Finding Our Identity and Hope in Christ

1) "Today we are continuing on in 1 Peter chapter 1. And this whole series is called Finding Identity Finding My Identity in Christ. And what I want us to do is to really focus throughout this whole series about what it means to follow Christ but more than that just more on a fundamental level to be one with Jesus. To have him filtering in through every aspect of our life. To be identified as a child of God above everything else." [26:36] (36 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2) "He said, I had the do's and don'ts down. I knew what to do, what not to do, all the processes, but what I wasn't doing was living the life. And so he really started that in earnest and you could see it coming out in his life as he talked about what it meant to be a follower of Christ. And so that's what we're aiming at here is finding our identity, finding our identity, in Christ, not being a, not just trying to find the right do's and don'ts. So that's a part of living that life out but really it stems from, as we talked about last week, our nature determines our behavior." [29:34] (32 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3) "We should respond with hope and put our hope in Christ and focus on the grace and focus on what's coming ahead. We should prepare our minds for action, commit our mind to sober thinking and fix our hope on the grace. Then the last part of the verses we looked at last week, tell us that we should respond to this with holiness, that the natural outgrowth of a life sold out to Christ is he does the sanctifying work within us and our life begins to reflect that. And we quoted text from the Old Testament, which tells us, as God said, be holy for I am holy." [33:47] (34 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4) "Knowing that you were ransomed. Again, the you is believers. You, if you are a child of God, if you have received Christ as your savior, if you're walking with him, you were ransomed. Okay, let's pull that back. We think about ransom. When I think about ransom, the first thing I think about is someone being kidnapped, and someone takes someone and they contact the family and say, if you want this person back, then you must pay this sum of money. That's the ransom money. It must be paid in order to receive that person. Well, the ransom to buy us back after we've fallen into sin is death." [43:34] (48 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5) "Jesus loved you enough to be the ransom for you. Don't ever say my life doesn't count. Don't ever say my life isn't worth anything. Don't ever say that the world wouldn't miss me if I was gone. Scripture says otherwise, and this is the truth. If you know Christ, you've been ransomed by him." [44:04] (28 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6) "Why did Jesus do this? For the sake of you. One of the things that I do in preparing to preach is once we lock down on what the text is going to be and start exegeting and that kind of thing, sometimes there will be a phrase or a word or a theme that just jumps off the page. And all week long, under my breath and in my mind, I have been saying, for the sake of you, for the sake of you, for the sake of you, thinking about what he did for the sake of me. Now, everything that Jesus did, he did was for God's glory, for his father's glory. But it also had the purpose for us, for your sake, for the sake of you." [49:02] (60 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


7) "The biggest mistake we can make in our service to the father is to think that somehow we have something worth offering to him other than just our lives. That we can somehow do some things that are going to be good for us. And that's what we're going to do. And that's what we're going to do. And that's what we're going to do. And that's what we're going to do. And we have to do it. Put our faith in our hope in something, some man-made tradition that we put our faith in hope in government or some sort of election or anything like that. What he's saying here is I've done this for you so that you could just trust me. You can put your faith and hope in me. Trust me. I'll take care of it. I've already done the hard part. You just follow. You just love. You just walk with me. That's all that needs to be done." [50:53] (45 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)