Who are you?

Compass Kids dismissed

our key passage today is going to be . While yall are turning i want to kind of set up what we will be talking about today. I’m a man of eclectic taste, especially in music. you would be hard pressed to find a genre that i cant find a song i enjoy. my dad passed down to me an appreciation of oldies and classic rock. because i named this sermon “who are you?” i have had the who’s “whooooo are you? Who? Who? Who? Who?” stuck in my head. which then leads me to teenage wasteland, magic buss, and those get me thinking about all of the rock band songs i used to love and before i know it I’ve spiraled into a black hole of music never to be seen from again. all joking aside, my goal today is to break apart and answer three seemingly simple questions. fist, who were you? second, who are you? finally, who do you want to be? so, let’s read our passage, pray, and get started.

(ESV)

The Ministry of Reconciliation

11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. 12 We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. 13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

pray

Every year around this time, we start reflecting on who we are and what we want to change about ourselves in the next year. we make a list of new years resolutions and, would it surprise anyone that, 75% of us don’t even make it 30 days before giving up on them. Only 8% of us actually accomplish the resolution we made. We say things like, “ in 2020 I’m going to eat healthier, read more, go back to school, be nicer, be a better christian, or just be a better person.” We give it the good ole college try, and by valentines day, 3 quarters of us have failed. Why? what is it about us that makes us so inept at being better versions of ourselves? the answer to that question lies within the answer to our main question of the day. Who are you? put it another way, what is your identity? Your identity in will dictate your destiny. What do i mean by that? let’s say your Identity is in your career. you are going to work as hard as you have to to become the best you can in that field. now success in that field is determined on more than just your hard work, so i am not going to stand up here and tell you that if you work harder, you will be the best. however, because i have seen it happen time and again, i can guarantee what will happen if you allow your career to dictate who you are. your relationship with your spouse will be damaged, if not deteriorate completely. you will miss out on making memories with your children, then justify it by saying that you are working these long hours for them, and be absolutely shocked when they resent you for not being there. you will lose friends. your health will suffer, and at the end of your life you will look back with regret because you will realize just how replaceable you really were in that company, and how you traded the things that really mattered for the facade of greatness. Just in case you were wondering, i like to ease you into things without coming off too strongly. We put our identity in things like sports, I am an Alabama fan, Jason is a Tennessee fan. trust us when we tell you that sports make a terrible identity. we both have seen the insanity that come form being a football fan in the sec. Society tells us that we should put our identity in our sexuality or gender or, as they would put it, lack of gender. our race or heritage becomes our identity. i am white, or i am black, or i’m Irish, Scottish, African, or whatever. We place our identity in our Country or political party. so, I’m an American or I’m a republican or democrat. if your identity is in your sexuality, you will be offended when someone speaks out against it. if your identity is in your race, you will inevitability think yours is inherently better than others. ask you again, Who are you? I would go as far as to say that there aren’t thousands of identities, but rather there are just two. your identity is either in Christ, or it is in yourself. you see, from what i have seen in scripture, that all other identities ultimately lead back to you resting in your own understanding rather than Gods. Moving forward this morning, we need to make a very clear distinction between these two groups. If you are here this morning and you have never repented of your sin and believed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, you are trapped in our fist question until that happens. you can never move from who you were until you have accepted Christ. So, for those of us whose identity is in Christ we are going to answer the question of who we were, and for those who’s identity isn’t in Christ the question we will be answering is who are you. you see, all of us we at one point trapped where you are now.

so, Who were we? what does it look like to have an identity that is not in Christ? lets go to scripture. if we go to the beginning, we see that the first man and woman were created perfectly in the image of God. however, it only takes 3 chapters of the bible before we see sin enter into the equation. now, i do think it is important that we take a minute and define what sin is. growing up i was lead to believe that sin was breaking any one rule on a list of rules that God had set up. even though that is a form of sin, that is not the definition. Sin is anything that is in direct rebellion to the character and nature of God. To further understand sin, you have to understand who God is. The second or third week of Sunday school was on the attributes of God, and one of the things i loved about that lesson was that it showed that even dedicating an hour to the topic, we could not even begin to scratch the surface of who God is. for our purposes today though, lets narrow it down to one word. perfect. God is perfect. God is perfectly loving. God is perfectly merciful. God is perfectly just. God is perfectly holy. And we are not. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. we are not only born into sin, but from the moment we are conceived we are in sin. We see in romans that sin came into the world through Adam, the first man, and because of that all men were cursed. This is one of the primary reasons the virgin birth of Christ is so important. Because he wasn’t conceived by a human father, He wasn’t born into sin. if we take the romans road to get to an understanding of the human condition, we would see in that all have sinned and fallen short of the the glory of God. We would see in that the cost of that sin is death. I want to pause a second and clarify some bad teaching that is out there. Hell, or the spiritual side of death that comes as punishment for our sin, is not seperation from God or the absence of God. God is omnipresent, and, by his very nature, cannot not be somewhere, including hell. So, if God is in hell what is he doing there? because we know he isn’t there being punished. Hell is the God of the universe pouring out his justice on every unrepentant sinner for all of eternity. this is the cost of your sin. it isn’t just dying a physical death, but it is also having the full weight of God’s justice and wrath be poured out without end. Remember, we are taking a real look at who we are before Christ as an identity. We have to get to the understanding that the enemy has done a wonderful job in his ability to convince our culture to lower their view of God an elevate their view of man. to the point that even when i make a statement like hell is God pouring out His perfect judgment on sin for all of eternity, a doctrine that has been held for not only all of Christendom but Judaism before that, that even the Christians have this angst that wells up inside us that says “thats not the God i serve. My God is loving.” I would contest that scripture shows a different understanding of love. in scripture we see that God’s Justice and His Mercy go hand in hand. We see that He and He alone is able to perfectly be wrathful and perfectly loving. is this a hard truth? absolutely. but it is only hard because of the sinful flesh we are born into. let me show you the response the bible shows us we should have when we truly recognize our sin in light of the Holiness of God. Turn to (ESV)

Isaiah’s Vision of the Lord

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

6 In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said:

and in sin did my mother conceive me.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory!”

4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Did you see it in verse 5? Isaiah, a man most of us would use as a standard for what a righteous man looks like. a prophet of God, sees a vision of God, and is immediately undone by the reality of who He is in light of who God is. When you come into the presence of God, you will be brought to your knees by the depths of your sin. every time in scripture we see someone come into God’s presence, at least the first time, they are undone. it happened to Abraham, moses, Joshua, peter, Paul, and the list goes on and on. for those of us who have been saved, it has happened to us too. It was ten years ago. November 4, 2009. to this day i can still feel the duality of emotions on that night. i remember the desperation i felt when Christ revealed to me the depths of my depravity. When we are able to truly understand that we deserve God’s justice , we become desperate in our cry for help. we quickly realize that this debt is far too great for us to pay, and in this moment of clear honest self reflection and hopelessness in our own strength, we are able to truly turn to Jesus and say i need you. we are the tax collector who is pounding our chest and crying out lord have mercy on me a sinner. you know that you deserve His perfect Justice, but you appeal to his perfect mercy, and you are able to do so because of His great love. puts it this way. (ESV)

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

So who were we, or if you don’t know Jesus who are you. you are an enemy of the God of the universe, but even in spite of your direct rebellion to everything He is, he still died for you. if you look at the last verse of our core passage for today you will see that God took all of your sin and while Jesus hung on the cross placed it all on him. He then poured out the entire weight of His wrath on the head of Jesus. verse 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. why did God do that? why did he take my sin and put it one his beautiful and perfect son? so that i could become the righteousness of God. Christ took your sin and your punishment, so that you could share with Him in His righteousness. for those of you who might be sitting here and God has used this to reveal to you your desperate need for a savior and you don’t know what to do, the bible says repent and believe. Turn from your sin and follow Him. Believing that His work and His work alone has saved you from the punishment of your sins, and it has mad you a new creation that will continually be made into His likeness.

now i want to speak solely to those in the room who have been born again and as, verse 17 puts it, is a new creation. I think all to often we forget where we have come from, or the whats at stake. my goal for us this morning is to remind us who we are. I want you to walk out of here with your head held high and a refreshed hope in your identity. Often time we forget, or in some cases never knew, that the gospel isnt only necessary to salvation, but to every second of every day for a believer. we have bought the lie that salvation is an event rather than a process. Yes, we are justified in an instant, but salvation doesn’t end there. we have a life of ongoing sanctification that we cannot do on our own. it is as if we go thanks for the reset Jesus, but I’ve got it from here. We then wonder why we are constantly falling flat on our face when trying to walk a righteous life. sanctification was never meant to be something you just mustered up the gumption to look more like Christ. God saves us from the penalty of our sin when he justifies us and he is saving us from the power of our sin by sanctifying us. as we look at who we are, i want to pull out some practical application for what we should look like in our identity. however, i dont want to fall in to the trap of moralistic dos and donts, because the message of the gospel is you cant. your inablity to do good, apart from God, is the point of the gospel. you needed him to save you from the penalty of your sin, and you need him to help you overcome the power of sin. i love how romans 7 puts this. (ESV)

21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

so every practical application that i give you, has to be understood through the lens that if you try to do these on your own, you will fail every time. not only that, but you will inevitably try to muster up enough goodness, and you will fail, and when you do remember the correct christian response to failure isn’t withdrawing or running from God, but run to him in humility and repentance. so lets get to it

if our identity is in christ, and we are being made in his image, then we must respond in a christ like manner.

the first practical application i want to give you this morning is quite simply to embrace your Identity. Remember there are two identities those who are in christ and those who arent. you were once in the flesh, but that is no longer who you are. so stop acting like it. Embracing your Identity in christ means acting, living, and even thinking differently. along with verse 17 of our Core passage, you have Romans 12:1–2 (ESV)

A Living Sacrifice

12 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

we are going to refrence this passage more in a moment, but for now i want you to notice the contrast of being conformed to this world vs being transformed by your mind being renewed. as i stated before, it is not only our actions that have to be biblical, but our thinking. you no longer get to look at the world through any other lens than the lens of scripture, and ultimately the Glory of God. another hard truth for you this morning, God’s primary motivation is not your good. God is for God, and our good happens because of that. God’s glory is the highest possible good. God will work all things to His glory, and our good. When we view our life, our actions, and our thoughts through the lens that everything should be glorifying to God, it will change our life, and the lives of those we come in contact with. so, we embrace our identity by asking God to renew our mind to what it was created to do. Glorify Him. real world application of this. a couple of weeks ago, my father in law and i had a conversation about how i cheer at ball games, well more so on how i respond to poor officiating at ball games. anyone who has watched any sport with me knows i’m passionate and loud. i get more so when it’s people i know and care about involved. this particular game the officials had asked the ad tell me i was being too loud. now, i had done nothing wrong. there was no profanity or criticizing of character happening. now, i’m stuck with a delima. i have every right to continue to cheer like i have been. i’m not doing anything wrong. i could ignore his advice and his warning and continue on with how i’m doing things. however, i’m also required to view the situation from a biblical perspective. so, now i have to look at does my actions bring glory to God. i’m sure if twist it around enough i can find a way to say that it does, but lets be honest. the answer is my actions either have a negative or neutral affect on bringing glory to the name of Jesus, but no, they don’t glorify the name above all names. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but i do know that the way it is right now needs to be adjusted. Here is the thing, God created all of us unique and with personalities that are equally unique. He made me loud and passionate. he made me strong willed, and forceful. but if i allow my personality to escape the confines of glorification, i have moved my identity from Christ to self, and that is the epitome of sin. so step one is embrace who you are.

step 2 is to act like your identity. so this simple to understand and hard to do. there is a standard that we are held to. 1 peter 1 tells us that we are to be holy as Christ is holy. how about that for a stansdard. anyone think they can live up to that? no. of course not. but that is the point. if you could have you would have and because you cant, you have to depend of the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. Through Him, you can. He is the one who makes you holy and leads you on to ever increasing holiness, till, as romans 12 puts it, presenting your body a living sacrifice becomes second nature. you start to see more and more growth in the fruit of the spirit.

i read random articles, because i’m really a nerd, but most of you just don’t get to see it. one such articles was about why you people who are in positions that do the greatest good, often times end up doing incredible evil. you have the recent scandals of the the Catholic church where there were priest who were supposed to be in a position to do an incredible amount of good and did do a lot of good, ended up doing evil. you have people who run charities who embezzle the charities funds. you could go on with example after example of people who have fallen into this trap. this articles take away was that it is part of human nature that the more good you do, the more you can justify the things you do. now, lets look at this through the lens of the bible and how we should respond. jerimiah 17:9 states that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Therefore we should assume that the heart we are born with is one that is always going to find a way to be deceitful. this is who we were. back up to verse 17 of chapter 5 that has passed away, and we are a new creation. As christians we don’t have a good bad scale where if we do so much good it out weighs the bad. thats Hinduism and Buddhism. so as christians we do good not for the sake of balancing the bad, but rather we understand that 1 we cant undo or make up for sin, and 2 we don’t have to. we know that our bad is covered under the blood on the cross, and that frees up our goodness to be done not for our own gain as a balance to our evil, but rather to be done for the glory of God.

(ESV)

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

(ESV)

31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

i do think it is important to state that if the bible is where we find the standard for our identity, and we never read the bible, we will not know what we are supposed to look like. so if our second pratical step is to act like who we are, then that will only be achieved by studying scripture to see what that is.

my third step falls under my third question. who do you want to be? for those of us who are christians, this seems like an odd question. we already have been saved from the penalty of our sin, and the Holy Spirit is saving us from the power of our sin and transforming us into the likeness of Jesus. what more could i want? There is one final way that we will be saved. We live with the hope that one day He is going to save us from the presence of sin. is no longer true for paul. sin is no longer close at hand, and he is no longer wretched.

(ESV)

16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Earlier i told you that i wanted you to walk out of here with your head held high with hope in your identity. the thing about our hope is that it doesn't diminish our pain, but rather gives purpose to it. As christians, we can have the deepest possible pain, and the highest possible joy all at the same time. John Pipers ministry has been built on the biblical truth that our highest possible joy is found in God being glorified, and God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him. This is why we are able to be, as we see in , sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. i know that some of you understand pain better than the rest of us, and some of yall’s wounds are so fresh that they havent even stopped bleeding, much less become scars. What i dont want to happen is that you hear this and think that i am speaking lightly of your grief. However, as Christians, we get to have hope in the midst of pain. we know from romans 8 that God will work out all things for our good. So in that moment when the police show up at our door with the worst possible news any parent could ever get, or when the doctor makes you come in to get those test results and uses words like cancer or terminal, or you lose your job of 20 years a week before you can draw your pension, or even if someone takes something from you that you will never be able to get back, we still have hope. all of these come with a pain that leaves you shattered. that deep kind of pain that comes with those silent sobs and gut wrenching wails. even in the midst of that, there is still hope. hope that, as real as your pain is, this is only temporary. hope that God will use this for his Glory and your good. hope that, though your pain is deep, and it is very real, will not compare to the future glory it is preparing for you. as most of you know, i am from birmingham, al. there is a morning show there that is quite popular especially across the south called rick and bubba. Rick burgess, devout christian, was speaking at a youth confrence in pigeon forge, Tn when he got the call that his two and a half year old son had figured out how to unlock and open the door, gone outside to look at the freshly fallen snow (a rarity in birmingham), and had fallen in the pool and drowned. 4 days later he stood up at Bronners memoral service and delivered one of the most gut wrenching presentations of the gospel i have ever heard. 1 peter 3:15 tells us to always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is with in us, and i dont know that i have ever seen that put in to action better than it was that day. in a time of his deepest possible pain, it was his hope that God used to draw people. A fathers heart, the name of the message Rick delivered, has reached more than 600 thousand people with the gospel of Jesus Chirst. years later, i heard rick say that even now if God would have given him the option to sacrifice his son for the salvation of thousands, that he would choose his son every time, and how he was so glad God never made him chose, but rather used his son to further the kingdom.

I started this message off with the question “who are you?” is your identity in your job, your sports team, your political party, or most accruatly in yourself? or does it transcend the transient things of this world and rest solely in the person and work of Jesus Christ? maybe your response is “who am i? I am a child of the the one true king. i am the redeemed bride of Christ, that was hopeless in my sin when my savior rescued me.” if that is your answer let me ask you are you living like it? are you being transformed by the renewing of your mind? have you embraced your identity? are you acting like your identity? and does your identity give you hope, and if it does are you prepared to give a reason for that hope? Maybe you are here and you have never moved from our first question of who were we. you haven’t been made a new, and the last twenty minutes you have been sitting there struggling with the hopelessness that comes with the realization that you are deserving of the Justice of God. if that is you, now is the time to to humbly go before God and confess your sin, as for forgiveness, and commit to following Him. salvation is as simple as repent and believe. while we continue to worship, Jason and i are here if you have anything you would like us to pray with you about. lets pray.