Shaped by the Identity of Jesus (Kirk Giles) | Shaped By Jesus

Good morning, everyone. If you take your Bibles, open up

to the Gospel of Luke Chapter 9, Luke Chapter 9, that's page 919.

Luke 9 · chapter mention Luke 9 · chapter mention

If you're using one of the Bibles in the seats around you

as you're opening up to Luke 9, I want you to think about a

question that has changed your life, a question that someone

has asked you at some point in time that you know, this was a

defining moment in my life. Maybe it was should I buy this

new house? Maybe it was should I say yes to

this person who wants to marry me?

I I think about sometimes in my own life that the reality of

questions that have shaped my life in different ways, hard

questions I've had to wrestle with.

Like. Do you really believe the Leafs

will win the Stanley Cup in your lifetime?

One of the probably most poignant questions I was asked

came in a season where I was even unusually busy in serving

God and doing some things in ministry.

And someone came up to me and said, hey, Kirk, what are you

trying to prove to God? Why are you doing more than what

you should be doing? And that was like straight to

the heart penetrating kind of question that makes you pause

and think and wrestle with something like that.

You see, there are some questions that don't just inform

our lives, they define our lives.

You've probably had a lot of those kinds of questions.

Am I happy? What is my purpose in life?

Should I take this job? Will I be OK?

Will the people I love be OK? And as we come to the passage

today in Luke Chapter 9, Jesus is going to shape his disciples

Luke 9 · chapter mention

through a question. In fact, it is the single most

important question Jesus could ask you or me or any other

person. So let's read the passage

beginning in verse 18 of Luke Chapter 9.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

While he was praying in private and his disciples were with him,

he asked them, who do the crowds say that I am?

And they answered John the Baptist, others, Elijah, still

others, that one of the ancient prophets has come back.

But you, he asked them, Who do you say that I am?

And Peter answered, your God's Messiah.

The single most important question in life is this Who do

you say Jesus is the The question of the identity of

Jesus, more than any other question you will ever wrestle

with in your life, matters. And the reason it matters is is

because it is the one question that has eternal consequences

and present day implications at the same time.

A couple of weeks ago, Pastor Derek talked about some of the

most common misconceptions that people have when it comes to who

Jesus is. And if you missed that sermon

from a couple of weeks ago, I really encourage you to go back,

review it, watch it. It's an incredibly helpful,

great teaching on some of the misconceptions people have about

Jesus. It's important that we

accurately understand the identity of who Jesus is.

Now, when I say identity, I don't just mean the fact that

Jesus existed. Historians are confident that

Jesus existed. Graham Stanton from Cambridge

University in England, he said this.

He said today nearly all historians, whether Christian or

not, except that Jesus existed and that the Gospels contain

plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and

assessed critically. So historians agreed Jesus

existed. So if he existed, then the next

logical question is, well, who was this guy?

Who is he? If you're not a history buff and

you don't really care about religion, you may not really

care because Jesus just another historical figure to study.

But what if that question of who is Jesus really, truly does have

eternal implications? What if it really does make a

difference in the way that you approach every single thing in

your life, not just part of your life, all of your life.

If you're here today or you're watching online and you're

exploring the Christian faith, who is Jesus is the primary

question to consider, and everything else flows from

there. The Christian faith is not a

faith primarily of rules and regulations.

It's not a faith of knowledge. It's a faith that is centered in

a person named Jesus. One of the mistakes that people

often make when they're exploring the Christian faith is

is they'll come to the Bible and they'll go, OK, I want to

understand all the things in the Bible before I make a decision

about Jesus. So I need to know, like, is it

really true? What happened in Genesis 1 and

2? Did all of that really happen?

Or the stuff in Revelation of a weird creature with horns coming

out of his head. Is that real?

Because it raises so many questions and doubts for me.

And so we go looking for all of our questions to be answered

first before we decide if we're going to put our faith and

belief in Jesus. But the Christian faith actually

works the opposite of that. The Christian faith starts with

the question of who is Jesus, and everything flows out of that

answer to that question. We have to figure out who Jesus

is and read everything else in the Bible through that lens.

Now, I know that for the majority of us in the room

today, we have settled this question in our hearts a long

time ago, who is Jesus? But for those of you who have

already made-up your mind who Jesus is, I want you to keep

your heart and mind open as we walk through this passage.

Because the truth is, this is the one question you're going to

have to keep coming back to over and over again throughout your

life. Now, when it comes to

understanding the identity of Jesus, one of the common things

that people will do is try and find out, well, what do other

people think about this question?

How would other people answer the question?

So we read books about the historical Jesus, we listen to

podcasts, we talk to friends, whatever that looks like.

And while it's OK and good to be aware of what other people

think, don't settle for what someone else says about Jesus in

verses 18 and 19. Peter is very well aware of what

other people think about who Jesus is.

Jesus says, who do people say I am?

And the disciples are answering the question.

This is who other people say that you are.

They're very familiar with what the talk of the town is about

who Jesus is. But as we read just in these 3

verses, Peter learns to figure out his own answer to the

question. He doesn't just depend on

everybody else's answer to the question.

There are some of you who maybe have experienced church life

before even being here at Forward, and many of you have

experienced deep hurt and wounds from other Christians and

churches. Some of you are looking at kind

of the world that we live in today and you see some things

that Christians do and you go, man, that does not line up with

what I think a Christian is supposed to do.

And there's a disconnect there for you.

And what happens is your experiences end up shaping your

definition of who Jesus is. You allow other people to shape

that definition in your mind and your heart of who Jesus is.

And so let me just say to you on this, if the the things that

other people have said and done that don't reflect Jesus well

are the reasons why you are doubting or struggling with

Jesus, that's not entirely fair to Jesus to allow other people

to define him for you. Let Jesus stand on his own

without being defined by what other people have or have not

done. There are also a lot of people

who've been in Christian environments for a very long

time who know all the right answers to the questions.

So, you know, OK, this is what I'm supposed to answer when I

say, when someone says who is Jesus?

And you've memorized the answers to the questions and you do it

because not necessarily that you believe it, but it's the right

thing to say and do when you're at church.

For example, there are a lot of people in our church who have

the incredible blessing of growing up in Christian homes.

And you grow up in a Christian home and, and, and, and you are

just surrounded by the teaching of who Jesus is and what the

Christian faith is all about. And, and, and what you end up

finding is that your entire idea of Jesus ends up being based off

of what mom or dad or a youth leader or a, a, a, a teacher in

kids ministry has told you Jesus is.

But at some point it's critical that you answer the question for

yourself that you don't believe simply because your parents

believe something about Jesus. One of the things I love that's

happening this weekend right now is we have about 80 students who

are off at a retreat discovering for themselves who Jesus is,

entering into a space where they're learning to take

ownership of their faith. And if you're a parent here

today and your kids have been asking you hard questions and

you're thinking, ma'am, maybe they've got some doubts, maybe

they're struggling with their faith.

I just want you to know, don't freak out.

It's OK. It's good.

In fact, it's healthy for your kids to be asking those kinds of

questions. It's good for them to wrestle

with that. Who is Jesus to me?

You have not necessarily failed your kids.

When they start to ask those kinds of questions, it's good to

createspace for them to explore for themselves.

Like I remember that moment for myself.

I, I had grown up in church. I've been taught all the rules

of the Bible, but then just reading the Bible for myself and

seeing things that just came to life that God wanted to speak

directly to me, not just through other people.

It's incredibly life giving when you discover that for me, the

defining moment in in that journey was I grown up in this

environment where Christianity was all about all the rules you

have to keep. And then one day I read the

words of Jesus where Jesus says the single greatest command is

to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength.

And that was like a light bulb went off in my head and where

God just said to me, seek Kirk, it's not about all the rules.

It's ultimately about my love for you and your love back to

me. That's the Christian faith.

So if you're exploring Jesus or you've been going to church for

a long time, don't just settle for other people's opinions.

The truth is, you're invited to get close enough to Jesus to

discover who He is for yourself. By the time we get to Peter

being asked this question here in these verses, Peter's been

traveling with Jesus for 2 to 2 1/2 years already.

He spent time observing Jesus in action.

He's seen Jesus working miracles.

He's listened to Jesus teaching. He saw how Jesus has interacted

with people and cared for people and love people.

And so the answer Peter is about to give to this question is not

based on having memorized the right answer to the question.

The answer Peter is about to give to this question is based

on his experience with Jesus. Sometimes you can come to a

church environment like this and somebody's going to ask you a

direct question like this one. Who do you say Jesus is?

And it feels like a pop quiz like I got to get the answer

right or else. And you feel this incredible

pressure. And so I, I want, if that's you

today, I just want to take the pressure off.

Nobody likes a pop quiz not giving you a pop quiz to the

question. Here's what I want you to hear.

We want you to take the time to discover for yourself who Jesus

is. We don't need to give you a

sales pitch. We, we don't need you to buy a

product. We want to invite you to take

the time for yourself to discover who Jesus is.

And after all this time of walking with Jesus, here's the

conclusion that Peter comes to. He says in verse 20, you are

God's Messiah. That's who Jesus is.

That's his identity. Some Bible translations will say

you are the Christ the OR the Son of God, and they're saying

the same thing. Christ is not the last name of

Jesus. You know, some of us might think

that his name was Jesus Christ. That's not his last name.

It's a title. The words Messiah and Christ

both carry the same meaning. It's a it's a title that means

the anointed one. To be the anointed one meant

that you were set apart by God for a special purpose and

reason. That in the Old Testament, being

the anointed one was often symbolized by pouring on of oil

on a person. And while Peter is saying he's

come to believe that Jesus is the one who is sent by God to

accomplish God's purposes in redeeming the world, that's what

he's saying. And to us as Christians, this is

the statement that brings us together that Jesus is God's

Messiah. In Matthew's version of this

story, after Peter makes this confession, Jesus says on this

rock, I will build my church. Jesus saying based on this

confession of who I am, that I am the Messiah, I'm going to

build my church. This is what unites us.

The church does not primarily exist to be a social community,

although there are social elements to what we do.

The church does not exist to run a bunch of good programs,

although that's part of what we do.

The church does not primarily exist to sing some nice songs or

to show up in an auditorium on Sunday morning and listen to a

guy talk for half an hour, although that is part of what we

do. The church is united around 1

answer to one question. Jesus is the Messiah.

That's who we are as Christians. And one of the things that is so

heartbreaking is to see the kinds of things that Christians

are debating and dividing over in our world today, like things

that we are arguing about that do not matter in the grand

scheme of eternity. The single thing that matters is

who do you say Jesus is on the day you and I stand before God.

He is not going to say, so take me through your entire

theological statement so we can decide if you can get into

heaven or not. He's not going to sit there and

say, take me through all the theologians and postures that

you listen to so I can decide if I agreed with those guys or not,

so you can get into heaven. He's not going to sit there and

say, were you a Calvinist or an Armenian?

He's not going to ask that question.

The only question that matters is what did you do with Jesus?

Who do you say Jesus is? That's all that matters when it

comes to our eternity. All those other things are good

questions, interesting conversations, but have no

bearing on our eternal salvation.

And most of us in this room, we will all agree that we believe

Jesus is the Messiah. But that leads to another

question. What do we actually mean when we

say that Jesus is the Messiah? Do you even know what that

means? Or is it just a title and it's

the right answer to the question?

Well, to say that you believe Jesus is the Messiah is best

understood with three words Prophet, priest, and king.

In in the Bible, those are the people who were anointed by God

for a special purpose, prophets, priests, and kings.

Up to that point, the world had seen all kinds of people carry

one of those titles of prophet, priest, or king.

But now Peter is recognizing Jesus as the anointed by God to

carry all three titles, that Jesus is the ultimate prophet,

priest, and king. So let me unpack that for us so

we understand what that means. First of all, Jesus is the

prophet who shows what God is like.

Imagine for a moment that God actually wanted to speak to you.

What? What does God sound like to you

in your head? What what does God sound like to

you? Is he?

Is he like the warm and cozy and fun grandpa that just wants to

hang out with you and feed you lots of sugar?

Is he the harsh and direct like a controlling parent or employer

stern kind of conversation? One of the things that God

consistently does in the Bible is send prophets to reveal God

to the people. And so these prophets would show

up and they would tell the people what God wanted them to

say, what God wanted communicated to the people.

And so when we see Jesus, he does the exact same thing.

In John 14 Jesus says the word that you hear is not mine, but

is from the Father who sent me. So every word that comes from

Jesus is not just Jesus words, it is what God wanted to say

through Jesus to people. So Jesus is a prophet just like

every other prophet. But then Jesus is a prophet in

an even better way than all the other prophets.

One of the many reasons we keep encouraging you to open your

Bible and to meditate on the Bible is because God wants to

reveal Himself to you through the Word.

And one of the things we see in the Word in John 14 verse 9,

John 14:9

Jesus says this. If you've seen me, you've seen

the Father. Jesus wasn't just the prophet

who spoke the words of God. Jesus was the greater prophet

who actually embodied what God is like.

When you want to understand what God is like, you look to Jesus.

So when we as God's people confess Jesus as the Messiah,

what we're saying is Jesus doesn't just give us information

about God. Jesus reveals who God is.

He doesn't just talk about God. He puts God on display for us.

So if you want to know like what does God think about suffering

and grief? You look at Jesus, you watch him

at the tomb of Lazarus if you want to know how God treats

outsiders. You look at Jesus and how he

interacts with a guy like Zacchaeus.

If you want to understand how God responds to self-righteous

people or injustices in the world, or political powers, or

people who are broken, or people who are humble about their sin,

watch Jesus. He embodies what God is like.

He is the greater prophet who is revealing God to us.

Any issue that you want to understand what God thinks and

what God has to say, you look to Jesus.

And as Jesus reveals God to us, he's also going to reveal how

far you and I have fallen from God's standards.

And that's why it's also important we understand that

Jesus is the priest who mediates between God and people.

If a prophet brought God to the people, the priestess is

designed to bring the people to God.

Many of you have grown up in traditions where you are called

to confess your sins to a priest because some believe that God

Forgives sin through a minister of the Church.

But every single priest in all of human history is imperfect in

some way. Jesus is the only priest who's

perfect in every way. The in the Old Testament, every

priest had to keep offering sacrifices over and over and

over again because the sin was never fully dealt with.

Jesus came and offered a sacrifice that was sufficient

once for all time. And while priests in the Old

Testament sacrificed an animal for the atonement of sins, Jesus

offers himself as the ultimate sacrifice.

And here's what all that means for you and me when we believe

that Jesus is the Messiah. If you confess Jesus as the

Christ, if you believe in your heart he is who the Bible says

he is, your sins are fully forgiven in the eyes of God.

Like imagine someone showed up at the bank today, went up to a

bank teller and said, hey, Kirk has this debt.

Here's all the cash to pay off his debt.

And oh, by the way, here's my card.

And whenever he incurs more debt, just put it on my account.

I've got that taken care of too. That's what Jesus has done with

your sin and my sin completely paid for past, present, future.

And not only that, because Jesus is your priest, it also means

your salvation is secure. Like some of us, we get worried

about be Am I being good enough as a Christian to keep my

salvation? We sang it earlier.

Jesus paid it all. All.

You cannot and do not need to worry about paying more to be

able to keep your salvation. Your salvation is secure because

Jesus is the priest. Jesus as priest also means that

you and I, we've got direct access to God, that you don't

need to confess your sins to a priest in order to be forgiven.

Jesus is the high Priest who gives you direct access to God

for the forgiveness of your sins.

Now, just because Jesus has forgiven you of your sins, that

does not mean you've got permission to do whatever you

want to do. Because to believe Jesus is your

Messiah also means that you believe Jesus is the King who

has ultimate authority. The Jews understood that kings

were anointed by God, and the Jews kept looking for the next

political king who was going to rescue them from the Romans.

But The thing is, there have been plenty of political kings

in human history. Jesus is better than that.

They all come and go. Anyone who just wants Jesus to

be a political king is thinking way too small.

Jesus is the greater king because Jesus is the one who

would conquer the one thing that no other king could ever

conquer. He's the one who conquers sin

and death, and so to to declare Jesus as King is to believe that

he is the one that everything else should fall under, that he

is the authority above all other authorities.

He's the one who's going to establish true justice in the

world. The crazy thing is that while

other kings and political leaders try to impose their

power over your life through laws and decrees and press

conferences and social media posts, King Jesus works the

opposite way. His kingship is marked by

humility and sacrifice and love and suffering.

For you to acknowledge Jesus as King is not the same thing as

saying King Charles is King because none of us, I shouldn't

say none of us. There might be some royal people

in the room. Most of us do not go about our

whole life going. I wonder what King Charles wants

me to do today. To acknowledge Jesus as King is

to say I am putting my life under the authority of Jesus as

King of everything. It's not a theoretical He's

king, but he is my king. It's not a theoretical He's all

powerful. And then we move on.

To believe Jesus is the Messiah is to say He's my king.

And that has profound impact on our lives because most of us

hate the idea of submitting ourselves to the control of

someone else. Most of us like to live with

something we've been taught our whole life.

Be your own boss, make your own decisions, do what you want to

do, how you want to do it, when you want to do it, and just do

life your own way. And we live with the idea of

nobody can tell me what to do. And this is where believing in

Jesus moves past a nice set of statements that you say you

agree with, to being a life that changes your life.

If you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, what you are doing is

you are surrendering yourself to him, all of yourself to him.

You are surrendering your time to the kingship of Jesus.

You are surrendering your wallet to the kingship of Jesus.

You are surrendering your relationships and how you

approach relationships to the kingship of Jesus.

You are surrendering how you relate to the people you like

and the people you don't like to the kingship of Jesus.

You're surrendering your purpose in life to the kingship of

Jesus. Every single one of us lives in

a Kingdom with a king. There's always someone or

something that is ruling over our life, even if that's someone

or something is ourselves. Paul Tripp said this.

He said little Kingdom living is an endless search for earthly

treasure and an unending focus on personal need.

Grace calls you to a bigger Kingdom.

When you're a citizen of God's Kingdom, you're a part of a

Kingdom that cannot be shaken. You are.

You are serving a king who promises to protect you, provide

for you, and care for you. And that is what Peter's answer

to the question is. Who do you say I am, Peter?

You're the Messiah. You are the ultimate prophet,

priest, and king. So what about you?

How would you answer the question?

Who do you say Jesus is? If Jesus really is the ultimate

prophet, priest and king, then what we do with him makes a

profound difference with our lives.

It's the most important decision you'll ever make.

And as I said earlier, I know there are many people in the

room who are exploring the Christian faith.

And I want to encourage you, take your time and keep

exploring. And the reason why I say that is

because I believe with all my heart, as you discover Jesus and

explore who Jesus is, you are going to find out, you're going

to taste and see that he is good and he is worth trusting your

entire life too. But some of you, you've been

exploring for a long time and you've got a lot of answers to

questions already, but for some reason, there's a there's a

block for you that's stopping you from being ready to confess

Jesus as Messiah. And so I just want to encourage

you. What are you waiting for?

What's holding you back? Why not today be the day where

you finally say, I believe Jesus is the Messiah?

You can do that just right in your own heart, right where you

are just like Jesus. I believe that you are the

Christ. And all of that means for me,

You're the one who shows me what God is like.

You're the one who paid for my sins, and I need you to save me

from my sins. You're the King who conquered

sin, and I surrender my life to you.

The Bible says part of the reason why God wants us to see

who Jesus really is is because of the life that God wants to

give us in Jesus. Listen to these words.

These things are written so you might believe that Jesus is the

Messiah and that by believing you might have life in his name.

That's why God wants us to come to this understanding of Jesus

as Messiah. Many of you are here today.

You're walking with someone and your greatest desire is you just

want them to become a disciple of Jesus.

And I just want to say to you, just be patient and keep

modeling Jesus to them, keep inviting them to come.

And most of us, we're believers in Jesus, but there's some

things we've forgotten about what the implications are of

believing in Jesus. We're, we're really glad that

Jesus is our priest who paid for our salvation, but we really

don't pay much attention to Jesus being king or being the

one who reveals God to us. There's one thing I know about

most of us is we're, we're, we would all say we're busy.

We run around to all kinds of activities and we're anxious and

we're filled with all kinds of worry over any number of things

in the world. But how would your approach to

life be different if you just simply remembered again that

Jesus is the one who reveals God to us?

I know when I lose sight of it, I will read the Bible more like

a task as opposed to reading the Bible to hear God's word.

To me. When I lose sight of Jesus as

King, I'll make hundreds of decisions in the course of a

week without really thinking about what is it that Jesus

wants. So just think about even this

coming week, today and going into this week, you're going to

make hundreds of decisions. You're going to make decisions

with your calendar. What does it look like for Jesus

to be king? You're going to make decisions

about what food to eat, how to care for your body.

What does it look like for Jesus to be king over everything?

One of the realities for us is that following Jesus is going to

be a lifelong journey of discovering who he truly is.

It's one thing to be able to say I believe Jesus is the Messiah,

but what you're going to discover is over the course of

your life, you're going to continue to discover what it

really means practically that Jesus is the Messiah.

If you're, if you're here today and you're almost ready to

believe and you go, but I feel like I have to understand it all

first. I want you to know you're not

likely going to understand it all first because Jesus, over

the course of your life, he's going to keep showing you more

and more of who he is. And if you're already a

believer, over the course of your life, it's going to be a

journey of discovering what it really means to trust Jesus as

prophet, priest, and king. Peter, in these verses, he makes

this confession where he says this is the answer, you are the

Messiah. But that was not the end of the

story for Peter. That's like the beginning of the

story for Peter. In the months and the years that

are ahead of him, those words, that belief statement is going

to take on a whole new set of meaning to Peter.

He had no clue what he was fully saying, and he consistently

failed to live like a man who believed like it was true.

Like he confesses Jesus as Messiah here, but just a while

later he's going to rebuke Jesus when Jesus says I have to go to

Jerusalem to die. And he's like, no, you can't do

that. There's so many things that

Peter's going to discover more about the implications of what

it means to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

So much more room to understand what it means to really believe

this. And over and over again in your

life, you're going to face, you're going to come face to

face with situations that are going to test and stretch your

faith in different ways. And if you're in a spot like

that, I want to encourage you with something.

Just keep bringing yourself back to who Jesus is because it's

going to help you make sense of all that's going on.

When you're in the spot of the greatest uncertainties in your

life and you don't know what tomorrow holds, step back and

remind yourself, I believe that Jesus is King and all things are

under His authority. I'm going to be OK.

When you're questioning your salvation because you just got

doubts and fear, step back. Remind yourself that Jesus is

the priest who paid it all. I, I, I I can't work my way back

to God. He's the priest who paid it all.

It's OK. I just need to trust Him when

you're looking at the state of the world around us and you're

going I, I can't make sense of all the stuff and the chaos

that's going on in the world. And I don't know whose voice to

listen to in the in in the mess of noise of voices that all have

an opinion on what's right and what's wrong.

Step back, go. Jesus is the prophet who reveals

God to us. Everything becomes much more

clear when I hear His voice above all the other voices.

The reality that Jesus is the Messiah will come to life for

you over and over again as you follow Him.

It is not something that we just believe one time and then move

on. It's what we keep coming back to

again and again that shapes how we approach everything in our

life. Remember that.

Who do you say Jesus is? Believe it, come back to it,

live like it's true. Father, thank you so much for

your word. Thank you for this penetrating

question. Who do you believe Jesus is?

Thank you for your word that reveals who Jesus is to us.

God, I pray for every person in this room.

This will not be simply a statement to check off a list,

but it will be a belief that takes root in our hearts and

lives and shapes and informs how we approach everything in our

lives. Jesus, you are the Messiah.

You are the Christ and we worship You.

Amen. Stand together and worship Him.