Advent: Vertical Identity

But we're taking a break from the book of Acts.

We've been going through the first half of the book of Acts and maybe gotten in, I don't know, five sermons or so, six sermons, I'm not quite sure.

But we're taking a break from that because we're in the season of Advent.

The season of Advent is the season, four weeks leading up to Christmas.

It's about uh it's about desire for what is to come, but it's not here yet.

So it's a season of waiting.

It's a season that asks us, are you ready?

To ask you to prepare you for the coming of Christ?

Are you ready to remember the incarnation of God into humanity in the birth of Jesus?

And there are other questions, waiting questions of the season.

Are you ready with all your shopping?

Are you ready with your tree?

Are you ready for your lights?

There's other more general questions.

Are you ready for cousin Eddie to come visit?

Are you ready, even more general?

Are you just ready for like your finals if you're in school?

Are you ready for your kid to leave for college?

Are you ready for, you know when you click on Netflix, if you're a Netflix watcher, you click on Netflix and it goes from 1 to 90% in like two seconds, and it hits 90%, then it just starts circling.

And you're sitting there waiting because you know there's 10 million other people at that exact moment waiting to watch Stranger Things.

Like the exact moment.

You know it, and you're waiting.

10 more percent.

1 to 90 in one second, the last 10% takes 30 seconds, and the time you're waiting.

And what does it reveal?

You're horrible at waiting, is what it reveals.

It's what waiting always reveals for all of us is that what we realize is that we're not always in control.

And even when we think we're in control, we're not really in control.

And we're not good at waiting, which means we really need the one we're waiting for, who is in control.

This past week, Christy and I got into a conversation about what we like to do on weekends when we were in college.

Right?

Because the weekends in college were always so very different than the weekdays.

And we got in a conversation about like, well, what was our routine?

What did we like to do?

Did we stay in our college town?

Did you like to go home?

And she said she liked to go home because she liked, on Sundays, she loved going over to see her family and to eat lunch at Nana's.

And I'd spent some time at Nana's before Nana and Granddaddy passed away, and I would show up, I'd walk through the carport door, and I would show up at their little house, and you walk straight into the kitchen, and as soon as I walked in, granddaddy would walk out the back door because granddaddy knew I liked a cold Coca-Cola with my lunch.

And the cold Cokes were kept in the fridge in the shed in the backyard.

And so as soon as I walked in, he walked out.

He'd come back in and he'd be like, here's your Coke.

They'd been, they'd been that whole morning.

They wouldn't go to church.

They were cooking for you.

You went to church so you could come to their house and have like a Thanksgiving meal every Sunday.

And they fed you and they served you and they pleaded with you to take a nap.

Please stay, take a nap.

Or you gotta take a nap, please take a nap.

And then go walk around their yard and look at their flowers.

And this is what it always was, and this is what it was for Christian college.

So what's going on here?

Why would she want to come back to this?

This thing she grew up with?

Why would she want to come back to it?

Because there's nothing sweeter, right?

Nothing sweeter than being reminded who you are.

And Nana and Granddaddy knew very little about what Christy was studying at college.

They weren't educated people, but they knew how to love.

And it turns out what we need, what we need the most, and what we need constantly, is to be reminded that we're already loved.

See, this is the thing that we're constantly forgetting.

Counselor and author, Paul Tripp, he says we have identity amnesia.

We forget who we are, and frantically we look at insufficient places to find a grounding, a sense of meaning, justification before God, before each other.

And every time you do it, you carry a burden that you were never meant to carry.

Paul Tripp says this you are in a constant conversation with yourself.

No one is more influential in your life than you are.

Because no one talks to you more than you do.

So who do you tell yourself you are?

And how are you forming that conclusion?

How are you forming the thoughts that you are telling yourself you are?

Are you your success?

And at what point, what measure of success does it create worth for you?

Are you your failure?

What about relationships?

Have you ever put so much emphasis on a person to give you worth that you smother the person?

You know, like all I want, all I want is for him to see me.

All I want is for her to observe me.

All I want is to finally be for them, for him or her to make me happy.

And I've been married 13 years, so not extremely long, but I have learned that I do not always make my wife happy.

And I have learned that she does not always make me happy, right?

Like that guy and that girl will never be the source of your belovedness.

Your belovedness, already received by the grace of God to you, is the thing that helps you love that imperfect person.

And their belovedness, already received by the grace of God, is the thing that helps them love you.

Should the clothes be turned right side out before you wash them?

Or should they be turned right side out after they come out of the dryer?

I gave a long earnest speech to my wife about this two weeks ago.

That is when I realized I do not always make her happy.

Now, what about money?

You don't have to raise your hand here, but does anybody in this room have enough money or enough things to bring your heart relief from the idea that you're not enough?

What about people's approval?

You help a lady load her groceries into her minivan at Kroger.

It takes you a minute and a half, and you tell six people about it in the course of the next two days.

Right?

You go for a jog on a Tuesday morning and it's raining and you run 11 miles.

Impressive.

And you get to the top of Kennesaw Mountain and you think this is something I should share with everybody.

Everybody should know what I have done this morning.

And so you take your picture and you post it and you say, what a great jog, outbeating the day, and then you obsessively check it for the entire day to see if everybody has agreed with you.

And it's just like, just enjoy the run, right?

Like, just enjoy the run.

You can be free of that.

You don't have to do that, just enjoy the run.

Or we use our spirituality.

Maybe you love to know the most.

Or if you're like me, you like to be seen as thinking maybe you know the most.

Or to be right.

When we forget who we are, we try to get things to tell us who we are.

And it creates all the mess that we're gonna see going on in this church, in this town called Corinth.

And this is 1 Corinthians, and we're getting these passages the next four weeks from uh from preset passages from the historic church that has formed the season of Advent and it's given us passages for us to follow.

So 1 Corinthians 1, 3, and 4.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus.

Now, there's going to be nothing new in this sermon, uh, for those of you who are regular here.

I'll just go ahead and break the news.

Because here's point number one.

You'll be like, yeah, he says this all the time.

Point number one, the way to change people is to begin with gratitude and grace.

So in the New Testament, there's this ancient church in the Corinthian church.

The Apostle Paul started this church, he gets to this town, he starts showing up in the Jewish synagogue, and the Jewish people, they're stuck in ritual and law so to be accepted by God.

Right?

So they're not, they don't believe they're accepted by God until the ritual and the law.

So they're using ritual and law so to be accepted by God, to be righteous.

And Paul shows up and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is ended.

There has been a final sacrifice.

God's grace to us has ended this.

Jesus the Christ ended this, the grace of God to us.

We are free, you are free, from using your own goodness and merit for acceptance, and through the Christ, people can live already accepted by God.

So a church starts in this little town called Corinth.

Paul eventually leaves this church and he goes elsewhere.

Like any good days of our lives episode, the drama begins.

Word circles back around to Paul that this church has grown, different teachers have shown up, and sort of chaos and division began.

Some people like this teacher more than that teacher.

Some people had more money than other people, and the people with the money wouldn't associate with the people who didn't have money.

And so there's elitism combined with confusion, combined with laxity of belief, combined with laxity of behavior, and they were fascinated.

They were fascinated by the spectacular and think that they always needed something more.

They always need a little bit more knowledge, some other knowledge, or they needed the next sexual experience, or they needed another material thing.

What's going on here?

What's going on?

They were defined by a confused, chaotic culture rather than being defined by the path of love defined in truth.

And it's no different for us, no different for me or for you.

So I'm reading this text this week, and I'm thinking, okay, well, you know, I with a small group of people started a church.

Now let's imagine I move away and I hear back that this junk is going on in the place where I labored and I preached.

And I think, how would I start my letter?

Well, it would probably begin much more self-absorbed than Paul started his.

It would start off like, how dare you ruin the thing we built?

Like, how dare you?

Did you not hear anything I said?

How could you ruin your community and your family with that belief or that thought?

I'm coming back.

I'm gonna come back, I'm gonna straighten you all out.

That's what I would write.

Possibly if I was getting a little more generous, there might be something like, I'm so, I'm sorry to hear this.

This is breaking my heart.

But Paul begins by going, like, I am so grateful for you.

Like, this is a group of people that have walked away from a lot of what Paul has said.

This is a group of chaotic, confused, lax people.

And he says, gratitude and grace to you.

I mean, he gets brutally truthful with them later on, but he begins.

He begins with gratitude and grace because he knows the way to change people is not by beginning with demand, but by gratitude and grace.

This is why Christie went to Nana's house.

It was a place, it was that place, it was a place of gratitude and grace.

It's what we need the most to be reminded of what is true about ourselves as beloved children of God.

It's why Paul begins by reminding them who they are.

Let's keep reading.

Verse 5.

That in every way you were enriched in him, in Christ, in all speech, and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any gift.

As you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end.

Guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, God is faithful, by whom you are called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

So, point number two, you already have everything you need.

This is what this whole Paul's saying in a bunch of different ways.

You already have everything you need in Jesus.

Let's say you and your friend Janet are going to go on a ski trip.

You're a regular skier, you ski every year, no problem for you.

Janet has never been skiing.

It's a bit intimidating.

There's a lot of gear with skiing.

And so, you know, the night before it, you get the phone call.

Janet's looking at her suitcase, she's looking down, and she's just asking, she's wondering like, do I have everything I need?

Do I have everything I need?

All this anxiety, all this fear, there's just a lot to remember.

And so you console her on the phone.

Hey, we've been through this before.

You have everything you need, Janet.

We went to REI.

We blew your retirement savings on all this stuff.

I mean, you got it.

You have your long underwear, yes.

You got your ski bib and jacket, yes.

Do you have your socks?

Yes, you got your gloves, your goggles, your hat, your sunglasses, sunscreen, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janet, you have everything you need.

Calm down.

Go watch Stranger Things with the rest of the United States.

See, you already have all the things you're ultimately worried about.

Absolution, enrichment, righteousness, word, belovedness.

It's already yours.

You have to go find it everywhere else.

And I want this to be really clear.

I want you to see it in the text here.

Verse 5, you're enriched in him.

Verse 7, you're not lacking any gift.

Verse 8, he will sustain you.

Again in verse 8, he holds you guiltless.

No guilt.

And he is faithful.

This means Jesus, the incarnate God for us to know, who took our sin upon himself on the cross and gave us his righteousness, in him we are enriched.

In him we are made forever rich in God.

You can stop looking for more and more and simply remember you already have it.

The secret to life is not to find the next thing that will finally redeem you.

Oh, this is finally gonna do it.

The secret is to learn that you've already been accepted and redeemed the entire time by God's grace.

Point number three, last point.

Your way forward is to always remember whose and who you are.

At the core, the core of you, you either define yourself vertically or you end up defining yourself horizontally.

So horizontal identity is I am my success.

I am my relationships, I am my righteousness, or my resume, or my bank account, or my possessions.

Those things are me.

Vertical identity is I receive.

I receive my identity.

I do not earn it, I do not accumulate it, I receive it.

It is given.

I receive my belovedness, I receive my righteousness by the grace of God.

Therefore, I am free from using horizontal things to define me or save me or justify me.

In this verse 8, this word guiltless, maybe in your Bible, a different translation, maybe it might say blameless.

It means that you cannot, you will not, you don't have to give an account for your life.

You're not going to die and give an account for your life.

Not if you've awakened to Jesus' saving grace for you.

That's already been handled.

The account for your life has already been handled.

Those who have been awakened in Christ, we are absolved.

There's no accounting for you to give.

You will not be reporting to God at the end of your life all the good things you've done.

That's not Christianity, that's moralism.

How spiritual you are, or moral or giving or successful you are, how perfect you kept your house, or how perfect you kept your relationships.

You are not defined or saved by any sort of horizontal reckoning.

This is what grounds you, this grace, this relief, the sufficiency of Jesus for us, this is what grounds us, the core of who we are.

It saves us, absolves us in a world that is confusing and shaky.

Friends, there's a creator God of love and creativity and power who holds all things together and is redeeming all things in time, and you are a part of that great redemption movement that we know in Jesus the Christ.

So, my brothers and sisters, may you rest as we walk through the season of Advent, as the God of grace and truth frees you from having to find your identity anywhere else.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your grace and mercy to us, which we need in Jesus because we love to find our identity elsewhere, and we love to get caught up in confusion and chaos like these Corinthians.

And we need the reminder, like Paul gave to them, that we are enriched in you.

We have everything we need in you.

We are sustained by you.

We are guiltless by you and your work for us, and not our work.

Help us to live and surrender.

God help us to live and surrender.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.