23 & Me: "Who(se) am I?" with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Good to see you guys.

I want to welcome you back to our 23andMe series.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And like Tony mentioned earlier, we are digging into the topic of identity in this series.

We started the series by talking about what identity is not, so we could build what it really is and really find out who we are.

We found out that a lot of times we confuse quite a few different aspects of our lives with identity, things like personality or temperament, our physical appearance, attractions, worst ways or mistakes, our social roles, our skill sets, accomplishments, and careers, even just our basic interests.

These a lot of times are the things that we are calling incorrectly our identity.

These things can't be the root of our identity because these things change and they shift over time.

And as time goes on, when these things change and we think that's what our identity is, we end up in an identity crisis, always trying to remake ourselves.

We've been trying to root ourselves deeper.

And the big idea that's carried us through this whole series comes from the very beginning of scripture and what's called the creation narrative, where we discover where all of this came from, and even more importantly, we discover God's intention for all of it, including our lives.

And we learn that we were made in the image of God.

We are divine image bearers.

And we learn that God created us and gave us a significant task on the earth.

When you really want to know who you are, you must look back because your identity is rooted in the garden.

It's rooted in that creation narrative and everything that we learn about ourselves.

And from then on, we've been looking and learning on how to live this out practically.

In the first two weeks, we saw to know who you are, you have to know why you are here, and you have to know where you are going.

You have to know why you're here, and you have to have some sense of destination so you can set the direction for your life.

Today we're gonna take the next step.

To know who you are, you have to know who you belong to.

To know who you are, you have to know who you belong to.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we uh we love you and we thank you for this time.

We come and we are seeking belonging.

That's just what we do.

It's a part of our human nature.

And God, we are wanting to belong to something significant.

And so I pray that you would show us that today.

Help us to further shape the truest sense of our identity so we can live that out for your kingdom.

We love you, and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to learn who you belong to, say amen.

Amen.

Belonging is a deep psychological need, a deep, it's like one of the greatest needs that we have.

It's like, you know, uh oxygen and water and belonging.

This is where we find our security and our stability from.

Babies as young as two weeks old can already start connecting with their parents and showing evidence of bonding through sounds and gestures.

And the first three years of life, kids understand their identity almost based solely on their relationship with the parents that they belong to.

They develop a connection with their siblings.

That's part of how they know who they belong to, is in their family unit.

And then you get older, about three or four years old, you can actually start making friends.

Now, you can set two-year-olds together in a room, but that's really a play date for the moms, right?

The two-year-olds can't actually play.

They don't know how to develop friends that early.

And I know you think that you have the one kid who is so unique that they could, they couldn't, okay?

Like at three or four years old, though, there's this social bonding that starts happening, and you develop friends, and that becomes so important as you get into elementary school, and that's part of how you feel like you belong in a community.

And that just gets more and more important as you get into the middle school years, and you start defining yourself by your friend group.

And so you're a jock or you're a goth or you're a nerd or you're uh whatever you are.

We start segmenting off, and we know this that it's around those late elementary, early middle school years we become very susceptible to peer pressure, and really we start becoming the people that we belong to.

And somewhere along the way, you start becoming romantically interested, and that kind of shifts into high gear, and and we want that so badly, and that travels all the way into adulthood where we are looking to belong to someone intimately and romantically, and maybe even till death do we part.

And all of these connections, they shape and inform who we are.

Sociologists have found that your five closest friends will determine how you live more than any other factor.

Belonging is how we establish security and confidence in our life, it's how we plan for our future, it's how we navigate through suffering, all of that to say to know who you are, you have to know who you belong to.

And so, what happens when you don't belong?

Research has shown again and again that a lack of belonging causes depression, anxiety, social dysregulation, lack of impulse control ultimately can lead to suicide or homicidal thoughts.

There have been wide-ranging studies on kids who don't have a sense of belonging in their own homes.

As a matter of fact, one of the largest social studies that have ever been conducted is on fatherless homes.

Basically, every outcome that you don't want for your kids can be directly correlated to a lack of a father in the home, or, in place of that, a strong male father figure.

Things like ending up in poverty, dropping out of school, becoming addicted to drugs, having a child out of wedlock, and even ending up in prison.

Right here in Bear County, we're experiencing one of the worst orphan crises in the nation.

The effects of a child not knowing who they belong to cannot be overstated.

As many of you know, Katie and I have firsthand experience with this.

We adopted our daughter about six years ago.

She turned five right after we got her.

We've seen firsthand the extreme effects of a kid who doesn't know who they belonged to.

When she came with us, she had never connected to her biological parents.

She had moved from house to house to house.

And if you don't know who you belong to, you do not know who you are.

And if you don't know who you are, you don't know how to navigate life.

And so we can look at the extreme examples, and it's helpful to do so because it emphasizes the point of how much belonging matters.

But isn't it interesting that you can come from a pretty stable home, maybe even a home with both parents in the house, or if your parents split up, both parents who co-parented well and really love you, a good social circle, friends growing up, romantic interests, you can have all of that and still have times in your life where you're not really sure where you belong.

Still have times where even though you're surrounded by people and on paper, it looks like all of your connections are solid, where you can feel staggeringly lonely.

The reality is people let us down.

Parents make mistakes, even the best parents, sometimes quite costly mistakes.

Our best friends sometimes put their needs ahead of ours or betray us altogether.

The romantic relationships we were in that we knew would have a storybook ending, end up with them going in another direction or maybe even cheating on us.

You live long enough and you realize that there's nothing guaranteed that you can belong one minute and be completely alone the next.

And yet, the very deep and very real desire for belonging does not go away.

And here at MetaCurches, we are pursuing Jesus and we're pursuing something higher than just the material world around us.

We do believe that there is a core of belonging that goes beyond just our earthly relationships, that you can check every box of healthy connection amongst the people around you.

And if you are not connected to something outside of this life, and that answers the question of where you belong after this life is over, that at the core you will always be searching for that kind of belonging.

Part of the problem that we have is a fundamentally wrong approach to how we view belonging, how we view these relationships that are so necessary to our existence.

It's almost like we take the connections that we have and the people we belong to, and we use them as a foundation to build our lives on.

We want to build our life on these relationships.

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

In fact, that's what you do at first because your first real relationship is with mom.

And, you know, dads, a lot of love for the dads in the room.

I'm a dad, but there's like nine months of alone time, right, before we even really get into the picture.

And the first relationship is with mom, and and really through those first couple of years, mom is providing, a lot of times she is nourishing, even with her own body.

The whole miracle of how all of it happens.

And of course, mom is important, and dad is quite important too.

And he comes in the picture, and your parents really are your first foundation.

And this is kind of a free parenting lesson in a sermon that's not about parenting at all, but but your kids, when they are babies, all the way until they really come into an ability to understand the higher things of faith and spirituality, they are meant to build their life on you.

You can set your baby, your toddler, your two-year-old on this foundation, and you should.

Now it's your job to constantly be pointing them towards their heavenly father, but in the interim, where they're not yet at the age to understand the higher order spiritual things, you are meant to represent those things in their life.

There's nothing wrong with an 18-month-old being completely dependent on their parents and for the first three years of life.

Your kid will basically only know their identity in relation to you as their parents, and that's good.

The problem is when your kid is 37 years old and still standing only on you as the foundation of their life.

See, over time you start building this out, and you know, you become aware that you have a sister like I had, you know, a great big sister who would beat me up and make me tough, right?

Maybe you had a brother that you could share your time with and your energy.

And we think about our connections with people as something to build our life on.

And so the more people we have, the more options we have.

Eventually you start making friends, and maybe you have a good friend, maybe you have a best friend, and maybe you try to be a good friend, hopefully.

And so we start stacking up our friends.

And it's interesting because somewhere around middle school-ish, your friends are awesome, and your parents are idiots.

Do you remember that?

It's like, man, if only your parents were as smart as you were when you were in middle school.

And so you kind of start rearranging the deck and figuring out who's most fundamental here, and we shift our priorities around, and we're trying to do something that can support the weight of who we are and who we are becoming.

And, you know, eventually you have enough friends, and friends can take you so far, and they're really fun, you know.

But eventually you kind of get that spark in your eye, and you notice that one of your friends of the opposite sex over the summer, you know, they they kind of look a little different than they did last time you saw them at school, and you get a little bit of butterflies, and now you're not just looking for friends, you're looking for a boo, you know.

It's like it's time, you know, and uh and and maybe you work hard enough and you you strike out a few times, and that's good for you, it grows character, but eventually you kind of land.

And and you get even older, and eventually you're gonna have a mentor, right?

That's like a boss, maybe, or a role model, or someone that's a little bit ahead of you in life, and and all of these things, and you you put them all together, and it's like, man, if if I could just get the right connections and belong to the right people and belong in the right networks, then I can build my life on these connections, and that is how we think about people.

This has been shown on a psychological level.

This is how we think about it.

And the problem is you start trying to build your life on, oh no, and you lose a friend along the way.

And the problem is that at the end of the day, that friend really couldn't actually hold the weight of your life.

And you see, friends will let you down, and more importantly, you will let friends down.

And we're building our life on the foundation of people in our life, but we know this.

About us statistically in this room, at some point in our childhood, had a mom and dad who split up.

And so, what happens when all of a sudden mom moves to a different place, and you have friends at mom's now, but those friends don't, and your siblings choose one and choose the other.

You see, you work and you work, and and then you think, well, everything is screwed up, like everything's wrong in my life.

But you know, if I could just get a good wife, if I could just get a good husband, and so you finally find that spouse, and now you have a new option of someone to build your life on.

But what you don't think about oftentimes when you get married is as soon as you get a spouse, you also get this big monstrosity.

This is called your in-laws.

And it's like, well, how does this fit?

Where does this go?

Because uh you might not love their parents, and their parents might not like your parents, and you know, it's not just their family, your spouse comes with their friends.

You know, her friends that always remind you that they liked her last boyfriend better than they liked you.

The truth is that when we seek to build our life on our connections and relationships, we are inappropriately putting the weight of our life, of our security, of our hope, our future, on top of a foundation that is not stable because human relationships are not stable.

And furthermore, we are putting the weight and the pressure of who we are, our identity, on top of people who were never built to hold the weight of your identity.

And so it's very difficult and it makes it difficult to navigate our relationships because the fact, the psychological, deep spiritual fact that you need belonging, to know who you are, you have to know who you belong to.

That's not going away.

You will search for belonging in this life, but over time, whatever connections you build your life on are a gamble that will inevitably let you down at some point.

And perhaps what I'm suggesting today is we aren't meant to just find belonging to build on.

Maybe there is a connection that we can cement our identity in.

Not to build on, but to root in.

I want to use as almost a case study the Apostle Paul.

The Apostle Paul wrote 13 books of our New Testament, the Christian scriptures.

He's the most prolific writer in scripture, he's the greatest church planter of all time, and in my estimation, and we could argue about this, but I believe that the Apostle Paul is the second most impactful human in all of human history, second only to Jesus Christ himself.

However, what you may or may not know is before he was the Apostle Paul, he was Saul the persecutor.

Saul hated Jesus and he hated the movement that Jesus had started at the church.

And of course, like all of us, Saul was looking to belong.

He had pursued the highest education, he was one of the brightest minds of his time.

He was young and wanted so badly to fit in and make a name for himself.

The first time we meet Saul is at the stoning, the killing of the first martyr in the church, Stephen.

And scripture says that Saul was there and he took and held the coats of the religious leaders who stoned Stephen to death.

Over time, Saul, the persecutor, had a meteoric rise to fame within Israel.

He was known as a scholar and he found belonging in the scholarly halls of academia.

He was a Pharisee.

In fact, he would even say he was the Pharisee of all Pharisees.

He found connection and belonging in the temple amongst the religious leaders.

He was a persecutor of the church, a rebel, a zealot, and he found his belonging amongst that group.

He was the leader of that group, going town from town.

He was insatiable and unstoppable.

He was known and he was proud to be an Israelite.

He found belonging among his people and saw it as his job to protect all of Israel from Jesus and the message that the movement of Jesus was spreading.

He had found belonging amongst the most powerful people in his society.

And maybe you know the story.

One day, on the way to a town called Damascus, where Saul was going to round up the Christians and imprison them, he met Jesus.

And Jesus blinded him with a light from heaven.

And he called him not just to believe in Jesus, but to spend the rest of his life spreading the good news about Jesus.

Saul became Paul.

He got a new name and he got a new mission, and the rest was history.

And usually in this story of Paul's conversion, we focus on the incredible fact of Paul's salvation, that he went from fighting against Jesus to fighting for Jesus.

But there's another aspect to Paul's story that I think it's worth focusing on today.

In one swift move by believing in Jesus and becoming a disciple of Jesus, Saul decimated every connection, every single piece of belonging that he had spent his entire life creating.

He was turning his back on everything that he had built his identity on.

All of it was gone.

He was starting over from scratch.

And the crazy thing about Paul is the rest of his life following Jesus would be insanely difficult.

He was shipwrecked and deserted.

He was often isolated.

This guy lived in constant hell for the rest of his life.

And even with changing circumstances, and even with all of that suffering, the most remarkable thing is Paul never seems to lose his sense of identity.

And for Paul, it comes down to these two words.

These two words that are so robust that we could talk about for hours.

But there were two words that every time Paul talked about identity, that he always brought up.

And this is how he saw himself, and this is how he rooted himself so that he could turn his back on his entire life of belonging, move forward following Jesus, and never waver on his identity once.

You guys following me so far?

Good.

What are these two words and what do they mean for us?

Over 143 times in scripture, Paul describes himself and other followers of Jesus as being in Christ.

In Christ.

Another 80 some odd times he writes the words in him, meaning in Christ.

In just 13 books of the New Testament, over 200 times Paul used this concept to cement his identity.

This for Paul is who he belonged to.

And so what did that mean to him and what does it mean for us?

We're gonna look in Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

This is one of the letters that the Apostle Paul wrote.

He wrote it to the church in Galatia.

We're gonna look at verses 26 through 28 to see three aspects, and there's probably 30, but the three that I think are most important for us to understand about being in Christ.

For Paul being in Christ was deeply personal.

Deeply personal.

In Galatians 3 26, he says, For through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.

Through faith, you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.

The number one thing that we have to know as kids is who we are.

Belong to.

And the truth is, kids who don't know who they belong to as their parents, who's actually raising them, kids who do not have confidence in that are known, we have a label for that.

They're called at-risk kids.

We knew this.

Adopting Kimberly, we were adopting an at-risk kid because they are at risk of growing up and falling into all the statistical categories that no one wants their kids to fall into.

They are at risk.

And what makes them at risk?

It's not just the fact of being an orphan and the fact of all the hardship.

What makes them at risk is they don't know who they belong to.

They don't have the very core thing that you need to move forward with stability and security and confidence in your life.

And so you need to know this.

What is true on the physical level about children not knowing their parents is true on the spiritual level for anyone who does not know God.

If you do not know your heavenly father, if you do not have hope for what comes next, if you don't have an answer for what comes in the life after this life, then you are a spiritual orphan, which means you are spiritually at risk.

And while that may not result in you growing up into a life of crime and hard drugs and imprisonment, it will cause you to live your life, never fully living out your purpose.

And we only get one life, and our lives are relatively short.

We get maybe 80 or so years if things go our way and if we're healthy.

And there's few things worse than imagining getting to the end of your life and realizing that you've wasted.

And so to know who we actually belong to is deeply personal.

The apostle Paul had spent his entire life studying about God, studying about the God of Israel, and under his ideas, really, you know, kind of like curated by the culture he was around, the God of Israel was a distant God.

It was a God who was ready to punish us.

It was a God who was gonna keep the law in order and keep the people in order.

And everything changed when Paul met Jesus.

Everything changed when he learned through the life revealed in Jesus of who his heavenly father actually was.

Everything changed when he realized that God got low and came down to us.

Everything changed when he realized that when Jesus died on the cross, he was paying the price for our adoption into God's family.

This is what John's gospel says.

It says to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God.

The right to be children of God to those who believe in Jesus' name.

It is in Christ that we are made children of God and finally belong to our Heavenly Father.

And man, anytime we start talking about these kind of things, it's uh I want to make sure.

It's like I've heard this, man.

I've been in church.

I went to vacation Bible school when I was a kid.

I get it.

But maybe you don't.

Do you really know who you belong to?

Like if everything else falls apart, if every other relationship goes awry, if everything that's in the foundation that you're building your life on right now falls apart, do you still know who you are?

Do you know where you belong?

Is your heavenly father more than a mere concept to you?

Is it more than just songs that we sing?

Is it the realest reality to you that you actually belong to someone who will never, ever let you go?

And in John's gospel, Jesus said that those who know me are in my Father's hands, and nothing can ever take them out of my hand.

For Paul, this was personal, it was also deeply spiritual.

The next verse in Galatians 3 says, For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ.

And we keep saying in Christ.

It's like, well, what does it mean to be in Christ?

Not long ago, Kimberly asked a very interesting question about Jesus dying on the cross.

And she was uh asking how many times he died.

And, you know, it kind of took me off guard because it was an interesting question.

And and I said, Well, what do you mean?

And she said, Well, is it like once a month?

You know, like how often is he having to die in order to do this whole thing and cover all of our sins?

And and I explained it the same way I think I've explained it at one point or another to all of my kids that Jesus died once.

He lived a perfect life and he only had to die once.

The book of Hebrews talks about that.

And I use this simple explanation, and people can probably nitpick it theologically if you want to, but it makes the point that you are a sinner, which means that you are covered in sin.

All of us.

And when you hear sin, here's what I need you to do: I need you to get out of your mind, like the first thing when you hear sin, like devils and fire and pitchforks, all right?

The word sin originally in the Greek is the word hemartia, which is an archery term.

It means to miss the mark.

And so some sin is certainly evil, but sin is any way that we miss the mark on God's design for your life and for his world and how we are called to steward it.

Any way that we do that, that is sin.

And so why does sin separate us from God?

Because God is holy and God is perfect, and in his perfection, he cannot dwell in the presence of sin, period.

It's like, why can't an ice cube dwell in the presence of the sun?

Because in short order, it will no longer be an ice cube.

Its very nature determines it cannot do that.

God's very nature determines that in his perfection, he cannot be in the presence of sin.

And when we believe as sinners in Jesus, we are clothed with Christ.

We are covered by him.

There's all kinds of illusions and metaphors in scriptures.

We are hidden in Christ, we are covered by his blood, whatever you want to call it, but from that point on, when God looks at us, he no longer sees our sin.

When God looks at us, he sees his son.

It's deeply spiritual and it changes everything.

And Paul, who had followed the Jewish law his entire life to try and be in right standing with God, all of a sudden realized the deepest spiritual truth, which is that we have no capacity to work our way to God.

God had to come down to us.

We cannot clean ourselves up enough to present ourselves to God.

In fact, Paul would say that our greatest efforts and our greatest work are just filthy rags compared to the righteousness of God in front of us.

We must be covered and clothed in Christ.

Paul wrote to the Romans and said this therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.

All of the punishment that our sin deserves, all of the condemnation that was coming our way, all of it is gone because we are now in Christ.

In him, not just building our life on him, in him.

For Paul being in Christ was personal, it was spiritual, and it was also societal.

In the next verse, Galatians 3.28, he says, There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus.

All one in Christ Jesus.

And I've talked about this verse a lot because it's so wild in the context of human history.

And if you have studied the way that humanity broke down for all of human history, you'll know that the way people found their connection and the way people found their belonging was primarily through race, through gender, and through class.

If you were in different classes socioeconomically, you did not belong to one another.

If you were in different races or ethnicities, you did not belong to one another.

If you were different genders, then you did not belong in the same way or at the same so social status.

And what changed that is it's not political progression.

That's not what changed it.

It's not just if you give it enough time, eventually we'll all realize that the color of our skin shouldn't divide it.

That didn't change it.

We had like millions of years to figure that out, and it only ever got more segmented and more divided.

What changed it?

Is a movement that saw everyone is equal in Christ.

In Christ.

And all of a sudden, all of the things that have divided us now were made completely irrelevant because we were living for something so much bigger.

Look at what Peter says in the letter that he wrote, 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 9, he says, But you speaking to the church, a church of all different ethnicities, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light.

1 Peter 2:9

It's hard for us, and it's it's difficult for me to even get this point across.

It's it's like impossible for us to understand what it would be like to be in the first century where the entire world is divided among race, class, and gender.

And to be sitting in a movement, it'd be wild enough to be sitting in a movement, loving people, in relationship with people, belonging to one another, people of different classes, races, and gender.

That would be wild enough.

And then to get a letter from Peter that calls all of these different races one chosen race, the people of God, the church of Jesus Christ, this bended the fabric of reality 2,000 years ago, and now we sit here today almost taking it for granted.

And what's happening as our world moves deeper and deeper into an identity crisis?

What happens as we remove Jesus from our culture?

What happens when we're no longer in Christ?

We are once again seeing the pool to divide ourselves among class and race and gender.

For Paul, this was the reality that changed everything.

Being in Christ was how he rooted his identity in a way that was unshakable.

And so let's break this down.

What does it mean to be in Christ?

In Christ, you belong to God the Father.

Remember, we have to know where we belong.

If a child doesn't know that, they are at risk.

If we don't know who our heavenly father is, we are spiritually at risk in Christ.

You belong to God the Father, and your sins are completely covered.

You have been clothed in Christ.

What does it mean to be in Christ?

It means to be in him.

Like, okay, y'all remember Noah and the Ark and two by two, and somehow the T-Rexes didn't eat the goats, right?

And then the flood and the whole thing happened.

What does it mean to be in the ark?

Well, it means you you got in the ark.

You trusted it enough that the flood is coming, judgment is coming, the world is ending, so you got in it, and in the ark, salvation was found.

To be in Jesus, we don't enter a physical ark.

We enter through faith and we live in Jesus by walking according to his ways in Christ.

You belong to God the Father, your sins are completely covered, and your relationships are set free.

You see, your earthly relationships that you're trying to build your identity on, they cannot hold the weight of your life, of your expectation, of your hope of your future.

They can give you a sense of belonging, but they can't offer actual hope.

Jesus came and did something different.

He didn't come just as something to build your life on.

Jesus came and he opened his life up to us.

Jesus is something that we can be in, in Christ.

And the life that you actually want to live, the life of power and purpose, the life that doesn't get swayed every other day by changing circumstances or by the whims of people, that life is found in Christ.

And this sets our earthly relationships free.

Your friends don't hold the key to your confidence.

You are loving them in Christ.

Some of you, your identity is being shaped by your parents, even as an adult, because you are living consciously or subconsciously to try and gain the approval you never got from them.

For too many of us, we are building our lives on our children, on them.

And you know this because you've been to a baseball game with little kids out there and got the feeling that that kid's love is going to be completely proportional to how well they play that game.

And so we're living vicariously through our kids and we're building our own identity on top of their success.

You want them to get good grades, not just so they succeed, but so that you seem like the Instagram perfect parent.

It's too much pressure for your kids and it will break them.

You're not called to build your life on your spouse.

When Katie and I first got married, this was the mistake that I made.

I was codependent.

I put an enormous amount of pressure on her.

I didn't know who I was without her.

And the call to biblical marriage is not to bring someone in to build your life on, the call to biblical marriage is to come together and build a life together in Christ.

And your friends cannot bear the weight of your hope.

And every time your friends go out of town or you don't see them for a couple of weeks and you don't even know who you are anymore, it's not right for you, and it's not fair to them.

And the call to be in Christ is for all of us, all of our relationships, all of our friendships.

Your relationship with your brother or your sister that has really been on the rocks lately, all of it goes in Christ.

All of it comes together, all that we are and all that we have hidden in Christ, and the pressure is off.

You no longer have to force relationships with people.

You no longer have to prove something in your relationships with people.

You are free now to love and love without condition.

And I wonder.

What relationship are you in right now?

That were it to end, you wouldn't know who you were anymore.

What relationship are you building your life on that if that foundation got knocked out of the way, your life would begin to crumble?

An identity crisis would ensue.

If you want to stabilize your life, move forward with confidence, live out your purpose, and it doesn't have to be contingent on what is going on around you.

The answer is to root your life in Christ.

To know who you are, you have to know who you belong to.

And this kind of belonging is beyond anything the world has to offer you.

If you are a believer in Jesus and the starting point for who you are is not in Christ, then you are set up to struggle.

You will look for belonging, and ultimately, no other connections, no other foundation, no other belonging can hold the weight of your life and hope and future.

The call to be in Christ is a call to quit looking for people to build your life on.

Instead, to look to Jesus, who has offered to let you in.

In Christ, you remember that you are made in God's image.

In Christ, you acknowledge the work that you have to do to spread the gospel.

In Christ, you keep your eyes set on your divine destination in Christ.

You learn to love people without pressure, without condition, without any strings attached.

I'm gonna invite some of the band to come back up and to lead us through a simple time of reflection.

Being in Christ has to be more than an idea.

What we come here and talk about Sunday to Sunday are not just ideas, they're not just philosophies.

This must become an identity, it must become real.

And that happens over time as you declare this truth and live it out.

Declare this truth and live it out daily, moment by moment.

Declare this truth and live it out.

I am in Christ.

I am not just building my life on the people, I'm not leveraging my relationships to try and get somewhere else.

I am living in Christ.

And so today we want to give you an opportunity to make that declaration, perhaps to make it for the first time.

We have all along the front of the stage these strips of cardboard, and these cardboard pieces can represent the people you've been building your life on, the relationships that you have set as the foundation of your identity, the belonging that you have sought in this life.

And so as the band plays, I want to give you some time, maybe just to pray, to connect with God, to wonder what it would look like to live a life no longer building on, but rooted in Christ.

And once you've had some time while the band still plays, I want to invite you to come up to the stage.

We have strips of cardboard and markers all over the place.

And I want you to write as a declaration, I am in Christ.

I am in Christ.

And this is kind of like taking communion, you know.

There's actually nothing magic about the bread, there's nothing magic about the juice, the wine.

It's what you do with it, it's how you approach it, it's the attitude that you bring into it.

If you just walk and write and throw it in the box, I'm in Christ.

That's gonna get you so far.

If you walk with intention, the intention to make this moment where you got up in front of God and your faith community and put pen to paper to declare who you are.

This could be the start of you beginning to root your life in something that will change your life.

Rooting your life in the fact that you belong to God the Father now and forevermore.

Acknowledging that your sins are completely covered, you've been clothed with Christ.

Acknowledging that your relationships have been set free.

Even like Paul, if every single person turned their back on you, you would actually still know who you are.

Because your life wasn't built on those connections, your life was hidden in Christ.

Let me pray for you.

Father, as we walk through this, I ask that it would be more than symbolic, more than just routine.

God, that as we put marker to cardboard, that it would move from our hand to our mind to our hearts.

That reality changed Saul the persecutor into Paul, the world changer.

And I believe that I am standing amongst world changers here today.

So be with us in this time.

We love you.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We have markers, we have cardboard, and once you're done, you can put it symbolically in this box, acknowledging that you are in Christ.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.