couldn't afford it. The free TV was going to cost $7,000 to sign up, and who knows what monthly or annual costs in the long run.
The free gift of salvation isn't given to you only after you hear a slick presentation of the gospel and then get someone to woo you to sign a confession card with an impassion plea. The free gift of salvation comes when in your heart, you have decided that you are in a desperate need for a way out of your sin problem, and know that you must not carry on the way you have been carrying on. I read a book called, “stop asking Jesus into your heart”. I highly recommend it for any Christian, but particularly if you struggle with feeling sure that you are in Christ. One of the points the author makes is that many people can’t point to this solid moment when they know they answered the call. This worries some people. They hear testimonies of others who sprang forward at the evangelist’s altar call. But really, many people, particularly those who grew up in a Christian home, simply come to a point that they realize that they really do believe the songs they've been singing and the gospel they have heard.
They can’t put a date or time on it, they just came to a solid understanding. This testimony is just as valid as anyone else’s. We often hear of someone who struggled with math, and then in a moment of epiphany, they finally got it. This is a huge deal to that person, but to another student who just plodded along, and was tested with straight a’s, may not feel they ever had that aha moment. The important thing is, the one who learned gradually has just as much appreciation for being able to comprehend math as the one who struggled until the aha moment.
The author of the book “Stop asking Jesus into your heart” basically says this: It is your posture before God today that tells you whether you are truly saved or not. It doesn't really matter whether you had an aha moment, or signed a card at a bible camp or VBS as a kid, or were at a big crusade and responded to the altar call with a thousand others. The question is, where are you today? If your posture before God continues to be one of repentance and a confession of Jesus as Savior, then you are doing well, but still you must persevere to the end. True saving faith, that saves once and keeps you saved, is faith that perseveres to the end. In other words, what you have done in the past is a lot less important than where your heart is right now.
God loves you enough that He gave you His image. Sin has hurt our relationship with Him, but He also gives us His salvation. This gift is particularly hard some people to receive. Sometimes we get a gift from someone and feel a little guilty, particularly if it is an extravagant gift. We may think we are undeserving, or that we will never be able to reciprocate the generosity of the one who gave the gift. God knew we were undeserving of His salvation. He knew we would never be able to get ourselves right without His help, and that’s what makes this gift so special. Its what makes us realize how intensely He cares for our relationship with Him, that He would do whatever it takes to save us. He loved us enough to allow Christ to die for us, even though we could not imagine how we were worth dying for.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—
but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were still sinners, He died for us! We never could deserve this! That is love. God’s love language to us is most powerfully seen in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. He wanted us to have our relationship restored, and now we can have it restored because of the Gift of God, eternal life, through Jesus Christ!
Next, He gives us provision. Scripture is full of examples of His provision. He gives rain to grow food. He gives breath. He gave manna and quails to Israel in the desert. He gave good land to His chosen people. He gives us all we need, when…. When we seek first His Kingdom. “Seek First the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. He tells us not to worry for the things of day to day living. The Father knows our needs, Jesus said.
He provides also for our healing. Though the Christian life is ultimately about the future we have, with eternal life and happiness with our Savior, He also gives us healing today. We don’t always understand this, but the promise is that we pray for sick with an expectation of recovery and we have witnessed this in the body of Christ many times. Ultimately, He will wipe every tear from our eye, and there will be no more pain or sorrow or sickness. In the meantime, we pray with faith that God can and will heal today.
Next, God loves you and proves it because for those who put faith in Christ, He equips us for spiritual battle by giving us proven weapons. He gives us the armor of God. We are told to put it on, all of it. The full armor of God means you don’t leave back any part of it. We are to take up the shield of faith. Where do we get this shield? How can we have faith? He gives it to us, and we can increase it. Faith comes from hearing the Word of God. We need to always be reading, listening to biblical teaching, and filling our mind with the things of God so that we are transformed by the renewing of our mind which only comes by His grace and our acceptance of the Word.
He gives the belt of truth. Jesus spoke truth to Satan when Satan tried to tempt Him. We have truth in scripture. We must study it so we know it, and memorize it. The belt of truth is key. When you speak the truth, you are on much safer ground than when you do not. The helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. Salvation must be on our head, as a helmet of protection. Some have supposed that this means our brains are worth protecting, and it is true. We must protect our minds. Our thought life must be submitted to HIm. We are to take every thought captive and submit it to Christ. The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God. Do you see how every one of these pieces of armor are linked to to scripture? Do you ever wonder why I never shut up about the importance of scripture? It’s because God loved you enough to provide it to you to be used in the spiritual warfare that you and I experience every single day. the belt of truth: truth is found in scripture. The breastplate of righteousness. The instructions for righteous living are found in scripture. The gospel of peace: Where do we find that? In scripture. The helmet of salvation. Where is the best source of information about the plan of salvation? In scripture. The sword of the Spirit IS scripture, the Word of God. The armor of God could be summed up this way: Know the bible, it will save your life! Know the bible, it will defeat the enemy Satan! Know the bible because it is God’s gift to you for use as a proven weapon. He gave it to you because He loves you. He thinks highly of you and did not want you left without a proven weapon to use in your battle.
In the movie, “The Ghost and the Darkness”, Val Kilmer’s character is hunting a man killing lion and finds himself face to face with it. He has an easy shot. The lion is standing still. He takes a breath and pulls the trigger, and it just goes click. Misfire. Remington learns that he had traded rifles with someone and had not tested the weapon. “You went into battle with an unproven rifle?” He asked. The point is important. You wouldn't go into battle with unproven weapons. You would test them. Vehicles, radios, weapons, supplies, are all checked and double checked before a battle. Kilmer’s character in the movie was foolish to go hunting with a rifle he had no idea would work, and he was lucky to survive it.
We are not given weapons that are unproven. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is being sent on his journey, where he would need to endure many trials and temptations to persevere to reach the celestial city. He is prepared for his journey by being taught scripture. Then he is brought to a room that has enough weapons and armor to outfit saints as many as the stars of heaven. This is an allegory for the armor of God. It says these were “fully tested weapons”. Were they tested? I’ll say they were! And we have all of scripture to testify to the proven effectiveness of these particular weapons.
The belt of truth, proven by Christ in his temptation. The breastplate of righteousness, proven by Abraham, whose faith was counted as righteousness. The gospel of peace, attested by the many martyrs who went to their death with a heavenly glow on their face, assured of their final state of glory with Christ. The first of these was Stephen, who we learned about tin Acts. The shield of faith, wielded by David, who wore no physical armor, but went against the giant with no more than faith in the deliverance of God. the helmet of salvation, worn by Paul and many others who were protected supernaturally in their mission to spread the gospel. and the sword of the Spirit, which all of the writers of the New Testament wielded with deadly accuracy as they penned the words that divide between soul and spirit.
He gives us proven weapons because He cares about our personal spiritual safety. The reason is the same as this whole message, I hope you always remember it. There is a reason for God’s gifts to us: He desires to have an eternal relationship with us, and since He does want us to persevere to the end, he gave us much hope in that future through the prophets.
That is the gift of His Hope. Last week, I ended the sermon with a taste of that hope. We find it in the book of Revelation and other places. So much today among the prophecy-heavy preaching of many of our brothers in Christ is based upon all the bad things happening in the world. Events are leading to the end. That is true. Events are always leading to the end. Some have turned to astrology to determine the things that are going to happen next. I have to say, though, that I think the cataclysmic events in the revelation, the bowls of the wrath of God’s judgment, are much worse than simply a lunar eclipse. The things in Revelation are so terrible it is hard to imagine how it could be simply be an astrological event.
Here’s my point: If anyone is preaching on the end times all the time, maybe God called them to do that, but if it isn't something that brings hope, it isn't from God! End times prophecy for the saint ought to make you leap for joy, knowing that the time is near! God has given this hope to the saints, that when the terrible judgments come on the earth, we will already have been snatched away by Him, and we will be in His presence.
If someone wants to talk about the ends times all the time and all it does is bring fear to your heart, either you aren't saved, or else the doomsday prophet is not speaking the truth of God to you. His gift to you is Hope! The story of Christ is a story of hope! Be aware of the evil in the world. If it reminds you to be a bold witness, do so. But I am tired of some of the fear I hear about in the church in the US. Muslim takeover, gay marriage, loss of rights. Despite these, if you are in Christ, you are commanded by Him to have joy!
He has given to you and I the whole of scripture to be reminded of what He has done for us and what he will do for us! He made you in His image because He loves you so much, and wants to have a relationship with you. He wants that relationship bad enough that when we put a wall between us and Him with our Sin, He provided a Way over that wall. More than that, He destroyed the wall with His gift of salvation. He reminds us of His love for us in that He provides for our physical needs. He has given us proven weapons of spiritual warfare. He gave us the manual for those weapons to study and be familiar with them, and He gives us many war stories of others who have successfully wielded these weapons so that we would be encouraged and have confidence that we, too can use them. Finally, He has given us hope that He will complete everything for our good and for our benefit, that we can be with him forever.
Earlier you asked the Lord, “Who is it that you say that I am?” In scripture this morning, we have found the answer. He says “you are mine, because I made you in my image and gave you the breath of life. You are so valuable to me that I long to have a relationship with you, not just now, but for eternity. I created you to bring glory to myself, and to enjoy me forever. I provided a way to repair our relationship when you sinned, because I didn't want anything to keep us apart. You are my child who I provide for, giving all of the things you need. You are my chosen servant to do spiritual battle in my army, and I have not left you without all the tools you need for this warfare. I have provided the same weapons to countless of my faithful before you. They are proven weapons that will see you through. You are mine, and I want you to persevere to the end, so I have sent many prophets to give you words of encouragement and a hope for your future. Who do I say that you are?
My child, my friend, my chosen ones, my special creation, the apple of my eye.”
