WHEN YOU HAVE TO RE-THINK YOUR WHOLE IDENTITY

How do you answer the question when someone asks you, who are you? It's tempting to just say your name. I'm Reuben. But the question isn't what's your name, the question is, who are you? And that's a slightly deeper question. And the more you think about it, the more difficult it becomes to answer that question. Because are you the sum of everything you've done, or are you what other people have defined you as? Maybe you are your personality. Are you your likes and your dislikes? Really, who are you? Where does your worth and value come from? You might've heard about the Apostle Paul in the Bible. He wrote most of the New Testament. He defined himself as a high profile scholar, a religious person, and he was well-respected for that. And he actually travelled all over persecuting and finding Christians. He writes in Philippians chapter three, verse four: It is true that I once relied on all that I had become, I had a reason to boast and impress people with my accomplishments more than others, for my pedigree was impeccable. So he says, it was because of his accomplishments, that he had a reason to boast. He defined himself and found his value in his own human accomplishments. But we know that for Paul, everything changed when he encountered Jesus. So he was walking on a road to Damascus, and he encountered Jesus and everything changed. Suddenly, he started to find his worth and his value in Jesus and not in the things that he had done. You see, as humans, we try to impress other people. And so we try to figure out our value based on what other people think and say about us. But the problem with that is it's so unstable and also really untrue. If you base yourself worth on your accomplishments in school or sport, or on your social life, and then something goes wrong, your self-worth goes all the way down. And so you're trying to find your value in things that are not true and things that are not stable. You see, how do we figure out if something is valuable? One way to do that is to see how much someone is willing to pay for something. If you have an item and someone is willing to pay a million pounds, we know that thing has a lot of worth. Someone is only willing to pay five P, It doesn't have very much worth. So what does this say about us? Well, one thing that we know is that Jesus paid the highest possible price for us. And that must mean that our value is infinite. So if we find our identity and our self-worth in God, that means that it is stable. Nothing that we do or have done will change our identity in Christ because Jesus has already defined our identity and our value. There's nothing we can do that would make God love us any more or any less. Our identity in Christ is completely stable and secure.