Who Am I

Let us all worship together: Before The Throne Of God

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Let us Pray

Lord, we thank you today that you are all-powerful, all-knowing and always perfectly good. Thank you for your daily mercies to us as we struggle through such challenging times. Father, we confess that we do not seek your presence as we ought. We confess that we have settled for lesser things, when we know you desire us to have a personal, close relationship with you. Lord, revive our love for you. Draw close, let us know your presence in our lives. And help us to in turn share your love with our neighbours. Lord, we put our hope in your unfailing love. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Let us share in The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven, 

hallowed be thy name; 

thy kingdom come; 

thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. 

Give us this day our daily bread. 

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. 

And lead us not into temptation; 

but deliver us from evil. 

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory,

 for ever and ever. Amen.

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Before we go to the word let us sing: The Power Of Your Love

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Who am I?

One of the most perplexing questions that each of us faces in life at some point, is: Who am I? What was I made to do? All too often we go looking for the answers in all the wrong places, and the image that we build of ourselves, the understanding that we have of who we are, becomes twisted and distorted. That one thing has ruined and is ruining, many a life.

We have so many pictures and images of who we should be thrust under our noses each day and yet none of them ring true, so we end up feeling a bit like refugees, lost.

The media and the advertisers, they want to define success for us. They want to tell us what it means to be open-minded. They want to tell us what we should aspire to. They want to tell us what a happy, well-adjusted family looks like, and what beauty looks like and what we have to achieve, who we have to be, what we have to look like, to be successful.

They tell us if we don’t look like this, we haven’t made it, but we will if we buy their product and I don’t know about you, but I can get so lost in that maze because my life never quite looks like those images of success that they wave under my nose. And we compare ourselves with other people, people who look successful and so often we come to the conclusion that we aren’t. And so that question, “Who am I?” rattles around in that empty, hollow void inside. 

Have you ever been to one of those fun fairs where they have those distorted mirrors. You walk in front of one and you look all tall and skinny or short and fat or all wobbly and wavy. They’re good fun. But imagine if our mirrors at home were like that, all distorted. It wouldn’t be good would it.

My hunch is, whenever we get a distorted image of ourselves, of who we are, that’s not a good thing even if we happen to like the distorted image better than the real one. For example, the distorted image that society puts up that you can be whoever you want to be, it’s all up to you, it’s all out there, just go and be whoever you want to be.

I’m 5 foot, 7 inches or 174 cm tall, so it doesn’t matter how much taller I want to be. I’m never going to be any taller. In fact, I’m getting shorter. There are also some things in life that I am definitely  not good at. If I try to be those things, it would be a bad fit. Maybe that’s why so many people aren’t happy, because they’re trying to do jobs or be someone that they’re quite simply not cut out to be. Aspiring to something that we’re never going to be any good at is one of the worst things that we can do in the world. I wonder if that’s why there are so many people, who literally hate their jobs.

Did you know that  45% of workers say that they are satisfied with their jobs. You know what that means? That means that 55%, or over half, are not. Of those 45% who said they were happy, only 20% said that they felt really passionate about their jobs. That means that 80% of people don’t feel passionate about their jobs

I think that these statistics are a tragedy. The vast majority of people aren’t passionate about what they do every day. So many people aren’t enjoying their lives. So let’s look at the flipside of that coin. There’s a whole bunch of people wandering around in life, believing with every fibre of their being, that they’re worthless. ‘Oh, I’m only a stay at home mum. I only work in a shop. I’m not as smart or as good looking or as talented or as successful or as wealthy or whatever as the next person.

Amidst all of that, here’s a question, who am I? Who are you? In the cosmos, in the scheme of things, how do you define your worth and who you actually are? And if you’re living your life that way, then you are living a powerless life. A life that will, ultimately, count for nothing. In a very real sense,  that was the kind of life that I was living, until I discovered what God said about me. How God sees me. What His view of me from Heaven’s balcony looks like. And that’s something that you find in the Bible over and over again.

I want to set you a challenge today, to read Ephesians Chapters 1 to 3 – only a few pages – and to write down all the things that the chapters say about you. Let me just give you the first few:

You are a saint, grace and peace are yours, you are already blessed with every spiritual blessing, you were chosen before the creation of the world, adopted into God’s family, redeemed, forgiven, God’s grace is being lavished on you, wisdom and understanding are yours, God’s will is made known to you … and we haven’t even arrived yet, at the tenth verse of the first chapter.

Do you get it? The Bible presents a radically different view of who you are. The Bible tells you who God says you are. So instead of believing the distorted images that the world reflects at you, you can see, a crystal clear, accurate representation of who you are. What we need to do is this. Ditch our self-image, and develop a faith image, by discovering and believing what God says about you. Because when you know who you really are, who you are in Christ, you will have laid hold of the power to be who God made you to be. It’s a power that will completely and utterly and radically transform your life.

You see God is no other pedlar of good philosophies or belief systems; He’s not some distorted mirror of low self–esteem or unrealistic stereotypes. If God is truly God, if God made you and me, how does He see us? The answer to that question tells us who we really are.

And not knowing who we are is like trying to navigate your place from A to B, with an inaccurate map. When I speak to people I often ask, “how often do you read your Bible.“ The answer to that questing has always been, well, not very often. Who am I? If that’s a question that you want the answer to, a question let me say that you want the right answer to, if you want an accurate map for your life, then the only place that you’re going to find it is in God’s Word.

Because when we come to His word, with questions like “Who am I?”, His Spirit breathes those truths into our hearts. I can’t do that for you, only you can do that with Him, only He can do that for you and that is in the Bible because all of us who are led by God’s spirit are children of God.

So let me take you back to that challenge. Open your Bible, go to Ephesians Chapters 1 to 3 in the New Testament. Read them. And write down everything that you find in those few sort pages that tell you who you are. I found thirty statements about my identity. Let’s see how many you can find. Right them down, ponder them, believe them. And you will find power unlimited to live your life.

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Remember that Jesus gave his life for us so we could live a life beyond our imagining. Remember you are loved with an everlasting love.

Let us join together and sing: Here Is Love

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:

The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:

The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.