Finding the Real Me

We are starting a new series this week called, / / Running to the Light: A better way to BE FREE!

We’re going to be looking at a few different things over the next four weeks. This week, to kick things off we’re going to ask the simple question, “Who am I?” Do I really know who I am? Do I really know the real me? What makes me tick? What makes me who I am? What makes me special? What makes me different?

Next week we’re going to ask the tough question, What’s holding me back? When we the types of questions we’re going to ask today, we are obviously focused on who God made us to be, what He loves about us, the fact that He absolutely adores each and every one of you. We talked about that last week, didn’t we? God so loved the world. That’s what this is ALL about. But we also need to ask some of the tough questions of what in ourselves we maybe don’t want. Why do I get angry so fast? Why do I want to fight? Why do I hold a grudge? Why do I drink too much, eat too much, smoke too much, work too much, curse too much and any list of other things… Now, this is why this is called Running to the Light, because the reality is, we will never be free in our lives if we go hunting for darkness and that becomes our focus. The better way to be free is to walk toward the light.

Jesus said in John 8:12, / / I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.

And that’s what we want, isn’t it? Life. The life that Jesus Christ promised when he said, the reason I have come, my purpose is to give people a rich and satisfying life. And that is in John 10, where he is also talking about us following after him.

So, we’re going to dig into that a bit next week and the coming weeks.

But, before we get too far in, let’s pray this morning. Jesus, we all want to be free. We all want to be the most of ourselves as possible. We don’t want to hide who we really are. We want to be alive, with your life. As we look at what it means to walk in your light, follow after you and put our focus on your goodness, would you lead us and guide us to that better way to finding freedom. Amen.

Dr Seuss says, / / Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you!

I said it last week, and maybe we should just remind ourselves and most importantly, the person next to us, of what Ephesians 2:10 says, / / For we are God’s masterpiece…

Dr Seuss was 100% right, wasn’t he? There is absolutely no one like you. You’re unique. You’re an individual. You are special. You’re a masterpiece.

The problem with the sentiment that you are you and there is no one youer than you is that we run the risk of falling into the trap of focusing on what WE believe about ourselves as the highest influence. And the problem with that is that Life has a funny way of shaping what we believe. What we believe about ourselves, what we believe about the world around us. We know this to be true. The worlds of Psychology and Sociology have been telling us this for years.

Since 1902 there’s been a term that has been used called “The Looking Glass Self”. It’s a concept that came from sociologist Charles Cooley in his work “Human Nature and the Social Order.” Heavy topic!

But the Looking Glass Self is based on the idea of what’s called “reflected appraisals”, and reflected appraisals is one of the main psychological theories about how we form opinions about ourselves.

It’s pretty simple. The concept of The Looking Glass Self states that / / our self-view forms as a result of our perceptions of other people’s opinions of us. What that means is that what we learn and know about ourselves essentially comes from other people, and from the world around us.

Now this is true of any age, but no more true than when we are children. What we go through, who we are around, what we see, hear, smell, touch, all has the power to shape our outlook on life and our belief system about ourselves. Things as simple as, if a teacher or parent gives us / / praise for our doing well on a math test, we begin to believe, “Well, hey, I’m good at math!”, and that builds our / / confidence. The more our confidence grows, the more we approach math problems with that confidence. A confident approach has a better chance at / / success. And the more we succeed, the more we are / / praised. And the journey is cyclical. That praise furthers our confidence, leading to more success and more praise.

That is the good side of this, right? We have the power to help develop confident, socially aware, wonderfully kind and gifted children. I often have the conversation with our daughter about how she approaches her day, how she approaches her school work, her tests. She sometimes gets nervous about a test, and when I ask why, she’s afraid she’s going to fail. What if she doesn’t do well. What if she gets a bad grade. So, first I acknowledge that yes, it’s going to take work, you need to study and know your stuff. Then I ask her, have you studied, do you know your stuff? Yes, ok, then you have nothing to worry about. Go, do your absolute best, and that is all we can ask. But if you go to school thinking you will fail, you are only going to be thinking about failing, and is that going to make it easier to do well, or harder? So, instead, let’s go into it believing you’ve done your best to prepare, will do your best in the moment and that will produce your best results, and whatever those results are, you can be proud that you gave it your best shot. Go in with confidence.

Now, what happens when we as children don’t have that encouragement? What happens if our / / failures and problems get pointed out more than our successes and our accomplishments? It has the same effect. That failure brings / / condemnation, or ridicule or punishment. Instead of becoming more confident, we become more unsure of ourselves. We become more / / insecure. When we are insecure the next thing we have to face we face with that insecurity on our shoulders, not confidence in our hearts, and the likelihood of / / failure is increased. And a much worse cycle of breakdown happens.

This isn’t just for kids and math problems either. The same happens as we get older, and as we go through more and more situations in our lives. The people around us, and more importantly their actions and reactions to us have great influence in shaping what we believe about not just the world around us, but what we believe about ourselves.

And some of us had situations in our childhood, or throughout our lives that shaped us in some pretty negative ways.

I don’t know what your situation growing up was like, but I’ve struggled with my weight since I was a kid. And that meant all kinds of things were said to me. It’s no wonder, that if you’ve heard my story at all, that I believed I was unloveable, that I wouldn’t ever find love and get married, that I wouldn’t ever be accepted for who I was. Because I was told over and over and over that WHAT I am is broken, WHAT I am isn’t enough, and that established a very strong belief that WHO I am is not enough.

What I am, defined WHO I am. Broken, unworthy, insecure, and not worth loving, not worth being around, not worth the time of day.

I know, sorry, this is Sunday morning and we’re supposed to be uplifting, right!

But we have to understand that there is a war in this world for one thing, to get you to engage with the dark rather than run to the light.

I’m going to say that again...

/ / There is a war over your life for you to engage with the dark rather than run to the light.

What do I mean?

Everything I was every told that was negative had the potential to drive me toward hiddenness. Toward wanting to hide.

Every time I was told I was ugly, shame wanted to get in and control the narrative in my brain.

Every time I was told I was fat and useless because of it, I wanted to hide. Hide so that I wouldn’t get hurt again. And where do things go to hide? Into the darkness.

And that wasn’t just as a child, this has been through my entire life regardless of the age. And what can happen is that these things get so rooted in our lives that they change our expectations, so that now before we even GET rejected, we believe we are rejected, and so we act like we are rejected, we respond like we are rejected, and more times than not that actually produces more rejection.

Soon enough, every situation I’m in I begin to imagine how I appear to the people around me.

Then I imagine that people are judging me because of what they see.

And my feelings, my emotions, and my response is to those PERCEIVED judgements, whether they end up happening or not. And what happens is that this becomes about my self opinion, rather than your opinion of me. So I’m rejected before I’m rejected. I’m afraid before there’s anything to be afraid of. I’m sad before I have a reason to be. Why? Because my expectation is so broken because of what I’ve been told and now deeply believe. And it becomes easier to sit in the darkness and the hidden place alone.

But thank Jesus it doesn’t have to stay that way. We don’t have to stay in the dark. I started with this verse, but I’m going to read it again. John 8:12, Jesus says, / / I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.

The ESV says, / / Whoever follows me will NOT walk in darkness.

You may not be able to run, you may only be able to crawl along the floor for the moment, you may only be able to walk a little bit at a time, if you’ve been here for a while you’ve probably heard me say, if you’re going through hell, don’t sit down, just keep moving!

See, there’s been a bad narrative out that you need to come out of darkness to find Jesus, but the reality is, is that Jesus comes to the darkest moments of our lives, meets us there and says, “Do you want to walk out of this place with me?” Romans 5:8 as I read last week, says, / / God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us WHILE WE WERE STILL SINNERS.

Not when I was perfect. Not when I had given it all up. Not when I suddenly believed all the good things about myself. But while I was still a sinner, while I still didn’t understand, while I was still broken, and didn’t believe anyone would love me, that’s when He loved me the MOST. And the invitation of Jesus is to walk out of the darkness of our beliefs, out of the darkness of our fears, out of the darkness of the lies that have held us down, and into HIS light.

And sometimes we say, “Yes” and sometimes we say, “I’m too afraid”..and you know what he says, “That’s ok, we can do this when you’re ready.”

Last week I talked about the upsides and the downsides of Free-Will. See, Jesus doesn’t make us walk out of darkness. He doesn’t say, “ok, better keep up, if not, I’m leaving you here.” As long as we’re willing to give it one more try, he’s willing to walk with you. He’s not going to sit there and wallow in our pain with us, but he is the most patient person there has ever been.

So, what does that look like? What does it actually like to make the decision to not walk in the darkness of a bad belief system, but to walk in the light?

See, for me, the change only started to happen when someone finally told me, “Rob, That’s not true...”

What you’ve heard isn’t true. What you’ve heard that shaped the narrative in your brain is not what God intended for you. But while you’re sitting in the dark, you won’t see a way out of it. But I’m here to tell you today that there is a way out. There’s not just a light at the end of the tunnel, the light has come to you. And some of these lies that we’ve believed are rooted deep within our hearts and they may not go away so easily. But it’s going to be ok, because this is the promise. And when I say promise, I mean 100%. If you make a decision today to follow the light, you will come out of the darkness.

So, taking steps.

/ / Decide Enough is Enough

You aren’t meant to be hidden. You aren’t meant to be in darkness. You aren’t meant to suffer believing the lies that the enemy would like you to believe to keep you down. You ARE meant to be free. And that does take a decision, a decision to start walking toward the light. Jesus said, For anyone who follows me… that’s a clear instruction. THEN you will no longer be in the darkness.

Look, the things I grew up dealing with were very obvious.....to everyone else. Not to me. I actually believed those things wholeheartedly. There may be things in your life that are not allowing you to be fully you, but you don’t actually recognize it. Now, I knew I was hurting. I knew I was broken, but I so believed the lies that I didn’t know I could believe something else. I just assumed that was my lot in life.

Maybe you believe you’re broken, or damaged goods. Maybe it’s that you don’t believe you deserve a good life, to be happy, to be free of the addiction or free of the pain or hurt.

This takes an openness to being set free, maybe from something you didn’t even realize is a problem.

This is so common it’s written about everywhere. From psychology to business to family counseling to every single self help book on the market. It’s why those books fly off shelves, it’s why everyone feels like they need a life coach, it’s why we spend good money on personality profiles and fall into the ridiculous trap of “answer a few questions and we’ll tell you exactly who you are...”, “tell us your favorite color and we’ll tell you who you are” “Tell us your birthstone and we’ll tell you who you are...”. Because two important questions are always on our mind.

/ / Am I ok?

/ / Am I enough?

We have to make the decision that enough is enough and that we WANT to know what it truly means to walk in the light of truth. Like I’ve said, that doesn’t always mean things change over night. I’m not saying it can’t. Sometimes they do, sometimes what we believe isn’t rooted so deep and it doesn’t take much effort or time to believe something new, but sometimes these things take time to change and we need to be willing to walk the process out.

Whatever the case may be. Decide today that enough is enough.

/ / Ask God for HIS Truth

I said that things began to change for me when someone told me that what I was believing wasn’t true. That it was a lie. OK, so you’ve identified that what I believe is a lie, now what?

Now we interject the truth into your situation. And the reason I say “Ask God for HIS truth” is because the entire point of this is that sometimes our truth isn’t actually true. Kelley and I recognize early on in our marriage that these core things we need in our lives have to come from God. If we are relying on each other to provide what only God can give, we are doomed to struggle. But, here’s a really great thing, we actually get to be a part of the process with those we love. I get to be the hands, feet and voice of Jesus in Kelley’s life. Speaking God’s truth to her.

So, I’m going to read some truths over you this morning because to start this series off right, we need to establish who you are.

This is what God says about you: And these aren’t in any particular order...

/ / GOOD LOOKING - We’ve already established that you are a Masterpiece, Ephesians 2, For you are God’s Masterpiece.

/ / UNIQUE - Psalm 139 is a beautiful chapter about how much God thinks of us, watches over us, but in vs 13-14 it says, You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous...

/ / CORE IDENTITY - Actually comes from God himself... - Genesis 1:27, So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

/ / VALUE - Matthew 10:29-31, What is the price of two sparrows - one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.

/ / FUTURE - Jeremiah 29:11 , For I know the plans I have for you, they are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

/ / LOVE - The truth is God loves you. And the fact that we have these things in our lives that have made us question if we’re lovable, made us question if we’re worthy, or if we deserve love or friendship, or a happy life. it breaks his heart.

1 John 4:10, This is real love - not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

/ / Walk In The Truth

It’s one thing to be told the truth, it’s another thing to walk in it.

Part of my story is that I had these amazing friends that would tell me the truth, but I didn’t believe them. Kelley was one of them. She would sit there and tell me about what a great husband I was going to make for someone one day. She had no intention of me being her husband at the time, neither of us had feelings for each other, but when she would say that, everything in me would laugh and recoil at the thought of it. I mean, how dare you tell me that what I believe isn’t true, and that what you are saying is true. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

/ / These are decisions we need to make.

I decide enough is enough.

I decide to be open to a new type of truth.

I decide to listen to that truth every day until the lie is gone and all that’s left is the truth.

The truth of who you are is that God loves you. He made you. He cares for you. He created you unique and special, one of a kind, broke the mold with you, you are an absolute masterpiece and to believe anything less is a lie and it’s the very darkness that needs to be removed from your life.

So, practically. I realized that if I go hunting for issues in my life, I’ll probably find them, but I’m not always ready to deal with them, so I’ve found that what works really well is that I tell God I want to change. I don’t want to deal with the hurt, or rejection, or insecurity anymore, and I invite Him to bring to light anything that is hidden when He sees it’s the time for me to deal with it. And when he reveals these deep things that I believe, I simply ask him to take them away, and I ask him to speak the truth.

You can do a personal inventory. Ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” or “What is holding me back?” “What do I truly believe about myself?”. But don’t let it get you down. Seriously. Talk to someone. Get in touch with myself or Kelley. Talk it through with your spouse or a friend that knows God and will direct you to HIM. Make sure you share these things with someone that will point you to the truth of Jesus Christ.

This can be a big decision, and I don’t want you to feel like you HAVE to do this, but what I can absolutely 100% promise you is that Jesus Christ is so compassionate, he won’t hurt you in the process. You may feel the hurt, you may remember the pain, but Jesus Christ is 100% about your healing and your freedom. His intention is for you to walk from darkness to light. So, I want to invite you to be super brave this morning and pray a short little prayer with me, simply inviting Jesus to lead you from darkness to light.

Jesus, You said that you are light, and that if we follow you we would no longer walk in darkness. I have darkness in my life I no longer want to be in. Lies I believe about myself. Lies I believe about life. Situations from my past have left me hurting. Would you be gracious to me. Would you give me comfort. Would you give me peace. Would you lead me in the light of who you are. Would you speak your truth to my heart.

It’s that easy. In your day, if you recognize that there’s something that just doesn’t feel right, you’re scared, or nervous or feeling funny, you can stop and pray, Jesus, lead me by your light. Remove from me any darkness.