Sermon Tone Analysis

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.