Finding True Identity as Children of God

"But he had been there for quite a while. There was a police officer that had walked by just doing rounds and saw Kant sitting at the bench and came back sometime later. He was still sitting there, came back sometime later. He's been there for a while. And so the police officer approached him because he began to kind of look suspicious of what's this guy doing here. And so he approached Kant and he said, excuse me, like, what are you doing? And Kant said, I'm thinking. And that sounded kind of strange to the officer. And he said, well, who are you? And Kant said, that's exactly what I'm thinking about. Who am I? Like, that's a foundational question that all of us wrestle with. Now, here's the truth of it. It is one of the most powerful questions we'll ever answer if we can. But oftentimes we don't really think about it. We don't sit on a park bench contemplating, who really am I?" [00:00:35] (54 seconds)


"Now, the problem with that is those kids leave, right? Does that mean you're not going to be a mom? No, you will be a mom. You'll be a dad forever, but it'll be vastly different, right? If you've done the empty nesting years, you know this. Vastly different. And if your identity is, I am a mom, I am a dad, I am the provider, I am there for my kids, and all of a sudden they're 20 -something years old and they don't need you anymore, all of a sudden your identity is in the middle of a crisis. Or, or maybe it's not even their adults. Maybe it's their teen years and you've raised them to either walk with Jesus or maybe, maybe even just, maybe you're not a believer, but you've raised them to be moral or whatever. And in their teen years, because they're autonomous thinkers and autonomous doers, they walk a path that you don't want them to walk. And you've tried to bring them back to the path that you'd like to bring them to, and they've chosen not to. And your identity is in this child, and this child is now doing the wrong things. Now you have an identity crisis, right? Because I'm not just a dad. And I won't always be a dad, at least in the way that it is, that I live it out now." [00:03:58] (72 seconds)


"he's restless he feels this competitive kick competitiveness kick in almost a chemical thing and he starts working out and he wonders could he play at 50 what would he do against lebron what if it's consumed me so much he says i'm my own worst enemy i drove myself so much that i'm still living with some of those drives i'm living with that i don't know how to get rid of it i don't know if i if i don't know if i could and here i am still connected to the game he knows he won't ever play pro basketball again he knows he's got to quiet these drives to enjoy a way to live the life he worked so hard to create to be still how can i enjoy this is a quote how can i enjoy the next 20 years without so much of this consuming me how can i find peace away from the game of basketball by finding your identity in something else his identity is a basketball player and now that the greatest is no longer a basketball player he has an identity crisis here's what you're going to see in john chapter one who i am is determined by whose i am let me say that again who i am my identity is ultimately determined by whose i am so we're going to read john chapter one john who wrote this this book is one of jesus's not just one of jesus's disciples there were there were a lot of disciples jesus had then he had the 12 that that we hear a lot about that walked with him and did a lot of ministry with him the majority of it but then there were three inside the 12 uh peter uh james and john were three of the inner circle john's one of those john's got an eyewitness view of jesus that no one else has now he's writing in the new testament the old testament the first part of your bible is in front of it we're going to see how the old testament plays into this passage in the scripture in a moment but the old testament was it's the first" [00:07:54] (118 seconds)


"They are reborn, not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God. There's a stick there for a minute. In verse 12, he says, to all those who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. Now, John was a Jew. Now he's met Jesus, and he's, he believes now and understands that Jesus is the promised Messiah that the Jews have been waiting for. So now he's a follower of Jesus. He still has Jewish roots, Jewish culture. A lot of his friends and a lot of people who are reading this are Jewish people, and we just read over this idea about being children of God, but this is somewhat offensive to the original reader. When he says, hey, you have the, you're given the right to be children of God, the people that are reading that go, wait a second, what are you talking about?" [00:10:50] (47 seconds)


"Nothing you can do to do it. He says it. He says in verse 13, not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or a plan, but a birth that comes from God. God is the one who, when you and I broke the relationship with Him, because we sinned, because we sinned, because we sinned, because we sinned, because we sinned, because we sinned, we messed up, and we broke that relationship with Him. Because we were trying to find our own identity, and we tried king, and we tried boss, and we tried all of these things, and broke the relationship, and we couldn't fix it. We couldn't build the bridge back to God. It was God who said, I love you. I want you to be my child, and I'll build the bridge back, and I'll fix it, because I'm pursuing you, and I love you, and I love you so much, I want you to be mine. I want you to be my child. So I want to take a few minutes and just think through like what that means." [00:16:49] (50 seconds)


"Like if you're a parent, you come along and you speak into your kid's life. You're trying to coach them up. You're trying to guide them. And what are you trying to guide them to? The best possible life they can have, right? Like my kids will tell you, like when they ride with me, I'm forever trying to... be a good guy. I'm trying to help them learn some of the greats in country music. Like, you know, I've got to counteract all that pop stuff they hear in their mom's car. And I'm like, this is George Strait. This is the king. Here's Hank Williams Jr. And so they roll their eyes and like, you know, trying to guide them to this will make your life better. All right. As a parent, that's what you want to guide them. I say that tongue in cheek, but you get it, right? You're trying to guide your kids to the right thing. So again, if that's what an earthly father does, the heavenly father, his spirit, his very spirit, the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside of you to guide you. And where is he guiding you? To the best life." [00:19:59] (57 seconds)


"Try to create a life that's peaceful for them, right? So imagine what a heavenly father, scripture talks all about the peace of God. The peace of God that passes all understanding is yours. That that's a part of being a heavenly, a child to the heavenly father. This week we, or I guess it's been more than a week now, we've been having like issues with our washing machine. It broke. And so it broke. We called out the repair person. So you're kind of like, how many, it's like, they're going to come out in like two days. Like, okay, like, okay, we can, we can, we can live, you know, without clothes getting washed. I can make it two days. They come and fix it. We're like, okay, put a set of things, laundry in, and then two or three in, it breaks again. So we call them again and they're like, we'll come back out. They come back out. We've got to order a part. So now, now I'm like, I haven't had a washing machine, like I've had it for one day, like in the course of the week. Now I'm to the point, I'm like, if you turn your underwear inside out, does it count? Like, what do we do? Because we had to go to the laundromat." [00:21:04] (55 seconds)


"You're born into an earthly family. Mom, dad, brothers, sisters, maybe, grandparents, aunts, uncles, most of us. Same thing. In the family of God, you have each other. That's why when people say, you know what? My relationship with God is just between me and them, me and God. Well, that may be true, but that's broken. It's not the way it's supposed to work. That'd be like me going, yeah, you know, I'm not going to go to church. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to I'm alive and stuff. And I, you know, I really just do my thing. I don't, I don't, I don't really have parents or brothers or. sisters or grandparents or aunts or uncles. It's just me and the world. Just me and myself. That's not the plan. Some of you, that may have been your story. That's not what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to have a family. And part of being a child of God is being in the family of God and having others. Which also means that just like you've got a crazy uncle at Christmas, you might have a crazy uncle sitting next to you today. But that's part of the family, right? We have and we do life together. Here's the last thing. There's all kinds of other things. I'm just hitting some." [00:23:33] (54 seconds)


"Just feel for a moment what it means to be a child of God. The last thing I want to point to you is the identity. Because that's what we're talking about. The namesake. As a child of God, you have the right to that. You are the heavenly father's son or daughter. And what that means is you have his name. That means wherever you go, sometimes for better, sometimes in a lost and broken world for worse. We're gonna actually do a series on that coming up here in the spring. But you have the name of the king. You carry his last name. That's another story of one of my kids. My oldest, she does PALS at school. Peer Assisted Leadership, I think is what it is. And basically what she does is she gets to go for a class period over to elementary schools and do mentoring for a class period. So she's in PALS and she's over at an elementary school. And she's walking in elementary school. There's a church, another church in town. They're doing like a baked potato bar for teachers there. So she walks in and there's other people in PALS. They like carpool together. They walk in and they're one of the ladies that's from this church that's got baked potatoes, sees my daughter and she says, hey, come over and get a baked potato. She didn't really like baked potatoes, but she went over and got one like, you know, to be kind, stuff like that. But here's what didn't happen." [00:24:27] (76 seconds)


"salvation, a relationship with God is free, but out of that comes action. There's a story of a guy, he was telling about the day he got a brother, and he didn't realize because he was a, this guy was a young kid, his parents were looking to adopt, and he was too young to really be in the conversation. He just remembers one day his dad brought home a 12 -year -old brother, and he's like, in the family now, and so, you know, so this is a marker for a kid, because I remember it, and he said, and I knew my new 12 -year -old brother, his parents, both his mom and dad had OD'd on drugs. He had no parents, he was an orphan, and now he was in our family. Well, it was, it was not an easy shift into the family, right? It was rocky, and the son says, man, I remember over and over and over again how many times I heard my mom or my dad say, we don't behave like that in this family. We don't say those words in this family. You don't have to fight and scream for things that you want or need in this family. We were, we show respect in this family. He said, over, over time, his name was Robert, the young man. Robert began to adjust." [00:27:48] (65 seconds)