Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Grace-based biblical teaching and sermons with Pastor Jason White. Messages that focus on Life in Christ and practical application as New Covenant believers.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with Brennan Manning or not, but he was a Christian author who wrote several well-known books such as The Ragamuffin Gospel, Abba’s Child, and The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus. And in a lot of his writings, he was pretty open and honest about his childhood and in particular the relationship he had with his mother and how that shaped him in a lot of ways.
He talked about how she would often come up from work and how he would run to throw his arms around her to hug her and embrace her only to be pushed away and told that he was such a nuisance and to go and sit in the corner and shut up.
It’s crazy that a mother would do that, but that was his reality…There was another time that he wrote about a specific incident that happened when he was only 8 years old and confronted his mom about her loving his brother more than him. Here’s what he said happened in his own words…
I said to my mom, “You love Robert more than me, don’t you? You’ve always loved him more! I hate you!” My mother looked stunned, but I didn’t relent. I continued to accuse her. ‘The truth is Robert’s always been your favorite you’ve always been kind to him and mean to me.” …My mother then stormed toward me and began punching me, over and over, to the point where I fell to the floor. She straddled me and continued to punch me, screaming, Shut up! Just shut up!”
Another time he wrote about an incident that happened when he was 10 and had saved up his money, went to the store & bought his mother a nice notepad for Christmas. On Christmas morning his parents, his brother & sister, and grandparents were all there together…and his mom tore the wrapping paper away and just stared at the notepad and said, “What in God’s name am I going to do with this?” And she took the notepad, threw it back at him, and said, “What a waste of money.”
These are the kinds of things that Brennan Manning dealt with while he was growing up, and these events and the cutting words of his mother were just embedded deep with him and became part of his identity… He thought he was worthless, a nuisance, and would never amount to anything.
And at first, he tried to deal with it by just closing himself off emotionally, but eventually, those feelings and emotions began to surface and when he was 16 years old, he started drinking alcohol to cover up the pain and hurt…and eventually Brennan Manning became a horrendous alcoholic trying to deal with this pain and hurt in his life
Now if you are like me, and you hear a story like that it just makes you cringe. You can’t imagine someone who is a parent talking to their kids like that, and it breaks your heart. But there’s probably some of you who cringe at a story like this because it is similar to something you’ve experienced personally in your own life personally.
And if that’s you, you don’t need me to tell you that things like that don’t just hurt but really do affect what you think about yourself…your identity…and your actions…
***And that’s the thing... what we think about ourselves – what we think about our identity - has a way of affecting how we behave and how we live our lives...even the Christian life.
Henri Nouwen, puts it this way, “Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life.”
But you know that you really don’t have to have had some extremely traumatic childhood experience to struggle with identity and self-rejection. The world we live in seems to do a pretty good job of helping us to feel as if we don’t match up to others.
I mean, it can be as simple as not being as popular as other people, not being as good of a student or an employee as others, not being as good of an athlete, or not being as good-looking as others.
All of these things influence us when we are forming an opinion about who we believe we are…what we believe about our self-worth and our identity.
And there are certainly a number of competing ideas, teachings, and philosophies in our world that can influence our thinking about who we really are and what we need to do about it which are way off base from the foundations of Scripture and the truth we see there… (which is sometimes easy to see)…
But we also see some popular teaching within the church or in online sermons or videos that don’t line up with the truth about our identity and what we need to do in response to who we are.
For example, a fairly popular teaching within Christian circles will say that our identity as Christians is primarily that of being a sinner and that we have a lot to change about ourselves. It is sometimes labeled a “miserable-sinner Christianity or miserable-sinner identity.”
One pastor who agrees with that label as being our identity has written this about that very thing…
“Our guilt is so great that we dare not think of it. It crushes our minds with a perfect stupor of horror, when for a moment we try to imagine a day of judgment when we shall be judged for all the deeds that we have done in the body. Heart-beat after heart-beat, breath after breath, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and all full of sin; all nothing but sin from our mother’s womb to our grave.” (Alexander Whyte)
And so those of us who operate from this position of our identity as being poor, miserable sinners often walk around defeated…focusing primarily on our sin…rejecting ourselves over and over again.
TRANSITION: So, we have all of these different things that affect what we tend to think of ourselves… for some it is the way our parents or an authority figure in our lives treated us growing up, for others it is the influence of more successful people in our lives, and yet for others it is what we’ve been taught through culture or even in our church experiences.
So my question this morning is, “What is the truth about who you are? What is your real identity?” Let’s look at Colossians 1:1…
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, 2 To God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father
Ok, so Paul starts off writing this letter to the Colossians with a customary greeting...He introduces himself as the primary writer of this letter along with Timothy. Then he acknowledges his audience…the Colossians…the church at Colossae.
But, I think it’s important for us to notice how Paul addresses his audience.
First, he calls them “holy people.” Other translations use the word, “saints.” So right off the bat, Paul makes a statement about their identity. They are saints who live in Colossae and are in Christ. This is no small statement. David Garland in his commentary on Colossians says this…
“Literally, the Greek reads: ‘in Colosse … in Christ.’ The parallelism implies that the recipients may reside in Colosse, but more importantly, they live in the sphere of Christ. “In Christ” and related phrases appear frequently in Paul’s writings, and the concept is central to his understanding of our salvation. To be in Christ means to be incorporated in him so that he encompasses the entire life of the believer. The recipients may be Colossians, but the only identity that matters to God is that they are Christians (in Christ).”
So, to be “in Christ” means that the believers at Colossae are inseparably joined in a union with Jesus. And being united to Him or incorporated in Him means that something has dramatically changed about them. They are no longer the “sinners they once were.”
Their nature has changed since they have been united to Christ, and they have been transformed into someone different.
Transition: Now, Paul knows that they will still sometimes sin, which is kind of made obvious in the fact that one of the other ways he addressed them here is as “faithful” brothers and sisters in Christ.
Paul knows it is still possible for them to sin and not be faithful otherwise he wouldn’t even point it out, but the difference is that if they do sin, it is out of character for them.
They are saints who sometimes sin, and when they do it’s out of character for them because their new identity is one that is found in being united to Christ (who does not sin…is righteous and perfect). Do you see the difference?
In other words, they are not poor, wretched, miserable sinners who will do nothing but sin their entire lives. They are saints because they are in Christ who will sometimes step out of character and sin. And the difference is huge because we live and act out of what we believe about ourselves.
So here’s the deal...Paul starts right off in his letter to the Colossians reminding them just in the way he addresses the letter to them, who they are…they are saints in Christ who live in Colossae.
Then he wishes them grace and peace...Paul is saying that this letter is to be a means of grace and that out of that grace, they will experience peace in their lives that can only come through God because of Jesus’ finished work on the cross which accomplished their “sainthood.” Look at verse 3
3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people—5 the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel 6 that has come to you.
Ok so Paul says that they are thankful to God for #1, their faith in Christ, and #2, for their love for all of God’s people. But he doesn’t say those things to indicate that they are such great people for their work for God. He points them to where that comes from in their lives, and it’s right back to their identity.
Here’s what I mean…Paul mentioned “faith, love, and hope,” but he didn’t mention that the hope they had came from the faith and love that THEY expressed towards Christ and other people…
He said it was the other way around – look back at vs. 5...he says, “the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven based on the gospel (receive).”
So listen, biblical “hope” is not wishing for something you think may not happen or know won’t happen…it is looking forward with strong confidence to the sure promises of God.
He already has reminded the Colossians of their being in Christ (who sits at the right hand of the Father)…they are already spiritually seated in heaven. So now he is thanking God for what has sprung forth in their lives from them being in Christ…and what has sprung forth?
Their faith in Him for daily living and the love Christ expresses through them towards others. It’s an inside-out expression of an inward reality – of the identity they have in Him as being spiritually united to Him in Heaven already. Look at what he says next…verse 6…
In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.
Paul continues to point them to this inward reality in their lives that expresses itself outward, but this time he does it in a way that points to this being what God is doing on a much bigger scale than in just their lives.
He says, in the same way that your identity has changed and fruit started being produced from within when you understood and accepted God’s grace, it’s happening in other people’s lives throughout the world. But why (why point them to what God is doing in the world rather than focus on them and their city/context)?
Well, if you were here last week, you know that we talked about how the Colossians were living in a pretty pluralistic city with other competing ideas and philosophies. And sometimes those competing ideas and philosophies that are all around start to sound pretty good.
And well, when we start getting distracted like that, we have a tendency to focus on those things being what is true rather than what we once believed. So Paul shows them, that this is bigger than just them…they are a part of something that is taking place on a global scale.
Paul is saying, “Hey, this inward reality you have experienced is where life is found…is what is true in people’s lives all over the world…so don’t get distracted by all those other false ideas floating around out there...this is what’s true and it’s evidenced by what you see happening in your own lives and the lives of others all over the world! Look at verses 7-8…
7 You learned it (the gospel) from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, 8 and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.
So after showing them that this is taking place all over the world, he brings them back home to their reality…that the gospel which forms the truth of their identity had to start somehow…and that was through Epaphras when he shared the gospel with them and they received it and their church was started.
And Epaphras is the one who went back and told Paul and Timothy of the love that they have for others which he says is in the Spirit...in other words, it was a love that came out of them from their spiritual union with Christ...their place of identity.
So let’s think about what Paul is doing here...
Paul started this letter to a bunch of Christians in a pluralistic city who he knows were dealing with the distractions of competing ideas and philosophies, but Paul didn’t start with the false teachers and their teachings.
No, he starts with the truth about the gospel and who they are in Christ...he talks about how even the fruit that is seen in their lives comes from their union with Christ...their place of identity.
In other words, what Paul is saying right off the bat to this church at Colossae is about the sufficiency of Christ. They don’t need to trust in anything that others are saying about adding to the work of Jesus to be a better you or to have a higher experience…
He is saying that it is Jesus plus nothing that establishes their primary identity…and it’s from that place of primary identity from which everything else flows outward.
And so what exactly does this mean for you 2,000 years later?
Well, it means that when you’ve grown up in a situation where someone told you that you were nothing, would never amount to anything, were worthless…that it’s not true!
In Christ, you are a saint…you are holy, righteous, set apart as a child of God.
It means if you’ve thought of yourself as inferior to other people because you view them as smarter, better looking, more talented, or whatever than you…that it’s not true…in Christ, you are a saint…you are holy, righteous, set apart as a child of God.
It means if you’ve grown up in a church setting where someone has told you that you are just a worthless sinner who is saved by grace…that is not true, in Christ, you are a saint…you are holy, righteous, and set apart as a child of God.
It means that you can rest in who you truly are based on being in Christ and that God is going to produce fruit through you and make impact on this world and in His Kingdom as you continue to receive from Him as your Source.
I told you earlier about how author Brennan Manning had experienced an abusive relationship with his mother and how that shaped his identity. I told you how one of the ways he coped with his identity was to drink alcohol...and he drank a lot of it.
He tried coping with it in other ways as well, but no matter what he tried, he hated himself and eventually got to the point that he contemplated suicide.
But he had this moment when he was praying and God broke through all the walls that he had built around his heart, the pain of an abusive mother, and his own addiction; and for the first time in his life he experienced the love of God.
He said, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn or deserve it.”
In other words, Brennan was learning to find his identity not in what other people said about him, what other people did to him, or even the things that he had done or not done, but rather in Jesus and Jesus alone.
After that moment, Brennan spent the rest of his life writing and teaching about God’s grace and our identity being found in Christ.
In one of his final books, he said that his message could be summed up as this...
“God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be (on the outside), because nobody is as they should be (on the outside). This grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us…Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something it cannot cover (in our lives). Grace is enough…Jesus is enough.”
He is enough for you too...your union with Him brings you your primary identity...so rest in it, and allow it to be the place that everything flows from in your life.
And if you’ve never received Jesus into your life would you receive Him today and His grace today? He wants to forgive you, come dwell in you, and give you a new identity that can never be changed!