Sermon Transcript
We’ve got an identity problem in our world, right?
And when I say identity, maybe your mind. I don’t know what your mind goes to. I don’t know what you think of. A lot of people probably think like, identity theft, right? You know, but I’m not.
I’m not necessarily talking about the information that’s on your driver’s license or your credit card number or your Social Security number or something like that, but that is probably where our minds go. And identity theft is a big deal in the US. We’ve all probably gotten a letter that’s like, we’re sorry we had a data breach and your information was stolen. And, you know, here’s a year free of Experian or whatever it’s called. You know, we’ve probably all gotten those letters and things like that before.
It’s a huge mess. It actually costs in the US. It costs Americans $8.8 billion a year. Identity theft does. Right?
Billion with a b. This is a big problem. But that’s not the identity I’m talking about, okay? That’s not necessarily identity. I’m not talking about your finances.
I’m not talking about your Social Security number. Talking about. That’s not the crisis that we have. Although it’s annoying to have to deal with those things, right? If you’ve ever had to deal with them, you know what I’m talking about.
But in the US, in the west, in our culture, really, all over the world, we have a problem. And many people, especially young people, especially young people in our culture, but it’s not, this is not just a young people problem. This is our culture has an issue with identity. We’re struggling to form an identity for ourselves when we could just turn to God instead for that identity and we could find that peace. For example, you know, throughout this series, we’re going to be talking about some of these things.
Some of these things. I’m just going to hit them right on the head. And some of them, we’re going to talk a little bit more, you know, generally about. But one example, okay? In the US in 2022 alone, gender reassignment surgeries cost Americans $2.9 billion.
The average is like over $100,000 per person. Right? And so we have an identity crisis. People are asking this question, who am I? And they’re willing to spend millions, billions of dollars we were willing to spend just in our country alone to try to come up with an answer for that question.
Now, wherever you stand on your beliefs about those things, that’s a problem. It is a money making industry that’s costing people tons of money, and it’s causing issues, not beyond finances. It causes psychological issues. When we struggle with our identity, people are going to psychologists and therapists, and those are all good things, but we’re struggling to answer these questions for ourselves of who am I and why am I here? And it’s causing a problem.
It’s turned our world upside down when we struggle to form our identity. But there may be an answer. In fact, I would suggest that there is an answer. In the scriptures, we’re taught that God has given us an identity and that that identity will lead us to peace. Now, for the sake of this series, when we talk about identity for our purposes, I’m going to give you a little bit of an oversimplification of what identity is and what that means.
But we’re going to answer two questions, and I’ve already shared them. The two questions that identity answers is who am I? And why am I here? Now, again, that’s a big oversimplification, but I trust you to fill in the blanks of my oversimplification and to understand what we’re talking about here. But the question is, why does it matter?
Why does identity matter so much other than the evidence that I’ve shown you that people are struggling to find a way to label themselves, groups to identify with, even to our gender and sexuality and all those things, these things are the things that we’re struggling with, political identity all of these things, all these ideals that we’re trying to struggle with. And identity matters precisely because of the answers that the questions that it answers, that question of who am I and why am I here? Because when we know who we are, we know what we’re capable of, right? When you know who you are, you know what you’re capable of. And if you know who you are, you know how to get back on track with who you ought to be.
Right? If you know who you are, then you probably have an answer to the question, who should I be? Right. And so once we answer those questions, if you think about it, when we know who we ought to be, it becomes much easier to figure out how we get back to who we ought to be. That makes sense, right?
But that statement, even in and of itself, has a fundamental truth claim to it that there is someone or something I should be. When we say that something should be a certain way, we’re saying that things ought to be a certain way that suggests that there’s some standard outside of ourselves, there’s some truth outside of ourselves that tells us what’s really true. And it’s a dangerous claim, isn’t it? It’s dangerous to claim that there’s something that’s true beyond us. What happens when my ought or my should be is different from your ought or your should be?
What if we don’t agree? What if we don’t line up when the reality that we believe in? Right. The standard that we believe in doesn’t line up with each other? The reality is that we need a standard that lies outside of ourselves for this to work.
Something that, whether we agree or don’t or disagree, that it’s just true, we need something that is just true. The same is true with our purpose. The why question. When we know why we’re here, we can figure out where we’re going, and we can figure out how to get there. And to put that idea in a negative, when you don’t know who you are and you don’t know why you’re here, we become lost.
When we don’t know who we are and why we’re here, we become lost. Let me ask you something. When you look out at the world and you examine people, do you see people that know who they are, do you see a world that’s lost? When you look out at the world and you see people that, do you see people that know their way, like the leaders in our country, the people that claim to have the truth, do you think that they do? Right?
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I don’t know. Are they lost? Look at your own life. Have you ever lay awake at night and asked those questions, who am I?
Why am I here? My guess is that all of us at some point in our lives, have asked those questions of ourselves. Or maybe you’re. Maybe you’re currently struggling with those questions of who am I? And why am I here?
And I think we can all agree that we have a crisis of identity, hands in our culture. The apostle Paul summarizes it this way. He puts it in the terms of a spiritual reality, a spiritual battle that’s happening within us. He identifies his struggle as a battle between the spirit of the law and the flesh and the spirit and the law of God within us. And he says, we know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.
I do not understand what I do, but for what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. I think we’d all agree with Paul here, wouldn’t we, that there’s this struggle within us. We want to do what’s good and right.
But in order to do what’s good and right, we have to know what’s good and what’s right. We have to define those terms, don’t we? Maybe. Maybe we could just. Or maybe we could just live our truth, right?
That’s kind of the spirit of our day. Just live your truth. Well, again, I go back to the question, well, what happens when your truth doesn’t line up with my truth? What do we do then? Do we just fight about it like the battle of the fittest or whatever?
The one that’s stronger wins, and we just yell and scream at each other until we figure out an answer to that question.
I think the reality is that we need an objective standard outside of ourselves. There has to be something more than just your truth or my truth. There has to be some sort of standard of truth for us to follow. Otherwise, how can we agree on anything? And I think we can all agree that having a foundation that we can build upon for our identity, that that’s a good thing.
Would you agree having a foundation that you know is true to build your identity on in your life or the lives of your family, your children, your grandchildren, that that would be a good thing for us all to have? But which one do we choose? Which foundation do we choose? Luckily, the Bible tells us about a foundation for our lives that is true for everyone, right? All the way back in the beginning of the scriptures, we’re given an identity by God, which forms the foundation on which we can build our entire lives, whether we are here in America or whether we’re over in Southeast Asia or in the saharan Africa, no matter where we are, no matter who we are.
It answers those questions of who am I and why am I here? In a way that is complete and it brings us to peace. And that identity is found in Genesis, chapter one. It’s the image of God. Genesis 126 through 27.
Then God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish and the sea and the birds, in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female. He created them.
So what is the image of God? Well, there are two hebrew phrases here that I think we need to understand in order to understand more fully what the image of God is. The first is spoken by God, and he says, let’s create man in our image, or in his image, spoken of God by the narrator of Genesis in verse 27. And the second phrase is in our likeness. Now, they are similar phrases, but they’re not exactly the same.
In fact, there’s two hebrew words here that really matter. There’s Betsalem, and there’s demuth. Image is Bethsalem, and likeness is demuth. What do these words mean? Well, what does it mean?
That God created humans in his image in bet? Salem? Right? Or in his likeness in Dumuth? Do we look like God?
Right. I mean, how many of you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror and, like, I look like a God? Some of you might. I don’t know, guys. Your wife doesn’t think that’s cool if you do it.
I’m just telling you. He’s not digging that. Just being honest with you. How can it be possible to look like God? God is spirit, right?
He doesn’t give us any physical image that’s formed to represent him. And yet, in the idea of these words, the physical representation, it does have something to do with these ideas of bet, Salem and Demuth. And, in fact, it may help us to understand that later context, these words were actually used of idols or statues. For example, if you look in the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar, and he’s taken captive, taken the Israelites captive and taken him off to Babylon. And he builds for himself or has built for himself this 90 foot tall statue of himself, right?
And he calls all the Babylonians, all the Israelites, all the captives, all the people to that statue and says, when I say go, you’re going to bow down and you’re going to worship this image. You’re going to worship my image. And it’s as if Nebuchadnezzar is saying, that statue, that giant 90 foot tall statue, that’s me, and you’re worshiping me when you worship that statue. Now that’s a sinful representation of the word, of course, because Nebuchadnezzar was creating an idol for the people to worship, a false God, right? But that’s what that idea of image or likeness, that’s what it contains, that’s what it carries with it.
But the primary meaning here isn’t a physical representation of God, at least not in the sense of appearance, as far as appearance is concerned. So what is it then? Is it a metaphor? Right. Are we like or as God, right, or whatever?
Which one’s that? Is that a metaphor or simile? Don’t answer that. I’ll figure it out later. I’ll google it.
But partially it is a metaphor. The words carry this kind of metaphorical sense of having the same or similar characteristics of something or someone. So, for example, you know, a child that has the same mannerisms as their parents, I bet you love it. Like, I love it when people compare me to my dad. You’re like, oh, you’re just like your dad.
Like, what do you mean by that? I love my dad, but, like, I’m my own person here, you know? But you ever seriously, though, you ever, like, do some mannerism or, like, make some noise or, like, you know, yawn in a certain way or whatever, or, you know, make, you know, do something and you’re like, oh, I just turned into my mom or my dad, or I just did something that my parents always did, and it just drives you crazy. There’s kind of that sense there of these similar characteristics. But again, that isn’t even a perfect definition of what the image of God is.
The reason that that’s incomplete is because the image of God, at least as far as the Bible suggests, is an innate part of who we are as human beings. And it’s never lost. We are created with the image of God as a part of who we are. And everyone who has ever existed bears that image of God, and they always will. And so you could change your physical appearance.
You could change your mannerisms, you could change certain things about yourself, but you can’t change the image of God in you. You can’t rid yourself of it. You can’t change its form within you. And so these are imperfect definitions, because the image of God is something that defines who we are. In fact, I can prove it to you just in Genesis.
If you look at Genesis chapter five, just a few chapters later, we see a written account of Adam’s family line, and we read that it says, when God created mankind, all of mankind, not just Adam and eve, but every human being. When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them, and he named them mankind when they were created. Now, some people might say, well, that’s just a summary of Genesis chapter one, right?
That’s just a summary statement, right? It doesn’t address the fall in Genesis chapter three. It doesn’t address the fact that we sinned. Right? And so does sin mess up the image of God within us?
Well, if we fast forward a couple more chapters to Genesis chapter nine, we look now, we’re looking at God talking to Noah, and God is renewing his covenant with Noah. After the flood, after the fall, after human beings had become so sinful that God decided to pour out judgment on them and destroy the earth because of their sin. And what does God say to Noah when he addresses the shedding of human blood? God says this, whoever sheds human blood by humans shall their blood be shed. For in the image of God has God made mankind.
Is that clear enough? That even after the fall, even after the greatness of sin that came before the flood, God is still saying that human beings are created in his image. And so nothing can undo the image of God in your life. Not even our sin can undo the image of God in our life. Even though the fall of man completely changed, fundamentally changed the nature of the world that we live in, it changed our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, our relationship with creation, and even our relationship with our own selves, even our own psyche, even those things were damaged by the fall.
And yet the image of God is still in you. You see this? Do we understand that one thing that the fall did not change about us, about every human being, is that we are created in God’s image? And so could the. Let me ask this.
Could the image of God then be that identity that we can all agree upon, that it’s something that is innate within us? Perhaps it’s the real answer to what the image of God is. Perhaps the image of God is the answers to those two questions that we’ve been asking all along of who am I and why am I here? Maybe it would help to think differently about the image of God. Maybe instead of thinking about it as just a characteristic or or as a noun, maybe it would help us to think about it more as a verb.
What if we thought of being the image of God as something that we innately do? In other words, we are imagers of God. There’s action to the image of God. We function in the capacity, yes, of God’s, as God’s representatives in the world. And so the image of God is not just a quality within you.
It’s what we are as humans, and it’s what we do. We bear the image of God. David Klein’s summarizes in his book the image of God and man. What makes man the image of God is not that corporeal or physical. Man stands as an analogy for a physical God.
For the image does not primarily mean similarity, but the representation of the one who is imaged in a place where he is not. Man is set on earth in order to be the representatives there of the physically absent God who is nevertheless present by his image. In other words, the image of God within us is the way in which God has chosen to be present in this world through us. An analogy that might help us is to think of a king’s ambassador or an envoy. Think back.
Maybe you know this about the ancient world. If a king sent an ambassador or an envoy, he would send them with his signet or with a seal that represented him. And as long as that seal, as long as that signet was present, it was as if the authority of the king went with that envoy, as if the king himself were there and physically present through that ambassador. As long as that signet was worn or as that seal was present, then the king’s authority was there and it was real. And that’s what the image of God within us is like.
And every person, regardless of their stage of development, is an imager of God. It’s a verb, it’s an action, it’s a part of who we are. But it’s also something that we do. And there’s no incremental, there’s no partial imbuing of God’s image on us. To be human is to be created in the image of God.
It doesn’t come from some ability or physical or spiritual prowess that you have no member of the animal kingdom, regardless of their cognitive abilities, have it. Same goes for any form of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Right? AI can’t bear the image of God or whatever extraterrestrials maybe you’ve dreamed of. I don’t know, like, aliens can’t bear the image of God either.
I’m not saying they’re real. I’m just saying, like, if that’s where your mind goes, but being created as human, we are created in God’s image, and that means that we’re his representatives here on earth. That’s why the creation of humanity is immediately followed with what scholars call the dominion mandate of Genesis 128 30. It says, God blessed them and said, be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it.
Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth, and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground, everything that has the breath of life, I give every green plant for food. And it was so God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
God provides for his creation. He created his world in a way that’s sustainable, so the world can produce and reproduce. In doing so, the world replenishes itself. But at the pinnacle of that creation that’s able to produce and reproduce. God tasks human beings, humanity with stewarding over his creation in such a way that it would be as if God himself were ruling his creation through us.
So what are we to make of this image of God that the Bible claims we all bear, how can we build on it as a foundation for our identity? Hopefully I’ve made my case clear that the image of God is that foundation. Well, being God’s image bearers provides an objective and reasonable answer to who we are and why we’re here. And we’ve been given this identity by God that answers those questions. It answers those most fundamental questions of being human.
And it’s an identity that’s not achieved, it’s not something that we can earn. It’s an identity that’s received. We don’t have to work to get it. You can’t earn it because it’s already in you. And if we don’t want our lives to be turned upside down, like we see when we look out at the world and we see the world struggling with its identity in this endless pursuit of who we are and why we’re here, then we have to answer those questions.
And I would like to suggest to you that the best answer for that question of identity is found in God’s image. So why is the world still upside down then? Well, it’s because we seek identity apart from God’s image. We try to answer those questions on our own. In fact, no other identity that we could ever create for ourselves or find for ourselves will satisfy us more than the identity which God has already given you.
And so because we seek our own answers to who am I and why am I here apart from God, we have an identity crisis on. On our hands. And we might think, well, how did we get here? A few years ago, before he passed away, Pastor Timothy Keller did an interview, and he gave what I think is some of the most succinct answers to how we got to this place in our culture. And he actually did it, in a way, by describing every generation.
Timothy Keller had a career that spanned almost 40 years in ministry, and he’d ministered to multiple generations in the church, and he kind of broke down each generation and how their beliefs, how every single generation has a belief that’s led to part of this crisis that we find ourselves in. But he also helps us find answers in the scriptures for every generation as well. Here’s what Keller said. He said, my parents generation, the traditionalists, or the science, sorry, my grandparents generation, the silent, what some people would call the silent generation or the traditionalists, they believed that we were good people and that the meaning of life was just to be a good person. But the Bible tells us that we can’t be good on our own, doesn’t it?
Right? You can’t earn your salvation through your own moral effort. You can’t be good enough to please God despite your sin. Right? We need a savior.
We need Jesus Christ to remove that sin from us. And so what does the Bible say? That if we claim to be without sin, John says in one, John one, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, that Jesus is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. There’s my parents generation, the baby boomers.
And baby boomers tend to believe that there’s kind of this inner child, right, this natural purity within us that’s perfect from the beginning. And society is just kind of trying to mess it up and trying to make you feel guilty for it. And so the meaning of life for you baby boomers, when you’re growing up, when you were growing up, a lot of you, it was to find your. To follow your heart, to kind of find your inner child. And if you don’t believe me, how many of you lived through the sixties?
Right, there’s my point. Right? Like, that was an interesting time. Was it? I’m joking.
Kind of, sort of. I wasn’t alive then, but it was interesting, wasn’t it? Right. Keller talks about his own generation this way. He says, everybody has something that.
Something that they want to live for. But whenever we live for something other than God, whatever that thing is, we will find ourselves enslaved to it. And does that not define so many of us apart from Christ, right? When we’re chasing these experiences and this inner child and this personal freedom, this rugged individualism, that the result is that we become a slave to whatever thing we’re chasing. The Bible, on the other hand, says that the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
And Jeremiah, the prophet asks, who can understand it? So we aren’t told to follow our hearts in the Bible. But Jesus does encourage us to have faith like a child, to trust and follow him simply and humbly. There’s my generation. I’m sorry, the generation before me, I almost forgot you.
Gen X. Sorry. So there’s generations that came before us, the ones that, when I was a kid, we looked up to you in high school like you were the cool kids, right? And you, maybe you grew up believing that life was about disassociating from authority and establishment, right? That you were your own boss and no one could tell you otherwise.
And, man, it was so cool, right? To be against the machine, against the man. What happens when you grow up, though, and you actually become a part of that establishment? Kind of backfires, doesn’t it? It messes with your beliefs.
But the Bible, instead of pushing human establishments upon us, the Bible tells us that Jesus came to establish a kingdom where every human authority is subverted for the authority of Christ, which is first and final in the kingdom of God. And yet, as the king Jesus calls us, his friends, he calls us to rule with him. He told his disciples, I confer on you a kingdom just as my father conferred one on me. Then there’s my generation, the millennials. And we grew up believing that everything should revolve around us, right?
Millennials, right? Like, the whole world should just revolve around us. We should be so focused on ourselves, leaning into what we want, and we learn that from older generations. But I believe while I was growing up, the identity crisis kicked into high gear. I think we really fell into this, and we embraced wholeheartedly this idea of just living for ourselves around the time when I was a kid.
You are who you are in our world. Your purpose, your truth. You are your own master. Just live your own truth. Well, now you got a new God in your life, don’t you?
And it’s you if you believe that about the world, that you’re just living your truth and you’ve just become your own God, and you’ve just enslaved yourself to yourself again, as Paul says, like we said earlier from romans seven, I know that good itself does not dwell in me. That is my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out, for I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do. This I keep on doing. And remember what Tim Keller said, that whatever that thing is you’re living for, even if it’s yourself, you’ve just enslaved yourself to it.
And yet Jesus is a lord who says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, I will give you rest. He says, take my yoke upon you. Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Millennials, have we found rest for our souls and living for ourselves? I don’t think we have.
And then there’s the next generations. Gen Z. All the people in the room that are under 25. Gen Alpha. My kids generation.
Right? You probably believe in a society with no margins, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. There’s been a transition where we don’t want to exclude anyone. Right? I am who I say I am, and we’re all about creating this society with no marginalized people, where everyone is included.
And again, some of that can be good, but have you ever noticed that it always comes with strings attached? It always comes with strings attached. We should include everybody except for the people that I say we shouldn’t. You see what I mean? Everybody should be included except for those that I want to exclude.
But according to the gospel, Jesus came, and he invited everyone to the cross. He came humbly. He gave up his glory and his power, his privilege, and he gave it up to give up his life on the cross for you and for me to forgive us of our sins. And so the apostle Paul encourages us to be like Christ, to have a christlike attitude when we view others, when we treat others. Paul says, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.
Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others in your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. No other identity that we could find for ourselves or create for ourselves will completely satisfy us every generation in our world than the identity that God has given us already. Image of God, then you’re going to take anything away from this message. It should be this, that the image of God is an identity received.
It’s not an identity achieved. The image of God is innate to every human being. It answers every generation’s desire for an identity on which to build the foundation of our lives. We find the answers to those questions, who are we and why are we here? In this image, it was perfected in Jesus Christ and redeemed in us by his death on the cross.
And so if we don’t want to live lives that are turned upside down, then I would suggest we need to seek our identity in Christ. As Paul said of Jesus in Colossians 115, the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. When we build an identity we’ve created for ourselves, we become a slave to it. But when we choose the identity that God has already given us, it sets us free. It sets us free for the Son who is the image of the invisible God.
Now, throughout the rest of the series next week and the week after, we’re going to dive deeper into what it means to have a redeemed identity in Christ. But as we seek this God given identity, I think it is worth examining our answers that we’ve given, the created identities that we have in our lives, the answers that we’ve given to those questions of who am I and why am I here, that don’t line up with the image of God within us. How do we answer those questions? How can we realign ourselves with God’s image that we bear, the image of the one who created us? Let’s look for identity there.
Let’s live out that image through redemption of Jesus Christ.