New series: True ID

It is not a hostile question, this “Who do you think you are?”  It’s not asking to you to defend or justify your existence, or prove your worth.  Honestly: who are you?

We’re beginning True ID, our new sermon series, which will help us explore what Scripture says about our identity, who we really are … or better, whose we are.

“Tell me about yourself.”  Well, we usually start with our occupations, what we “do for a living.”  Who am I? An engineer, health care worker, plumber, at-home mom, lawyer, and so on.  We might add whether we’re married, divorced, single, our widowed, where we are in the parenting or grandparenting phases of life, where we’re from, something about our parents, some snippets of personal history.  All of it good and true, all of it aspects of our “who we are!”

We might also identify ourselves according to our political allegiances, or about our positions on “the issues of the day”: gun laws, abortion, climate change, racism, immigration policies—and on and on and on that list can go!

But even if we knew all those things about you, important as they may be, would that really be you?  Would all of that get us to you?

What’s your True ID?  What’s our True ID as a community of Christ?

In this series, we’ll be looking at this question of identity: who do you think you are? We’ll explore the various ways we can develop our sense of identity—and how those square with the Good News of who God says we are.  We’ll be studying one of the New Testament’s most glorious, most mysterious, deepest, most wonderful and shortest phrases: in Christ.  Who you are is who you are in Christ.  Your True ID is the you that Jesus knows you to be, the you that Jesus creates by virtue of his cross, resurrection, ascension and outpouring of his Spirit.

You won’t find who you really are in your history, personality, politics, education, parentage, ethnicity, or memberships.  Those certainly are aspects of who you are.

But who you are isn’t really in those things; it is in Christ.

Make a list of your answers to “Who are you?”  Then pray through that list: anything Jesus wants to modify, remove, change … add?