You In Christ

Who Are You?

The Who song, “Who Are You?”

Data breaches with the latest being Capital One.

Identity Theft

Who are you?

Is you identity tied to your job, family, economic standing, or race?

What defines you identity?

I would like to take several weeks to explore who we are “in Christ”

This expression is used 240 times in the New Testament,

It is the shortest definition of a Christian in the Bible.

Indeed, it is the essence of true religion.

If I could only ask one question to help a person to determine his relationship to his Maker, this would be my question: ARE YOU IN CHRIST?

Everything God has for you is IN CHRIST!

“It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom from God for us—our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption” 1 Corinthians 1:30

“In Christ” signifies a personal relationship.

It expresses the most exalted relationship that can exist-an inseparable relationship, an indestructible relationship, an unspeakable relationship that cannot be defined in word only.

Abiding in Christ

We’re going to start with what it means to abide in Christ.

Last month’s memory verse John 15:7

If you remain in me, or if you abide in me

What does it mean to abide in Christ?

We are going to look at what it means to be in Christ, walk with Christ, to be a disciple of Christ, follower of Christ.

The goal of this study is to discover who we are, our identity in Christ which ultimately will lead us to be equipped to lead others to follow Jesus and become a disciple.

David Platt in his sermon, “The Disciple’s Identity: You In Christ,” put like this, “Christianity is not to be lived for self consumption.

The goal is not for us to look at some truths in so that we can walk away and say I am glad that I learned that.

The goal is for us to walk away from our time together this morning and be able to teach the truths of so at the end of this series after walking through eight weeks in this series, the whole faith family will be equipped not just to know what it means to abide in Christ, but to lead others to abide in Christ.”

We shouldn’t be simply receivers. We are to be reproducers.

Read Matthew 11:25-30

This passage gives us one of the most compelling, beautiful pictures of Christianity the way Jesus designed it to be.

And at the same time those verses give one of the most clearest, most powerful, most forceful rebukes of what we have created Christianity to be today.

Let’s look at two simple life changing truths that we have a tendency to completely miss out on today.

We give up all we have to Jesus

This is Christianity explained.

We give up all we have to Jesus.

Now the imagery that dominates this passage is the picture of a yoke.

And a yoke is a strong, heavy wooden bar that is placed over an ox in order to allow that ox to pull a cart or pull a plow.

And oftentimes a yoke could be singular, could be placed on one ox, but then also you can have a yoke that can be shared between two oxen.

And if you have a yoke like this that is shared between two oxen, then basically the picture is one of those oxen would be stronger than the other one.

You would have a weaker ox on one side and a stronger ox on the other side.

And the stronger ox would be able to basically the pull the load of the weaker ox.

Now the context here.

Jesus is speaking in the middle of the first century to a group of Jewish people who had been living under a very strict religious system, rigid religious system.

And so you had a people whose religion was dominated by all the things that they were supposed to do.

And that is what He is talking about with this burden that is heavy that has made them weary.

They were surrounded by teachers of the law—Pharisees who interpreted the Old Testament law, and basically put the law on the people and said, “You need to do all these things.”

Not only the Old Testament law, but they had added 600 plus more laws that they needed to follow, rules and regulations.

Let’s go over to Matthew 23:1-4 and see how Jesus uses the same word down in verse 4.

Read Matthew 23:1–4, “Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples: “The scribes and the Pharisees are seated in the chair of Moses.  Therefore do whatever they tell you, and observe it. But don’t do what they do, because they don’t practice what they teach.  They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them.”

That’s the picture.

Now Jesus comes on the scene and offers rest from all these rules and regulations. He says, “Take my yoke upon you.”

We give Him the full weight of our sin.

What does that mean?

What does it mean to come under His yoke?

First of all… We give Him the full weight of our sin.

The first Century Jews were feeling the full weight of their guilt.

They knew they couldn’t measure up to what the religious leaders expected.

Sometimes, I think that we do the same thing in churches today.

Put so many laws on Christians that they feel burdened with guilt because they can’t live under the burden.

I want to remind you that if you have placed your faith, if you have trusted in Jesus Christ, you do not bear the weight of your sin any more.

Isaiah 43:25, God says to you, “I will remember your sins no more.”

He has borne that for you completely.

He took the full weight of your sin and He nailed it to a cross for all of eternity.

So I want you to see that when we talk about giving up all we have for Jesus, being a follower of Christ, giving Him the full weight of our sin, that is not where Christianity stops, it is where Christianity starts.

We give Him our complete and utter inability to obey God

Complete and utter, total, absolute, inability to obey God.

What He is saying is, “You come to me because you have got His law on you and there is no way that you can fulfill the law on your own.”

He says, “You have come to me because without me you will never be able to obey God and you will never be able to please God.”

But the danger of Christianity, contemporary Christianity, is we think we can.

We think we can obey the law.

We think we can please God.

Many of us take it upon ourselves to try and live the Christian life on our own to the point that we are in danger of missing the point of Christianity altogether.

How do we define the Christian life?

Pray, study the bible, share the gospel, watch decent movies, don’t smoke, don’t use profanity, and you don’t do all the things the world does.

We believe that God’s pleasure in our lives is based on what we do or don’t for Him.

If we do enough, God is pleased; if we don’t, we fail.

You Will Never Be Able To Please God With What You Do

We can’t please God on our own.

We will never be able to please God with what we do.

Remember the guy with spinning plates on the early variety shows.

Some Christians are trying to keep all the plates in the air at the same time.

It was the curse of first century Judaism, and for many it has become the curse of 21st century Christianity.

Even the best we can bring to Christ is not good enough.

One Puritan preacher said, “Even the tears of our repentance need to be washed in the blood of Jesus Christ.”

Listen to the words of Ian Thomas: “I am talking about some Sunday School teachers. I am talking about some pastor in his pulpit. I am talking about some missionary on the field. I am talking about many ordinary, earnest Christians. They are wonderful people. You would love to meet them. They talk all the language of salvation and they mean every word they say. They are not hypocrites, but they are tired. Many of them desperately tired. They are overwhelmed inwardly with a sense of defeat and frustration and futility and barrenness. Story after story could be told of these men and women who bravely, doggedly out of a sense of duty, love and devotion go on and on and on yet deep down in their hearts they are tired. Again and again they have got down by their bedside and cried out to God with tears in their eyes, ‘God you know how barren I am, you know how empty I am and you know how stale I am and you know it,’ and yet they do not know the answer … This is the curse of Christendom. This is what paralyzes the activity of the church of Jesus Christ on earth today. In defiance of God’s Word, God’s mind, God’s will, and God judgment, men and women everywhere are prepared to dedicate to God what God condemns. The energy of the flesh. There is nothing quite so nauseating or pathetic as the flesh trying to be holy.”

This is what Jesus is saying.

He is saying, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I give you rest.”

It is not about what we bring to the table.

It is about what He brings to the table.

We give up all we have to Jesus.

We can’t do it

Jesus Gives Up All He Has To Us

Listen to what Jesus says, “Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:29

Why would Jesus want to put a yoke around us?

A heavy yoke

You replace one heavy burden with another?

Remember back to the picture we have got of the yoke and you have got the stronger ox and the weak ox.

Now see you have got the one whose strength is infinite and perfect and the one who knows intimately the commands of the master and the one who is experienced in obeying them to the very end.

He is the one who is inviting you to take His yoke upon yourself.

You come into the yoke with me and see that the stronger ox now makes it possible for the weaker ox to produce all that he does.

We replace the yoke of the law upon us with the yoke of Jesus.

Jesus gives up all that He has to us.

What does He have for us?

Number one goes back to the full weight of our sin.

He gives us full pardon for our sin

The standard of God is perfection.

God’s standards are higher than the religious leaders’ were.

Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

God’s standard is perfection.

No one person will ever enter the gates of heaven who does not live up to that standard.

Since we’re in the yoke with Jesus, we get in based on the perfect standard of Jesus Christ.

He gives us full pardon for all our sins.

Praise be to God that through the work of Jesus Christ, His perfect life and then His death for the burden for all our sins, yours and mine, on a cross, that He rose from the grave and as a result, He can say to us, “You are not guilty any more. You are pardoned forever.”

He gives us full pardon for our sin, and that leads to...

Results in peace with God

What’s interesting is that He uses the word rest twice.

Matthew 11:28, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

The first time He uses that word it literally means “relief”.

It’s the same picture in Romans 5:1–2, “Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”

We have peace with God.

We don’t have anything separating us from God any more.

Jesus has given us full pardon for our sin.

But we still have our inability to obey the law.

So He gives us the power to obey.

Now this is where it gets really awesome.

Let’s look again.

Read Matthew 11:29

That word “learn” there is the same word that is translated disciple in later in the book in the Great Commission.

So it’s basically, “Take My yoke upon you and learn from me, learn to be My disciple.”

And He says, “I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”

Here’s the beauty.

The reason Jesus can give us rest is not because He is giving us the rules and says now follow them.

Instead the beauty and what makes Christianity not just another religion is we live our lives, and it is Christ living through us, enabling us to follow the law, enabling us to be pleasing to God, enabling us to obey God.

He’s basically saying, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, learn to be my disciple.”

And He says, “I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”

This is a pretty astounding truth that Jesus is saying here.

You learn to be my disciple and you will find rest for your souls.

There is no other religious teacher in the history of the world.

No other teacher at all that would equate learning with complete and total rest.

He gives us complete power to obey God

When we join in the yoke with Him, and we learn from Him, what are we learning to do?

We are learning to trust in Him and not in ourselves.

And as a result, slowly, surely, we are relaxing in the yoke and learning to let Christ do in us what all along we have been trying to do for ourselves.

It doesn’t mean we sit back and do nothing.

We’re learning to rest from the work of trying to please God, and let Jesus do it through us.

It is not a passive picture, it is learning, it is following, it is going after the law.

It is not because the law doesn’t matter anymore which is what many people have done.

And the emphasis that the church has had on legalism they say we don’t have to follow the law.

On the contrary, we are free not to forget the law; we are free to obey the law.

And now we have in us, Christ Himself who enables us to follow the law.

The picture of being in a yoke with Him is that He takes over more and more every day and we find more and more rest in Him every day.

Do you want this?

This is the picture of coming into the yoke with Him

Results in Peace

The second time He uses the word rest, He says, “You will find rest for your souls”.

It is the picture of the Hebrew word, “Shalom”.

It is existential peace.

That comes when we let go of ourselves and we let Christ do what only He can do through us.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me” (Matt. 11:28–29).

Do you want that?

Then give Him the full weight of your sin and give Him your complete and utter absolute inability to obey God and please Him and let Him give you all that He has got, full pardon for all your sin and His very own ability to please and obey God.

And then we will be on the way to experiencing what it means to be in Christ.

Prayer: Father I pray that you would bring rest for souls; that you would draw people to yourself. And God I pray that the result would be burdens and heavy loads lifted. That we would no longer feel the weight of trying to even live out the Christian life on our own, but we would trust you with that. And I pray that you would supply us with all the grace that we need to let go of ourselves and trust in you completely. Let us find rest for our souls in Him. In Jesus’ name, amen.