your Bible with me to Peter 1,
the first one, the first chapter. Believe it or not, today we're going to be moving on to verse 10 next week,
so we'll be at the end of verses 1 through 9 today. Now as I started the service
I said good morning and then I made the comment that if it's
not a good morning you need to ask why. If it's not a good morning you need
to ask why. And then you need to get to the point where you
can list those reasons so that you can be aware of why
you don't think life is good. And then you need to get to a
place where you can measure those reasons against the ineffable
glory of Jesus Christ. Now, what does that mean? Seeing
Christ for who he is that is absolutely indescribable and
immeasurable and incomparable to anything else that is, ever,
or ever will be, or ever has been. See, that sounds so powerful,
right? It sounds so powerful. It's like,
oh my goodness. This is just where I want to
be. This is where I want to go. This is what I want to do. I
want this. Give it to me. And sometimes some of us were
like, you know what? I've been there. I've experienced. Some
of you may be there today. And then you're hanging on the
feeling. You're hanging on the experience. You're hanging on
the opportunity to feel something or know something or be something. But Those of us who have been
there, we know it's sort of like a high, it goes away, it wanes,
things start to fade. It's not when you first start
dating, or your marriage day, or your
anniversary. You love each other in a different
way, in a deeper way as you go on, but it's not the same. You
didn't love each other when you started dating. You love the
idea of each other, like, yeah, I could, what's your name again?
Yeah, I could do this. You know, this looks right. It
strokes this inner identity that we feel like there's something
worth living for. We've got some drive. We've got
some momentum. And the same thing is in the
faith. That's why it's so easy to create an atmosphere of spirituality. It'd be real easy, I mean, we
could work on some songs, we could practice every Saturday,
we could work on songs, we could have some, I'll tell you what
puts me in the mood to worship, violins, you know? Strings, just
generally speaking. It's like reflective. Turn the lights down low, got
the music rolling, everything is good, we start to feel the
presence of God, aka adrenaline. And then we can be told to do
whatever. We can be told to think whatever. We can be in a state
of suggestiveness that will press us into whatever's in front of
us. That's why we have to be careful
what we put in front of us. Because God has created us to
be impressionable. And what happens when we have
a list of the reason life isn't good is because we've been impressed
upon these negative things over these positive things, over the
Lord. We take things out, we put things
in, we strive, we do everything. Y'all have left my rings on my
desk and I'm going to fidget with my fingers all day, so y'all
forgive me for that. I don't realize just how much
I play with them. It's the first time in, 28 years I've not had
that as well. It's boggling my brain. Pray
for me. But we're impressed by these
negative things and we come to, we try to overcome by putting
more positive things in and we even do that in the sense of
spiritual things. Well, I'm going to be disciplined. I'm going
to memorize a bunch of scripture. Great, do it. It's awesome. But it's wanting.
I'm going to inductively study the Bible with 25 different color
highlighters. Doesn't work for a guy like me
who can only see about nine hues. You know, it's either gray, blue,
black, white, or dark. Everything's gray in here. And
blue. That's it. That's all I see. And we try, and then we find
that these things don't work. Well, there's two questions.
For those of you who probably heard me say this already this morning, if
you were up early and you're on social media, there's two
questions that I've asked myself my entire life, and the questions
are, who am I and what do I want? You know, when you get into philosophy,
when you start to look at the Stoics, when you start to, you
know, think in certain ways that most people don't take time to
think. I've been thinking since I was born. I never not think. It's a problem. I ruminate and
I ruminate on the ruminations and the ruminations of the ruminations.
And then the next thing you know, I've written a thousand pages
of absolute nonsense that's good for nobody but the fire. But
hey, it's there. Now let me think about why it's
not good. What is fire? Should I put it in the fire or
should I just metaphorically burn it? You see the point? And we get wound up and bound
up in all these things and we try to answer these questions,
you know, what is my purpose? Well, you don't know your purpose.
You can't find your purpose until you know who you are. And you can't know what you want
until you know who you are. You may think you know what you
want, but you know what? Typically, you want what will give you the
identity that you're looking for. You want something that'll
help you get away from the bad list. Am I lying, or is this just me?
Am I the only one that experiences this, or have I got some friends
and brothers and sisters in this? I think I do. I think every human
being, with some exceptions, I'm not gonna say every, because
I've not talked to all the people in the world throughout all the
generations, almost all of them, but not all of them. My Rolodex
doesn't hold but like three billion, so I'm a little off. I think
everybody in some way or another, in some root centrality of their
consciousness, deals with these questions. Did John the Baptist not deal
with these questions? Behold the Lamb of God that takes away
the sins of the world. I'm not worthy to untie his shoes
to wash his feet. I'm not worthy to be a Gentile
slave. I'm worse than that. And that
was pretty bad in that day. And then he gets arrested. And then he goes, maybe I'm not
who I think I am. Maybe I'm not doing what I think
I was doing. Maybe I need what I thought I
didn't need. Maybe I need to figure out if
this guy really is Messiah, before they put my head on a platter
and serve it at a dinner party as a joke. That's what happened
to John the Baptist, remember? Peter, identity, identity. I
will die for you. I will live for you. No, no,
you don't have to die. I know better. Blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah. I don't know who this guy is. And I said, well,
what's this got to do with who he was? Because he thought he
was a disciple of Christ, but he was actually a deserter of
Christ. John the Baptist thought he was
this high evangelist in the spirit of Elijah, but he was really
a human being with doubts. So if we find the answer to the
question of who we are based on what we do, based on what
we accomplish, based on what we love, based on all of the
things that the world can provide for us, whether it be something
that our parents told us or our grandparents told us or that
we saw in a movie. Do you know how many people order their lives
off of characters in movies? There's my coming and going.
I want to be like that. And they posture and they don't
even know they've done it. Not just movies, books. Come on, when's the last time you saw something or someone
on television or on social media, on YouTube or whatever, and you
went, I like that jacket. I like that. I like those shoes.
I mean, do you ever just sit in the bed and think, Imagine
a pair of blue jeans and go, I wonder if they make those,
let me go search. No, we see them and then we go, I want those.
Or we're walking in the store to pick up milk and I don't know
why there'd be clothes, but let's just say there are some clothes
while we're getting milk and we go, I think I could wear that. Or we hear
about something. We want to get a new car. We
want to get a better set of glasses or whatever it might be. There's
always something. There's always an identity out
there for us to be had. And beloved, every generation
thinks that their understanding of these things is the right
thing. And then what do you want? I'll tell you what we want. We
want to be told what to do. But we want to be autonomous. I'm the boss of me. What should
I be doing with my life? I mean, I'm serious. Now, I believe
in a very small, that was six minutes, I believe in this six
minutes, I have encapsulated the totality of the human condition
and ego with brilliance, and there's sarcasm in that, okay?
And out of that six minutes now, you and I walk together with
the same ideology, so we're all in agreement that I am right,
and then we are right together. All jokes aside, every person
in the dispersion, every person in the dispersion to whom this
letter was written had an identity crisis and had a needs crisis. They didn't know who they were
anymore and they didn't know what they needed anymore. Because
what they needed yesterday was to fix the drapery. What they
need today is, am I going to feed my kids? What they needed yesterday was,
I wonder how the economy's gonna do on my halal stand. And what
they need today is, I don't even know where my family is. All of a sudden, yesterday I
was a honored member of Jewish society. And today I'm following
some man that I've never seen, supposedly raised from the dead,
says this guy, and now I have nothing. Now if I just said that,
In our culture and the things that we've known since America
has been a thing, everybody say, well, that's what you get when
you get in a cult. Do you know why people get in
cults? Because they find an identity and they get what they need. That's why they get in gangs.
That's why they marry into families. That's why they take certain
jobs. That's why they join certain churches. That's why they read
certain authors and watch certain movies and listen to certain
songs and learn certain skills. See, people think that I'm just
like this amazing Renaissance type person when they, oh my
God. No, I am seeking that which I cannot find in what I'm looking
for. I love, not novelty, mastery. I hate doing anything just because. I'm not playing a game of chess
unless I'm gonna get back up to about 1,700. If you don't know what that is,
it's okay. I'm not gonna float around at a 900 score and just
enjoy the game of chess. I'm not going to climb rocks
just because I like climbing. I'm going to master it. I'm not
going to learn to play the piano so that I can do what everybody
else does. I wanna do more. And it's not competition with
others. It's identity, right? We've stopped
learning to live in the moment and we live in the future or
we live in the past, right? We regret, we remorse, or we
live in an anxious state. These people were looking for
instruction, just like the people in the Exodus. They were looking
for instruction. Okay, we saw God do these wonderful things.
We followed you and supposedly God into the wilderness. Now
we are hungry for better food. We are hungry for constant water. See, that's what got Moses in
trouble, right? The water. Speak to the rock, don't strike
the rock. Moses, you disobeyed, you're
not going into the promised land. But he got the true promise. That's what we do. We just want to know how to stand,
know what to do, know how to think, know how to feel. I'll
do it, okay, here we go. Well, beloved, when we get to
chapter 2, I mean get to verse 13 of chapter 1, everything that
I've been preaching over the last 16 weeks is preparing us
for a foundation to stand upon, not jump off of, not launch into
something else, but stand upon while the sprinkles of the therefore
begin to build around us. When I say that, I envision an
hourglass. You know, some of those things that I don't even
know what they're called, but they have sand in them and you
just watch them flow down. Or like a rain stick, that sound
as it's moving down through that instrument and this sand that
fills up the bottom, like an hourglass, it fills up the bottom.
If you have an object in the hourglass, the sand just sort
of covers it up. You've got to stand still in the gospel identity. You've got to stand still knowing
that who you are is not the right question. You need to ask the
question, whose am I? And that sounds so cliché. But
if we don't get that right, nothing else that is preached from this
pulpit will make any sense to any of you, and it will bar you
from joy, and it will restrict you from freedom, and it will
put you in a place where you will determine, you will determine,
let me say that again, you will determine what you need and who
you are if someone else doesn't do it for you, and you will miss
every promised blessing of Christ in this earth. Well now you just sound like
you preached a contingent blessing. I did preach a contingent blessing.
Eternal life. Salvation. Listen to what I'm
about to say and don't hang me till I'm finished. There's a
punchline. Redemption. Grace. Is all conditional. On the death of Jesus Christ.
Done. What else? Nothing. But your
joy. Your intimacy. The freedom of
your mind. that surpasses all understanding,
that peace, oh boy, it's conditioned on your discipline. Discipline's a hard word, I don't
like it. It's conditioned on your faithfulness. Oh, faithfulness,
I don't have any. It's conditioned on your focus.
I'm blind. Then the Bible says it's conditioned
on the faithfulness, the groundedness, the focus, and the promises of
God. So all we gotta do is find a
way to get the mustard seed of intention to go back to the tiny
minuscule sand grain of hope. You put a piece of sand in your
eye, beloved, you're not gonna ignore it. Get in the Word of God and be
with God's people. If you're not doing those two
things, you are not praying. You are not rejoicing. You are
not satisfied. And you are not focused. And
you are asking the question every day, what am I doing? Why am
I here? And what do I need? And you're just going to keep
asking. How do you know this? Are you in my head? No, we've
got the same thoughts. This is confession, y'all. This
isn't psychiatry. It's not psychic ability. It's shared experience. And anything you can do bad,
I can do badder. I feel musical there. I can do worse-er. I can be ugly. I just wish I could be happy.
Have you ever said that? I just wish I could trust. I
wish I could have faith. I wish I could just measure up.
I wish I could find purpose. But you gotta know yourself. And for the most part, I had
a debate with one of my children a year or so ago on this very
topic. We are not autonomous. We are not independent. No human
being is. Even the most amazing people
that we look at, we go, huh, their identity, what they present
is a product of something else. It's a product. And we operate
as human beings as a product of outside ideals and standards
and influence and inside ideals and standard and influence. And
for me, it was the inside influence based on what I assume the outside
expectations were that destroyed my life. And the crazy thing
is, if we knew we were thinking that way, we could stop it, but
we don't. So let's look at the text. Blessed be the God and the Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has, you know, I was almost doing
Ephesians, according to his great mercy, He has caused us to be
born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, unfading,
and undefiled, kept in heaven for you, who, by God's power,
are being guarded through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed
in the last time. In this you rejoice. Though now
for a little while, if necessary, you've been grieved by various
trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious
than gold that perishes when it's tested by fire, may result,
focus right here, beloved, may result, or may be found to result,
what is this? Your faith that is tested genuine,
the genuineness of your faith may be found to result in praise
and glory and honor at the revealing of Jesus Christ. I'm going to
stop there for a second. We've done that. We've looked
at that. And for all intents and purposes
and the simplicity of it all, kids, listen to what I'm about
to say. Look at Christ. Listen to Jesus. Read His Word. It's as simple as that. Because when we turn about 17
or 18, we begin to lose this precious imaginative ideology,
all things are possible. And it, and I've got friends
that live in Europe, who when they're like 10, they lost it.
And I got friends in their 80s who seem to have never caught
the idea that there's anything wrong with the world. It's great.
Emotional lobotomies, that's what, It could be a different
perception. But seeing Christ, the revelation
of Jesus Christ, looking at Christ, that's where our stress and our
trials and our suffering and everything is going to make sense.
We're going to see it for what it is. We're going to see Him
for who He is and all of these things are going to like, what
was I thinking about? All these experiences that we
bottle up and we carry like a badge. Look at my badge of pain. Yeah! I mean, that's like good for
a fake wrestler. You can turn it into some move
that causes harm. He calls this my badge of pain.
All my sorrow and trials on your head. I mean, you know, you can
see it, right? That's good marketing. Take it.
You're welcome. All those things, no matter how
hard they are, everything we've lost, everything we've suffered,
everything we've thought, everything we've done and said and hated,
everything that has been done to us will not matter anymore
when we see Christ for who He is. And I can't tell you how
to do that. I can't give you the steps. I've
tried. I've written frameworks. I've
written more frameworks in my life that if I were to put sticks
to it, I'd have houses. Because that's how I live. I
have frameworks that I live by. I write them out. They're extensive. And when I'm done with them,
I hold them in preciousness and idolatry. I say, this is how
I focus. And you might say, that's sort
of weird. You do the same thing. You just don't write it down. You don't think
about it. You're not consciously aware that you're building the
frameworks. I'm very mindful of what I'm thinking. I haven't always been. But when
we see Jesus, those things are going to make sense. It's not
like we don't care. It's not like they go away and
it doesn't matter that you hurt. The Bible even says God knows
your pain. God knows your suffering. God knows your good works. God
knows your labor. He is not going to look over
those things, but He's going to help you make sense of them.
And then when you see Jesus face to face, it's going to go click!
And you're going to go, wow! Wow! What are you going to say,
James? Tell me what we're going to say. I can't tell you what
you're going to say. And a song comes to mind I can
only imagine. You know that song? I mean, they didn't even get
close. I love that song, but they didn't even get close. They
just poetically expounded upon the duh. And that's great. And that's what it's going to
be. With all knowledge and all wisdom and all insight and all
glory and all worship and all truth and all righteousness and
all love and all care. All of it, at the same time,
right there, like a fountain. When Jesus said to the woman
in Sychar, John chapter 5, that I will give you water that wells
up to eternal life, that woman had no idea what he was talking
about, and neither does James Tippins 2,000 years later. I
just get this feeling inside of me that I have to be careful
because I'm very impressionable. So if I get the feeling and I
start to feel this spiritual, emotional thing that opens me
up to really be just inundated with stuff, I have to ask the
question, what do I need right now? What I need is not more
of this feeling. What I need is the Spirit of
God in truth. So I eat the Word of God. That's exactly what Peter does. When he quotes scripture for
these exiles and he says, Behold, I, God, am laying a Zion. I'm
laying in Zion a stone. I'm laying down a stone, a cornerstone,
a chosen and precious cornerstone. And whoever believes in him will
not be put to shame. That's over there, chapter two,
verse six. So even in the days of the disciples,
what they did is when they were opened up to the ineffable glory
of the revelation of Jesus Christ, they input the Word in them. Jesus, in His humanity, did the
very same thing. The Son of God, out in the wilderness,
hungry. laboring, praying, knowing what
it was that he was to do and what it was and what the cost
was. And the enemy tempts him in his
flesh and he responds with the bread of life. He even uses that
in the context of the metaphor that man does not live on bread
alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God,
which, according to Paul's teaching to Timothy, that everything written
in scripture is breathed out. By God, and that's supposed to
be poetic for a reason. It's not theologically, it's
not theological precision in a scientific way. It's supposed
to make you go, oh, big auditoriums. I remember preaching in that
context. And there's things you can do with a microphone to get
people's attention and breathing into it. Imagine when you're reading the
Bible, God is breathing into you. So we see this text. We see the
text. We've already gone through several,
a couple of months now of this text. And we know that as these
people were, we are. As these people were, we are
in our humanity. We are in the grace of God. We
are in our suffering, not identically, but we are in our suffering.
We are in our fears. We are in this world. We are
in a culture that doesn't understand. We are not of it. We are adopted. We are beloved. We are forgiven. We are empowered. We are lost at times. And we
are hopeless at times. But being adopted, being beloved,
being forgiven, being drawn into the Father's bosom, held tightly,
intimately in Christ. There's a promise there. But just like these people, we
are also very lost at times, as I've just said, because we
have lost much at times. And some of us can say, you know,
I haven't really lost anyone, or I haven't really lost anything
of much value, but you've lost yourself. And some of us can
say, you know, I've lost a lot, man. I lost my house, I lost
my job, I lost my kids, lost my... But you haven't lost yourself.
And one is not worse than the other. It all is loss. It all
hurts. It's all painful. And I think
the hardest thing to lose is hope. Because without hope, there is
no joy. Without hope, there is no contentment. Without hope,
there is no purpose. Without hope, we don't care about
who we are. And without hope, we don't care
about what we need. Do we? And we can follow frameworks,
we can follow plans, we can follow instructions, and we can feel
better, but we're not better until we understand the answer
to these questions. And what we lose, as I said earlier, will make
sense. And not only will it make sense, not only will our suffering
make sense, Oh, listen to this, and I'm going to unpack it. This
is the introduction, by the way. I'm about to unpack all of this in five simple points.
It's all given back. If Christ holds everything in
his hand, if Christ is the God of all things, if Christ promises
that all that we've lost will be given back to us, and we see
the narrative, we see those simple instructions, we see these examples,
these tiny little imperfect examples in the Bible. Everything we've
lost when we see Christ will be ours again. If we've lost our dignity, we'll
have it back. If we've lost our hope, it's ours. If we've lost
our joy, we don't even know what joylessness is anymore. If we've
lost love, we just gained back more love
than we could ever have. If we've lost riches, the riches of grace
beyond measure, And for those who are in Christ, we're together
in that. So even when we lose each other,
we are not lost to each other. And as much as I like to stand
and say when I was younger, it doesn't matter. I used to say,
you know, I'm gonna get to heaven. If all the people that I've lost
and I loved are in between me and Jesus, I'm gonna tackle them
to get over them, to get to Jesus. That's a real nice beauty pageant
answer. But when you're 25, you really
think that way. When you've suffered real loss,
you understand what it means to be restored to those that
you love. So I've entitled this sermon,
Unseen Yet Unshakable, Our Identity in Christ. Verse 8, Though you have not
seen Him, You love Him. By the way, all that was verse
7. Though you have not seen Him,
you love Him. And though you do not now see
Him, you rest, trust, and believe in Him, and you rejoice with
a joy that is inexpressible and filled with the glory. obtaining the outcome of your
faith, the salvation of your soul. We're going to go through trials,
beloved. And let me review that. The trials
and the testing of our faith. We understand our trials in light
of God's love and God's purposes. And we are going to suffer trials.
Someone asked me Friday, why am I suffering this? What
have I done to God? And I answered it simply for
the first time in my life. It didn't take 20 minutes. I
said, there's nothing you could do to God. You can do nothing to God. You
can't hurt Him. You can't touch Him. But John
says that which we have seen, heard and touch with our hands. Look what the world did to God,
the son. And he's alive. And now there's
nothing you can do to separate you from his love, because Christ
has paid it all. He's paid it all. You're suffering. It's the consequence of this
world we live in. And I'm going to say this, and
a lot of my friends, you know, there's a context in which they
may be right, but it's not your fault. It's not your fault that you
have pain. Some of it is. You put your face
in the oven and turn it on to get the pie out, you're going
to burn yourself. You jump into a fire, you're going to get scalded.
You want to do the ice polar plunge and you get frostbite,
that's your business. But I mean, the pain of life, yeah, there's
some consequential things, but the internal stuff, the constant
agony, the hopelessness, it's just part of it. And we're not going to escape
it, but we can suffer with those who have hope, the Bible says.
There's a value in learning that when we are unable, and beloved,
and I've said this and some of you are not hearing me because
I'm not being emphatic enough, but there are times in my life
recently where I didn't want to believe in rest. I wanted
to sit in my feelings. I wanted to sit in my pain. I
wanted to wallow in my pity because I have power there. I do. I have the power to stay. And
I can control it. I can be miserable. And I don't
even enjoy it, but I enjoy the power of making sure that I get
to decide when I'm done with it. And you know what God does? He brings me out of it. Not through a swift kick in the
teeth or a punch in the gut. Not an inverted reverse punch
to the solar plexus. See what I have for breakfast for the
fighters in the room. No. Gentle embrace. Gentle reminder. Breathing into
my life that which he planted there many times over 50 years. I love you. That's what he does. I understand. Why are you putting
this stuff on God? This isn't right. Paul writes
it in the Hebrews. We don't have a Savior who doesn't
sympathize with us. We don't have a Savior, this
God, that doesn't understand what we've gone through. In every
way, He's been tempted. In every feeling that you've
ever had, He's had. Every pain that you've ever considered,
He has endured. But He never sinned. See, my
biggest sin is sitting in my sin. Not acting on it. Not running to it. Sitting in
it. Like the godfather in the back
corner of the Italian restaurant. I just sit there. Turn the lights
down because I don't want you looking at me. And the sequel
to that in the Christian reality is grumpy old man. And that's
what it creates. Don't look at your husbands.
Don't look at your wives. Trials and the testing of our
faith shows us that it's genuine. Not because we're faithful, because
He's faithful. He brings us through it. That's
the point I'm making. Shows us that there's an eternal
perspective on our trials. And we used to focus on the outcome
of them. Preparing us to rest more. You
can't have faith without doubt. You can't have hope without despair. You can't have joy without trials. You can't have peace without
chaos. You can't have healing without illness. You can't have
love without apathy. And the love and the belief in
the unseen Christ in verse 8 there, this unseen Christ, See, we look
too much at what we see and what other people say and what other
people see. We look too much about what we
think, about what we want, about who we are. That's the whole
introduction, right? So loving the unseen is the example
that Christ did. He wasn't with the Father physically,
but He loved the Father. He wasn't there for the Father
to to just embrace Him. But He trusted in the Father.
He cried out, O Lord, O Father, take this cup from me, but Your
will be done, because He knew that no matter how hard the circumstance,
that the love of God the Father for Him would not fail Him, would
not leave Him, and would not abandon Him. And so that no matter
what the cross was, it was part of God's love, and it was an
absolute Guarantee that it would not stick. Return. How do we know that?
Jesus says that in his prayer in John 17. Return to me the
glory that I had before the world began. Show me this promise. Father, I'm good. Walks out. Time to go. I need to pray. My prayer time's up. I need to
die. It's time to go. That's not stoicism. Jesus is so far... Stoicism is
not correct. Being strong is being authentic. Being authentic is being vulnerable.
Being vulnerable is being honest. If you're not honest about your
feelings, you are a liar. And you know what? When James
Tippins lived his whole life as a liar, he couldn't even pray
correctly because he didn't know what he was supposed to pray
for. Talk about that man in the third
person. Because that's not who I am anymore. The Bible tells me that too.
You once were. You might say, well, haven't
you been born again a long time? Yeah, but it takes time to grow
up. And like I said to some folks
fighting and fussing about masculinity yesterday, I said, I know a lot
of men with beards that don't make them men. Just because you
look like a man and you got manly characteristics or traits in
the context of your physical appearance, it doesn't make you
a man. And I'm not pointing at anybody in here. I'm just saying. We can look like we're grown,
we can look like we're spiritual, but it doesn't mean we've grown
past the day we've been born. We've got to look at the unseen,
not what we see. We've got to look not what the culture tells
us to look at and to point at. Not what other people might think
our motives are. It doesn't matter what people think of you. It
doesn't matter. Their opinions of you are none of your business.
Because when you make them your business, then you believe them.
And if it's your business to make them see that you really
aren't the way they think you are, then they are your master. Imagine being in the dispersion,
being an elite member of society, being a woman or a man in Jewish
culture, having everything, being wealthy, and then all of a sudden,
out in the woods, hanging out with silly people, Being reminded of the days of
Exodus that you heard about as a child in Bible school. One of the things on your mind
might be, what are people thinking about me right now? My mom and my daddy probably
think I'm an idiot. The culture, my peers, my co-workers, my family,
my spouse might think I'm an idiot. Who cares? Are you an
idiot? Probably, but does it matter? No. Paul says that about
himself. He said, I'd rather be out of
my mind in Christ than a sound mind without him. That's a paraphrase.
You won't find that exact translation. The difference is what we see
today in evangelical America, evangelical America, people are
out of their minds and it's not for Jesus. And we also say, man,
I wish we could just find the common sense. I'm just looking
for the sense, just one or two cents rattling around in some
brains. It's not there. It's brainwashed.
It makes me upset and I remember what Paul tells the Thessalonians.
There's a great deception out there. And I love how people
who are deceived use that as, you're deceived because you're
not like me. And I think, I'm not even going to say praise
God I'm not like that guy because I know what that story talks
about too. Right? Oh, what am I supposed to do?
Find my identity in the person of Jesus Christ. Look to the
resurrection power that He's promised me. and know that everything
that I lose today will be given back to me. Believing in the
unseen. Maintaining spiritual vitality.
Spiritual vitality, what we look for. But it has implication.
I preached about that the last three or four times, so go back
and listen to that if you need to. Faith is the assurance of things
hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. None of the
people in Hebrews chapter 12 received what they were looking
for. Moses didn't receive what he was looking for in the temporal
sense because he was looking for the promised land. But that
picture shows a better thing because he's listed in Hebrews
chapter 12. He didn't even receive what he was looking for had he
went into the promised land. Because Hebrews says, had the promised land been
the point, then they wouldn't have had to find someplace else.
That's why what we see going on in the Middle East for the
last 2,000 years, specifically the last 100, is not a biblical
prediction, not a biblical picture. That dirt is not the point. The temple is not the point.
It's over. It's a picture. I was looking at pictures of
family yesterday. I mean, we're not there anymore. Saw newspaper clipping for the
E.T. movie. I watched it when it came in
theaters, 1982. And I remember, because I cried, and I was trying
to hide my tears, because boys don't cry. That stupid thing
died, y'all. Spoiler alert. And that was sad. I mean, you can't be eight years
old and not cry at that. But I've seen the movie. I know
the story. I know how it ends. I'm not going to look at the
poster that's talking about the movie coming out in theaters
and go, man, I can't wait to see E.T. Just look at it. I can't wait.
It's done. The shadows of Christ are just old advertisements. The pain of our life is an old
advertisement to a future promise that we have been given. We got
to look at it that way. The joy is only found in understanding
this love, this promise, this purpose, this identity. This
joy that comes from a deep relationship with Christ that transcends human
understanding. Philippians 4, 7. Inexpressible. What does that mean? That means that in points where...
Have you ever punched the floor? I don't know if you men do this,
but... Or women, I don't know if you do it at all. Have you
ever kicked the floor? If you haven't, it's probably
because you haven't laid in the floor and lamented so loudly
that that's the only place you could go was down. You ever seen
a child throw a tantrum and punch and kick the floor? I've been
there. I've been there emotionally as
an adult. And what the Bible is teaching
me here As these people in the dispersion
probably kicked and punched the sand in agony, wondering why. That was joy inexpressible. When
God answered the question in the midst of the kicking. When
God reminded them of His promise in the midst of the lamenting. It's illogical. It's irrational. There's no list. I mean, you
know, they put the maps in there later, but they didn't put the
outcome of how that works in our lives because God is going
to do it in your life when he's ready. But it's only going to
come through great pain, beloved. And I think, is there more to
this joy? I'm fine with what I have. I've seen all the unseen that
I want to unsee that I don't see, and I love you just enough.
I don't need any more. I don't need any more love. I
don't need any more joy. It's great. I'm happy. Please
don't bother me. I mean, you know. The dust has settled. Don't shake the blinds. Sorry. This world's going to shake the
blinds. The glory of our salvation. In Romans chapter 8, the salvation
of our souls, the ultimate goal of our faith, For in this hope we are saved.
Paul says, now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes in
what he's seen? Who's hoping to see the movie
they've already seen by looking at the commercial? Who's hoping
to get to the destination they just left and finished the work? And for those of you who know
me well, you know that I've lived a majority of my life 10 years from now.
And the irony behind that is every time I get to where I was
looking forward to getting, I wasn't content there because I was already
someplace else. And the disorder that comes along,
whether it be dust on the wall or whether it be just somebody
not understanding what I'm trying to accomplish is absolute terror. And I pray to God that that's
not the same for you. But it probably is, you just
don't realize it. We have no control over the outcome of our
fate, and that's a good thing. Because if we did, we would systematically
destroy it. We have no control over the love
of God for us, and that's a wonderful thing because He would not. But
the beautiful thing is that God loves us as we are today in every
fiber of our existence, so that our identity in Christ compares
to the identity of the world, whether it be current world,
whether it be political world, whether it be the traditional
world, whether it be the Christian world or whatever, or our identity
that we have on the inside of our own little brains, our identity
in Christ wins. It beats it all. And friends, if you want to talk
more about this, I'm happy to talk more about this. The pulpit's
not the place to parse out psychological things and philosophical things
unless we're rebutting them in the context of the scripture
that we're in. However, you're probably digesting and consuming
these ideas. Well, I'm not listening in your
own thoughts. It's not new. It's not original. It's not an epiphany. It's a
getting to something that you haven't thought about before
and then internalizing it to the point where you begin to
fight against the very spirit that lives within you. Now hear
that. Ephesians 6 tells us it's gonna
happen. There's nothing we can do about it, but it gives us
the remedy. these cultural expectations, these traditional roles, these
personal ambitions, and these self-spoken thing that we have
in our mind. I mean, think about what the
culture is. Think about what the Bible says about finding
our identity in mimicking or aligning culturally. Do not conform
to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the changing
and the renewing and the refreshing of how you think. so that by
testing your thoughts you may understand the will of God that
is good, acceptable, and perfect. Don't understand the will of
God based on what I say or what somebody else says or what tradition
says. Don't understand the will of
God based on what modern tradition says. Speaking of traditional roles,
the Bible disavows them. It doesn't establish them. It's
nonsense. You didn't see any of this until
the 1940s. You didn't even hear about biblical roles. We saw
biblical offices. And this is a point of contention
that a lot of folks are going to start jumping a little bit.
When we get to chapter 3, we've got to understand this gospel. There is neither Greek, nor Jew,
nor slave, nor free, nor male, nor female. You are all one in
Christ Jesus. What does that mean? That we're
just this blob of humanity? No, we have our distinct, we
have our distinct identifiers. We have adjectives that are applied
to us. We have things that we do. But these things change. They're not modeled into some
biblical mandate. When it comes to Christ, we need
to see our roles as beloved. So if I'm an American, which
is true, it's not my identity unless I'm at a government agency
or somewhere that needs a government agency ID. But in no time when
I have to show my government ID, am I not a child of God? And when I see Christ face to
face, he's not going to check my driver's license or my passport. Because it will be no more. My husband card, my daddy card,
my pastor card, all of those are going to be left in the drawer
to burn. I have a box of stuff from great-grandparents
and great-great-grandparents of like ID cards and military
things and stuff. They carried this stuff around
in their wallets and now it's in a box in my storage room being eaten
by bugs. That's how good the world's roles
and identities are in comparison to our identity in Christ. And
the very nature, the very fact that that fights against the
nature of our so-called spirituality, and some of us feel uncomfortable
by this discussion, proves without a shadow of a doubt that it is
an idol and that we are misidentifying ourselves in the context of the
gospel of free and sovereign grace. And if you leave the West, if you leave our culture, you
won't find it anywhere else in the entire God's given cosmos. to where it's such a huge deal,
right? But yet we have it here. First world problems, even in
poverty. First world problems. Why does it matter? Because I'm
of the opinion that when I feel myself better, more spiritual
in any sense and still humble brag and literally believe it,
that I have a love for people, I still have this in really tiny
thing that makes me think, oh, I hope they can get it straight.
I hope they can understand. I hope they get it right one
day. Let me help them. That's not ministry. Maybe you haven't become aware
that that voice whispers in your mind. It's the same voice the Pharisee
had. Thank you, Father. Oh, God of heaven, that I am
not like those people. It's not me. It's all you. You've
done it all. But thank you, God. I'm not like them. You see? That's the wrong identity. God's identity. That's who we
are. It's not about achieving perfection.
It's not about working hard. It's not about having a good
work ethic. If you think your identity is in your work ethic,
James, and it was, I'll show you what happens when I break
your foot. I'll show you what happens when I break your stomach.
I'll show you what happens when I break you. Now who am I? I'm loved, accepted. He's chosen us and Him before
the foundation of the world that we should be wholly set apart
for Him, blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us for
adoption to Himself as children through Jesus Christ according
to the purpose and after the counsel of His own will. Not
only am I loved and accepted, I'm also perfect in Christ. I'm
perfect. So my perfectionism is silly. It's a fool's errand.
Striving for excellence, great. Doing all I can, awesome. Accomplishing
things that are cool and interesting, great. Helping other people to
the best of my ability, superb, but that's not who I am. Do not
find identity in your compassion or your love or your generosity
because chances are you hate some people, so you are not a
loving person. I just popped my hand. That wasn't
a technical difficulty. How do you know this? Because
it's me. I'm not telling anything about you. I'm just, like I say,
this is confession. Perfect in Christ. Paul says,
it's like Corinthians chapter five, for our sake he made him
to be sin who knew no sin so that we might become the righteousness
of God. We are a new creation. We have
a new identity. And we are called to live out
this identity in trials, that our joy is full. Why am I focusing
on this so much? Because if you don't know who
you are and what you need, you will not have joy. I'm just reminding
you what I said in the first five minutes. Because you will
continually be seeking the answers to those questions. We need to
live out our true identity or we're not honest. We're not fulfilled. We're not able to come bold before
the throne of grace. We're behind the curtain a little bit. Hey dad, how you doing? And you
might think, even that analogy, I don't even present myself to
my parents in raw form. I mean, after 28 years of marriage,
I'm not even sure I present myself to my spouse, to my wife, in
the rawest of ways. For those of you who have been
married 40, 50 years, I mean, there's probably a little part
of you that you still like, you know? And that's okay, we don't
need all of that honesty. But let's be real, we can't hide
from our Father anyway. So we need to live out before
Him, not necessarily in the world, we've got to have wisdom, we've
got to have prudence. There's things that we say and don't say and do and don't
do because it's wise, not because we try to have to find our identity
in it or please God in the process. But we've got to be in prayer,
and we're not going to be in prayer if we're not in the Word,
and we're not going to be in the Word if we're not in the fellowship. And if we are, it's going to
be just another thing to check off a list to make us feel better
about who we are. And we don't even know who we
are. So we think that's what we need and it's not what we need.
So we're really just joyless and we're pretending we're faking
it till we make it. And it's never going to make
it. We're never going to make it. We've got to be able to witness
to others. And the way to do that first is to be honest about
us. What does that matter? Because
we have an unshakable foundation. An unshakable foundation. I'll give you three things to
think about in closing, and we'll pick up from here next week.
The unshakable foundation of our joy and love in Jesus Christ. The faithfulness and the truth
of God. God's unchanging nature. Because you're asking the question,
okay, how do I rest in this identity? How do I rest in this joy? How
do I rest? What do I need to focus on? Because
you've already said it's not what you do, except for the simple
disciplines of being exposed to the promises of God, which
are conditional. I feel like I'm talking a little
faster now, because I want to get a lot out in a little bit of time. But the faithfulness and the
truth of God, God's unchanging nature. It is impossible, Paul
says, Hebrews 6.18, for God to lie. We who have fled for refuge
might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set
before us. So how do I do that? Read the Bible and be in the
fellowship of the church. That'd be different if we were
just juggling and fire breathing up here. It'd be different if
I was just given some psychological encouragement. If I was just
beating this pulpit trying to get you to be manipulated into
behavior modification and whip you back into a Christian traditional
ideology. You've got no obligation to sit
under that. But beloved, I'm sharing the journey of near death
in this life and the hope of Christ in the
midst of it. Faithfulness of God. God's unchangeable
nature underpins our identity, helps us trust and rest in His
promises. If we're faithless, He remains faithful. 2 Timothy
chapter 2 somewhere. Second thing is that we can be
unshakable in our joy when we suffer. Our joy does not depend
on circumstances, but the unchanging character of our Father. Count
it all joy, brothers. Don't you get mad when people
tell you that? And you're really having a really, really, really
hard time? Some people, you know they love you, so you accept
it. You love them and so you accept it, but you really, it's
sort of just, it's just a soundbite. But when we draw into a resting
place to know whose we are, we know what it means to count it
all joy. It's not flippant dismissiveness. That's not healthy. It's a strategic and disciplined
acceptance. of knowing that whatever this
is, I hate it, I'm a little angry, Father, that you did it, or that
you permitted it, or that you're not getting me out of it, but
I know that when I am out, there's something going to be
different about me. I'm going to be better. I'm going to be
restored. It's Restoration, Romans 8, and
we know that all things In all things, God works all things
together for the good of those who love Him, who have been called
according to His purpose. In Romans chapter 8, it also
talks about how all creation groans for restoration. That's
how, as I've said earlier in the first third of this message,
that we can rest in the fact that God is going to restore
everything we've lost and our joy will be full. But it won't
be in those things. They will overflow the joy that
is in Christ. So now what do I do in the meantime?
I sit in my despair? No. Do I sit in this inexpressible
joy? No. Love one another. It's the single and only commandment
that lasts, that binds, it's the single and only thing that
all of the New Testament, let me say this again, all the New
Testament letters are written for the purpose that we may love
one another. Ourselves, as Christ loves us,
our spouse, our children, our neighbor, our church, our enemies. And it's not a disposition of
tolerance, though that is a lot of it sometimes, right? That's
about as good as we get sometimes, that's okay. But true love is
not a disposition of tolerance, it's an active reframing of good,
to seek out the good. And there's some people that
we can't find good, so we just pray. I'm not saying make crap
up, okay? I know he punched me in the mouth,
but his hand was itching. Glad to be a scratching post.
I mean, let's call wrong what is wrong, make people accountable
to them. If they're sorry, they'll change. But we can love one another.
How? By responding in gratitude because
he first loved us. by being vulnerable with those
that we love. And beloved, by embracing that
vulnerability and not taking it personal. Whatever that means for you,
that's another sermon. And we find our purpose in the
love of God. Paul prays for the Ephesians
in chapter three of that letter. He says, and I pray that you
may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you
may be filled with all the fullness of God. And so in closing, I pray, beloved, that the immutable, ineffable
nature of God would be your joy, that His love would be unshakable,
that your trials would be opportunity for you to embrace an inexpressible
joy And that you would stand firm, not because you're strong,
but because of God's unchanging, unshakable character. And I pray
the Holy Spirit would give us the power to embrace and live
out our true identity in Christ. Let's pray. Father, all of those
things that I've said, Father, we find ourselves often in this
way, sitting in loneliness. And it's not easy when our identities
are found in intimacy or attention or production. But it's times in these silent
and quiet moments, in these silent and quiet places, where we gain
the discipline and the power to be free in Christ. Suffering
refines us and shapes us. It tells us who we are in you
to the point that we can become unshakable. As the world around
us rumbles violently, we stand firm. This is structure, Father,
that only you can give us, no matter the chaos. This is what
it means for us to believe. So, Father, help us to be these
believers. Help us to understand. Help us
to rest. Help us to rejoice in that everything
that we've ever felt, experienced, lost, will be renewed in Christ. And the fleeting joys of that
return will be added to the fullness of the joy that we have in Christ.
Lord, let us live that hope together today, right now. Let us live
it together when we go to eat lunch in a little while. Help
us to live it together for those who we don't know how to love. Help us to be mindful forever,
every moment, and remind one another every moment that we
can about your glory, about your purpose, and about who we are
in Christ. In his name we pray, amen.