For the past month at the
church where I serve, we have taken a break from this series
entitled identity. During this series, we have been looking at a letter that is
recorded for us in the New Testament of our Bibles called the book of
Ephesians. And as we go through this series, our hope and our prayer has been
that God would enable us to see our true identity, the identity that He
designed us to live in, so that we would live our day to day lives in light of
our true identity.
Since we have
taken this break, I wanted to spend today reminding ourselves of all that we
have discovered about our identity as a follower of Jesus so far in this
series. For the first three chapters of the book of Ephesians, we saw the
Apostle Paul focus on all that God has done vertically for us so that we could
experience the identity that He designed us to live in as followers of Jesus.
We saw Paul focus on the
reality that our identity as a follower of Jesus is the basis of our spiritual blessings
because we have been chosen by God the Father and adopted as His children, because
we have been rescued by Jesus Christ from the selfishness and rebellion that
separated us from God, we have obtained an inheritance according to His plan
and for His glory, and we have the Holy Spirit’s ongoing activity in our lives.
We saw Paul focus on the
reality that that our identity as a follower of
Jesus is based on the reality that while we were once dead, we have been made
alive through Jesus. We saw Paul
focus on the reality that our identity as
a follower of Jesus should remove racial barriers and should
result in equality among followers of Jesus. We saw Paul focus on the reality that
our identity as a follower of Jesus flows from the incomprehensible love of Christ that results in our
relationship with Christ.
We then looked on as the
Apostle Paul shifted his focus to how we should live when it comes to our
horizontal relationships with others in light of all that God has done when it
comes to our vertical relationship with Him. We looked on as the Apostle Paul
revealed for us the timeless truth that the worth of our identity should drive
us to live in a way that is worthy of our identity as a follower of Jesus.
Then, on Father’s day, the
Apostle Paul revealed for us the timeless truth that our identity of a follower of Jesus should lead us to
live a new life as we lay aside our old life. We discovered that as followers
of Jesus, our identity should lead us to no longer live our day to day lives
like those who do not know Jesus and who are far from God. Instead, our
identity as a follower of Jesus should lead us to
rid ourselves of our old nature that identified us as being far from God in
order to put on our new nature that reflects our identity as a follower of
Jesus.
Now with that in mind, we are
going to spend our time next week picking up where we left off last month. As
we ended our time together last month, a natural question that we were left
with was "Well Dave, saying that our identity of a follower of Jesus
should lead us to live a new life as we lay aside our old life sounds great,
but what does that practically look like? I mean, how am I supposed to lay
aside my old life and put on my new life? And how do I really know if I am living
a new life that is laying aside our old life?"
Next week, we will look at a
section of the book of Ephesians that provides the timeless answer to these
questions and reveals for us a timeless truth about our identity as followers
of Jesus...
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