Keep The Change – A Tale Of Two Name Tags

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

So excited you're with us today.

We are kicking off a brand new series called Keep the Change.

And this is gonna be a fun series for the next few weeks.

Here's what we believe.

Last weekend was Easter.

We believe that the resurrection of Jesus changed everything, but it keeps on changing everything.

And I don't want you to miss it.

I don't want you to lose it.

I don't want you to lose the change that he's made in your life, but I'd love for it to be something that continues making a difference in your life.

Last weekend on Sunday, it was 19 years ago to the day that I asked Liz to marry me, and that was that was a big day for me.

It was awesome, right?

And so we got engaged, we were head over heels in love with each other, and then for like almost eight months we planned this wedding, but the week before our wedding, we had this brilliant idea.

We knew that in just a week we'd be standing in front of a couple hundred family and friends, and so we wanted to look good for our wedding.

So we decided to do a crash diet.

Let's be honest, has anyone ever done a crash diet in the room?

Anybody?

This was called the Sacred Heart Diet.

I don't know if you've heard of this before, but the Sacred Heart Diet was invented by the Sacred Heart Hospital that does lots of cardiac surgeries, and what it was invented for was for people who were massively overweight to be able to lose weight really quickly to help the surgery be more successful.

And so I wasn't massively overweight, but I was some overweight.

And um, so here's the here's the diet.

You make this pot of soup, right?

And it's it's got like all kinds of stuff that's virtually no calories, a lot of celery, a lot of green beans.

It was just honestly, it was terrible.

To this day, if I smell anything that resembles that soup, I just lose five pounds.

It was just bad, okay?

And the game is you can eat as much soup as you want during the week, and then like on day one, it's only soup, day two, it's soup, and you can have like one banana.

Day three is like only soup and one banana and one piece of broccoli.

It's just like terrible.

You hate your life at the end of it.

And we did it.

Like we did it.

I didn't cheat at all.

I thought about cheating, didn't cheat at all.

Made it seven days, and on the seventh day, I had lost over 10 pounds.

I was looking slim, I was looking good, couldn't believe how effective this diet was.

And on the night of the seventh day, my soon-to-be wife went to some sort of bridal shower party thing for her, and so I had a whole night to myself, and I thought the diet's over, I should celebrate.

And to channel my inner Kevin McAllister from Home Alone, I ordered a whole cheese pizza all to myself.

Day seven, I had lost ten pounds.

Day eight, I was down a net of three pounds.

How does this happen?

It wasn't worth it at all.

All I actually lost in the diet was seven days of happiness.

That's all I really lost.

You understand, all of us have had things in our life where we attempted something, we tried something, we did something, and if we didn't complete it the way it was intended, we don't get the intended change or the benefit from it.

How many of you have a book in your house that you started to read but you didn't read?

You don't get the benefits of that.

How many of you have ever started a diet that you didn't complete, or you've joined a gym and then you went one time and be honest about this?

How many blogs exist in the world where someone put up a blog and they shared it on social media?

This is my new blog, check in regularly, I'll be posting daily.

Six years later, there's one blog post that says, hello everyone, this is my blog, right?

Um, I asked my wife during worship like, what's an example of something that we start but we don't finish?

And this kind of brought up this kind of long-standing fight in my marriage.

Um, when I get some sort of medicine, like an antibiotic, for whatever reason, I have this belief system that as long as if I take it until I start to feel better, it's done its job, and then I stop taking the medicine.

My wife takes, like, if it's 10 days, she takes all 10 days, doesn't miss a single day.

Um if you don't I deal I told this one time, and there was a doctor over here on the front row, and she just stared at me and just shook her head like this, right?

Like, you don't get the benefit unless you do the whole thing before service.

I said to my brother, like, what's something that if you don't complete it, you don't get the benefit out of it?

And I don't know where this came from, but he just goes, murder.

And I don't know where that came from.

So we're ordering a psych evaluation immediately after the service.

Here's the deal: Jesus changes everything.

And a lot of us have had an experience.

Some of you came back this week because last week you made the decision.

You were one of those 116 people, and you made the decision to make the decision for the rest of your life to follow after Jesus.

But here's the deal: if you don't allow him to completely transform your life, you will find yourself unintentionally drifting back to the ways you used to be.

So for the next few weeks, I want to talk about how we can keep the change that he's made in our lives.

Imagine this.

Imagine if today you showed up to church, and as you walked and you were greeted by people in the parking lot, we have the greatest team out there.

And when you came through the front doors, someone stopped you and they said, Hey, listen, we're doing something different today.

Today is no name Sunday, and they handed you a name tag that looked like this.

And they said, Here's what we're gonna do.

Today, instead of you telling everyone your name, today we want you to write your identity on your name tag.

One word.

Write who you are in one word on the name tag.

What would you write?

Well, the truth is, there's a lot of things that you could write.

You might identify by your job, you might identify by your success, you might identify by your best moments or your worst moments, you might identify yourself by your challenges, by your handicap, by your areas of weakness.

You might identify yourself by your political party who you voted for or who you'll never vote for.

I know this is true because you post it all all over social media.

Um but who are you?

You see, all of us have an identity.

And an identity is who we actually are.

And I thought about this and I was doing some reading and I found this definition some years ago.

If you have your message notes, pull them out.

Your identity is the truest thing about you.

And there's lots of things that are true about you.

Your height is true, your weight is true, your hair color is true.

Maybe not for some of the ladies, but it is true, right?

Your job is true, your parents are true, where you were born is true.

There's lots of things that are true about you, but your identity is the truest thing about you.

It is the foundational thing that makes you you.

And here's what happens: every once in a while, a person will have this moment of identity crisis.

Something will happen that will rock the foundations of their world, and they think to themselves, I gotta change.

I can't stay this way any longer.

I have to make a change, something has to be different.

And so, what we tend to do in those moments is we tend to try to modify our behavior.

We tend to try to change the things that we do, thinking if I can change what I do, it'll change how I feel.

The funny thing is, all of us have tried this before.

This is the reason so many of us have woken up one day and we had a hard time sitting up in bed, so we thought, I need to join a gym.

If we modify our behavior, we think it'll change how we feel about ourselves.

But here's what I want you to understand: behavior actually flows from identity.

We think it's backwards.

We think that our identity will come from our behavior, but it's not this way at all.

Our behavior, what we do, flows from who we are.

Here's a way I can say it: who you are determines what you do.

So, what determines our identity?

What is the thing that makes us feel who we actually are?

Well, if you study psychology, there's lots of factors that help a person to determine who they are or who they think they are.

One of the most popular theories is what's called the early and the often factor.

The early and the often factor means this: there are words spoken over you when you were a child.

And it was said over and over and over again.

And those words that are spoken over us have this way of shaping who we are.

If you were told over and over and over as a child, you're wonderful, you're so smart, you're so brilliant, you you have so much potential.

If you hear these words early in your life, what happens is we tend to raise our level of living to the standard of the words spoken over us.

Another factor that happens is the often factor.

And the often factor doesn't just take into account your childhood.

If over and over and over through your life you hear words like you're wonderful, you're amazing, you're incredible, you'll raise your life to that standard.

But conversely, if you've heard over and over and over again you're stupid, you're worthless, you'll never measure up, you tend to lower your level of expectation of your life to that low standard of living.

What are the words spoken over you?

Like, look, what are the words that have been said over you for your whole life?

And how have they impacted you?

You see, what's funny is we we don't think that what happened to us when we were six years old has any bearing on us as adults, but talk to any psychologist, talk to any person in the in the counseling fields, and they'll tell you those early words spoken over us have this way of directing or redirecting the directive of our lives.

Today, what I want to do is I want to share with you what I believe is the most important thing that a follower of Christ can understand to really reshape and reform their identity.

I'm calling this message a tale of two name tags.

You see, all of us have a name tag that we wear unintentionally.

We carry it around with us everywhere we go.

It's the name tag of our identity, but there's a second one that God has for us that has this way of re-identifying us.

I want to I want to jump ahead to the conclusion.

Here it is.

All throughout scripture, particularly in the New Testament, there is a little two-word phrase that God gives us, that this little two-word phrase, when we understand that it is the truest thing about us, when we understand that it is the foundation upon which we build our lives, once we understand this, it has this way of changing everything for us.

Your truest identity, according to Scripture, is that you are in Christ.

This phrase is found 140 times in the New Testament.

In a moment, we're gonna read from the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians, some scholars call the crown jewel of the New Testament.

In Ephesians chapter 1, in the first 14 verses alone, this phrase in Christ is found 11 times.

Ephesians 1 · chapter mention

This is a big deal.

Well, one of my favorite verses in the Bible, in fact, it's one of the foundational verses in all of Scripture, comes in the book of 2 Corinthians, where Paul says, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, and I love this because anyone means everyone.

So here's what it means: anyone includes you.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old is gone, the new is here.

Here's what this means: it means when you make a decision to get your foundational belief about who you are, when you find your identity in Christ, you followed him, everything changes.

The old is gone.

The old you is dead, buried, and gone.

The new has come.

This is the reason, by the way, at Access, that baptism Sundays are the biggest parties of the year.

It's because it signifies the person who's made the decision to find their identity in Christ.

What it means is their former sinful past, when we immerse them in water, it means it's dead, it's buried, it's gone.

This is symbolic.

When they come out of the water, the reason they celebrate and the reason we lose our ever-loving minds is we've made the decision to celebrate the fact that they were once dead.

But because of Jesus' love and because of his death, burial, and resurrection, they come out of the water made new in Christ.

You need to get this simple idea.

According to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians, we are not made better.

We are not a spiffier, more polished up version of ourselves.

You are made new when you find your identity in Christ.

Here's the funny thing.

If we're not careful, what happens to so many of us is we'll say it with our mouths, but then our actions call us liars.

So what it means if we're not careful is we'll find our success, we'll we'll find our identity in the early and often factor, but here's another place we find it.

We find it in our successes and our failures.

We find our identity in what we've achieved, or in ways that we missed the mark.

This last football season, I was watching a college football game, and it was a game that with like five seconds left, there was a long pass, and the receiver jumped in the end zone, the ball hit him in both hands, he fell backwards into the end zone, and when his back hit the ground, the ball popped out.

He didn't catch the ball, the team lost, they would have won if he caught it.

Immediately I went to Twitter, I searched this man's name, and someone said, like the number one tweet right after this happened was he'll be remembering that play for the rest of his life.

We rem, we, we, we find our identity in our highlight reels.

You hit the game-winning shot, you got the promotion, she said yes to your proposal in our success moments, but we also find it in our failure moments.

I said a moment ago, I want to read today from the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians is called the crown jewel of the New Testament.

Here's what I love about the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians is six chapters, but I want you to get this.

The first three chapters of Ephesians are all about our identity, who we are.

The second half of the book talks about our works, which is what we do.

And the funny thing is, if you pay attention in most churches, most churches will start in Ephesians 4 through 6, which talks about the stuff we need to do.

And does some stuff in you need to change when you make a decision to follow Jesus?

Absolutely.

But it all starts by getting your identity right.

Remember, behavior flows from identity, not the other way around.

So what if we all made this decision that before we try to change all the stuff we're doing, let's make this decision that we will no longer be defined by the labels put on us, the words spoken over us, our successes in our failures, but instead we will find our identity in one place, in one place alone, two words in Christ.

If you find yourself today struggling with finding your identity and your success and your failures, I want to start in Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

Here it is, Ephesians 2, verse 1.

Ephesians 2:1

Paul says, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin.

I love this.

I want you to see this.

This is past tense.

He's talking to people who've made the decision to follow Jesus.

These are people who were literally living just some 40 to 50 years after the resurrection of Jesus.

They had either seen him with their own eyes or they knew people who had.

These were people who had every reason to be a follower, every reason to be a believer, and he uses this words for them that are past tense.

He says, You were dead.

You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world, and the ruler of the kingdom of the ear, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.

All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts.

Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.

Remember that phrase.

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions.

It is by grace that you have been saved.

I want you to see what Paul is saying, and I want you to understand to whom he is writing.

First of all, Paul is writing to a church in a city called Ephesus.

Ephesus would have sat on the western coast of what we would call modern-day Turkey.

It was literally like off of the coast of the Aegean Sea.

This was a group of people who had so much pride, not just in what they did, but where they were from.

We know from history that there was a Colosseum there.

There was like a there was a, what would you call this?

Like a performing arts pavilion that sat 25,000 people.

There was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The temple Tadayena was built there.

Everyone from Ephesus would have had this sense of pride of like, I'm from Ephesus.

Like this is the way that you would feel if you're in America and you would say, I'm from New York, I'm from LA, I'm from Bartow, like I'm from these great places.

They were proud.

Proud of where they were from.

And he says to them, I want you to pay attention to your identity because you are not who you once were.

You are not defined by your past.

Listen to his language.

He says, You were dead.

You were dead.

And you thought you were deserving of God's wrath.

I wonder how many of us live there today.

If we were to examine our lives, we just think that we're somehow worthy of receiving God's punishment, God's judgment, that we feel in every day, in every relationship, in every season of our life, that we serve a God who's angry at us.

This cosmic kill joy, just waiting for the opportunity to zap us for doing something wrong.

Paul's like, you've got to reframe the way you think of this.

He said, You were dead in your sin.

All of this before Christ, you were dead in your sin.

And then he uses this little two-word phrase, he says, but God.

This is one of the pivotal lines you need to understand.

You were dead with your sins.

You were separated from God.

But then there is this moment in every person's journey of faith where you say, But God, who is rich in mercy, did for you the unimaginable.

He sent Jesus for you.

So here's what you need to understand.

If you're a person who identifies by your failures, you need to get this.

You are not who you were.

How many of us identify by our failures?

How many of us think if I just hadn't gone on that spring break trip, if I just hadn't married this person, if I just hadn't invested this money, if I just hadn't left that relationship, if I just hadn't done that thing, I wouldn't feel the way I feel.

So those of you who feel this, who feel like if you were to examine your life and you think about your relationship with God, you feel like you were deserving of the wrath of God.

I need you to get this.

You are not who you were.

It's over.

It's dead, buried, and gone when you're in Christ.

But then here's the funny converse of this.

If you're not defined by your failures, you also often have this potential of finding yourself, defining yourself by your successes, and I want you to get this.

If you find your identity and your success, you need to understand this.

You are not what you do.

Isn't this funny?

Yeah, you ever paid attention to the way women and men interact with each other?

Two women meet each other for the very first time.

Hi, what's your name?

Where did you get that outfit?

And they love talking about, oh, this whole thing, I got it at TJ Maxx, 60% off, right?

But pay attention to men.

Men, we are dumb.

Okay, this is how men talk.

What's your name?

What's the second question you always hear from a man?

What do you do?

For a man, we find so much of our identity in what we accomplish, the things that we do.

And here's what Paul wants you to understand.

The verses we just read had to do with our failures and God's response.

We were dead in our sins, but God, who is rich in mercy, did for us the unimaginable.

The next few verses are about what you do if you find your identity in your successes.

Here's what he says.

This is Paul.

He says, For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith.

Some of you need to get this.

Some of you have been followers of Jesus for so long that somewhere along the way you forgot the words of this verse.

He said, This is by grace that you have been saved through faith.

And this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.

And I want you to get this.

It's not by works.

It's not by works, so that no one can boast.

Why does this matter?

Because there is this trap that followers of Jesus tend to fall into, which is we will spend ourselves to death, exhaust us ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, trying to earn the favor of God that He so freely wants to give to you.

That there's a lot of people who've been Christians for 40, 50 years, and then life doesn't go the way they expect it to go.

They find themselves tripping over a situation in their present moment and stumbling into their future, and they think to themselves, I must not have done enough to get God to love me.

Have I not done enough to garner his love, his blessing, and his favor?

And here's what you need to know from the verses we just read.

In Christ, your identity is given, not earned.

You can't earn a gift.

It would be like someone at Christmas giving you this wonderful gift, this thing you've dreamed of, and the moment you open it, you think to yourself, I'm not worthy of this.

So you pull your wallet out and you try to pay.

For it.

Okay, let me try to frame this for you for just a moment.

If you feel like you have to show off your resume to God in order to get his blessing, his favor, and his love, you've missed the point.

I want to show it to you like this.

The person who wrote the book we just read, the book of Ephesians, his name is Paul.

If you understand Paul's life, when we first meet Paul in the Bible, he goes by the name Saul.

Saul is what we would call a modern-day terrorist.

His whole life, his life mission, what he woke up every morning excited to do was to find followers of Jesus, to arrest them, to beat them, to have them literally assassinated.

We would call him in 2023, we would call him a terrorist.

And this is what he did.

And there is this moment in Saul's life when he's on a road called the road to Damascus, modern-day Syria, and as he's on the way there, he has this encounter with God that is so transformative.

He's literally blinded in this moment by God's presence, and God speaks to him and he says, Saul, why do you persecute me?

This moment is so profound, it's so big, that he literally does a 180 changes his whole life, and God uses him to write something like two-thirds of what we call the New Testament.

Okay, here's what that means, first of all.

It means that no matter how far you feel from God, you can't do anything to outrun his love.

That's important for you to understand.

But then, towards the end of his life, not only does Paul write like two-thirds of the New Testament, he is single-handedly responsible for so much of the spreading of the church in that first century.

And Paul has this moment where he speaks to those of you who feel like you've had to do a lot to earn God's blessing and favor.

Here's what he says.

This is the next book of the Bible, the book of Philippians.

Paul says, We put no confidence in human effort, though I, though I could, I could have confidence in my own effort if anyone could.

And Paul's about to flex on all these people in the city of Philippi.

Indeed, if others have reason for confidence in their own efforts, I have even more.

Here's what I want you to watch.

I was circumcised when I was eight days old.

T M I.

Anybody else include this in your emails?

Because I was a pureblooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin, a real Hebrew if there ever was one.

Hashtag in your face.

I was a member of the Pharisees, I was who demand the strictest of obedience to the Jewish law.

I was so zealous that I that I harshly persecuted the church.

And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law with without fault.

I once thought these things were valuable.

But now with some maturity, I consider them worthless because of what Christ of this has done.

Not because of what I did, but because of what has been done.

He says, yes.

Everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

And watch this.

For his sake, I have discarded everything else, counting it as all garbage.

So that I could gain Christ.

I want you to get this.

Your identity isn't found in your successes.

It's not found in your failures.

It's not found in what's been spoken over you.

It's not found in things that have been prophesied over you.

None of those things.

Your identity is found in one place and in one place alone.

Let me show you how you might know if you find your identity in the wrong place.

This is a quick little five-point litmus test for you to know.

If you're finding your identity and your successes or your failures, the first one is this.

You might feel pressure to perform.

Because you feel like if you don't do good enough, people won't love you, and if people don't love you, how could God love you?

Number two is you have a fear of failure.

Fear of failure causes you to not risk, it causes you to not step out in faith, and it causes you to not try the things God has for you.

Number three is you live with constant comparisons.

Eleanor Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy.

So many of us, we we live without joy because we compare our normal days and our normal thought processes to everyone else's highlight reel.

The fourth thing we have is we have wrecked relationships.

The reason this is true is because we see relationship as transactional.

It's what do I get from you instead of what do I get to bring to the relationship?

The fifth thing is we live with fatigue and frustration.

Okay, before we move on, do any of you see any of yourself in these?

If so, let's just do a quick identity check.

Who are you?

Who are you?

A few verses later in the book of Ephesians, what we just read, same chapter, Paul says this.

But now in Christ, here's these words.

But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Jesus.

I want you to get this.

Your identity is found in what Christ did for you.

It's not found in what you do, it's not found in how much you give or how much you serve or how much you love.

It's none of those things.

Your identity isn't found in something you can do, it's found in what's been done.

Jesus loved you, Jesus laid his life down for you, Jesus rose again from the dead for you, and as a result, now I get to re-identify who I am, not by what I've done and not by what people have said over me, but by whose I am.

Whose I am.

End with the story.

In 2011, there was a story that made international news.

In the country of India, the city of Mumbai, there was an orphanage that took in only girls.

And the reason this matters is you need to understand in the Indian culture, women have so much less value than men.

Women are seen as people who are there to serve the family and literally to produce children, and that's it.

And so in a culture that devalues women, it has this way of crumbling the culture for a thousand different reasons.

But one of the reasons is that children, women, like little girls when they're born, they're either aborted or they're discarded.

And so there was this orphanage that made international news because they had hundreds of little girls that all had the same name.

The name was Nakusa.

Nakusa is an Indian word, it literally literally means unwanted.

Imagine this.

You show up and you meet this family.

Hey, look at your kids, what are their names?

Like, oh, it's awesome.

This is Chad, this is Kevin.

This is little unwanted.

Like, imagine your name literally means that you have no value, that you have no worth.

And the reason this story made international news is because there was a day when this orphanage who had led all of these girls to have a real relationship with Jesus had a renaming ceremony.

This is the line from the AP.

The 285 girls wearing their best outfits with berets, braids, and bows in their hair lined up to receive certificates with their new names, along with small flower bouquets.

Leave this up for me for just a moment.

All the girls were allowed to choose their new names.

The story goes on to tell the names the girls chose.

All 285 renamed themselves from unwanted to names that had value, meaning, and worth.

Their names meant beautiful, loved, adored, valuable, cherished, wanted.

I need you to get this.

When you find your identity in Christ, you also get to go through a renaming ceremony of your own.

In the book of Ephesians, this is beautiful.

In the book of Ephesians, I found five, five terms that, in my opinion, you need to hear.

You need to allow these to wash over your heart because these are the names that Christ has for you when you find your identity in him.

Just from the book of Ephesians, in Christ, we are chosen, adopted, redeemed, marked, purchased.

These are powerful because all of these are God's choice.

All of these are God's intention for you.

Not something you earned, not something you did, but what He did for you.

I called this message a tale of two name tags.

Here's why.

If you were to name yourself this morning by what you thought was your identity, that's the first name tag.

I don't know if anyone else had a mom that was that like hyperactive mom who wrote your name on everything inside of every shirt, inside of every lunchbox, inside of every pair of underwear.

Like who's stealing that, right?

But there are these tags you can buy now, and it just says this belongs to.

And what if today you understood that you get to exchange the name tag of identity that you put on yourself, that you feel like you've tried to earn, that you've depleted and exhausted your soul trying to measure up to?

What if you and I made this decision that we're going to trade that name tag for the one that says this belongs to?

And it would just say Christ.

That in Christ you are more than enough.

In Christ, you are a conqueror.

In Christ, you have the ability to live out all the plans and purposes of God.

And yes, there will be voices in your life that call you to somehow compromise your standard, but instead of listening to those voices, you only listen to the one who names you.

Let me end with this.

I have three kids: Joey, Gavin, and Ella.

I love my kids.

They are my joy in life.

One of the weirdest things when you have a kid is you get to pick their name.

And you think about it.

You think of all the weird variations, you think of all the, you think about the initials and what the initials spell, right?

You you think of what it rhymes with because you don't want to give your kid a name that rhymes with a curse word, right?

You don't want that.

You think through all the different things to come up with the name, and you find a name and you name them.

Okay, my kids' names are Joey, Gavin, and Ella.

Imagine you came up to me after church today and you're like, bro, your kids are awesome.

Joey's amazing.

Ella so cute.

But Gavin.

What a dumb name.

What a dumb name.

Who would name their kid Gavin?

You know what I would do?

I would punch you in the throat in Jesus' name.

Why?

Because you don't get to name my child, only the creator gets to name his creation.

So if this is true, only your creator gets to name you.

So how incredible would it be today if we just made this decision?

That if we're gonna be people who keep the change of the resurrection, the kind of people who, Jesus, you transformed my life, and because you transformed me, I really do believe that if I'll find my identity in you, I can do anything you've called me to do.

Would you do this?

Would you bow your head and close your eyes all across this room?

Let's have a renaming ceremony right now.

Jesus, today we make this decision all across this room to lay down the false identities that we've allowed to name us.

God, some of us feel worthless.

Some of us feel like a scratch and dent section because our lives feel like it's constantly been beat up, kicked up, marred, scarred.

God, others of us, we just feel like we have no value.

Some of us have exhausted ourselves trying to earn your blessing and your favor.

God, for those of us here, regardless of how or where we got our names and our identities, pray that today will be the day that we find our identity in one place and in one place alone.

In Christ.

God, thank you that when we find our identity in you, everything changes.

If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation.

You make us new.

Thank you that we were dead in our sins, but God, who's rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ.

Thank you that because of that we can be made new in you.

So, Jesus, today help us to re identify, to rename our souls, and to see ourselves the way you see us.