Gloria Dei Lutheran Church | Urbandale, Iowa

New Beginnings: Finding Your Identity

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Chinese symbol for “crisis” is actually made up of two symbols. The first symbol means “danger.” The second symbol, although some would interpret it as meaning “opportunity,” from my research, it seems to be more closely translated “critical moment.” So for the Chinese culture, as they read and write the word “crisis,” it’s a mixture of two things. There is danger but there is also a critical moment at hand.

Many people today are in crises. Crises because of job loss, crises because of loss of a loved one, crises because of a transition in their life. And there are dangers surrounding that. There are real dangers. There is very real stress and pain and struggle that goes along with it but, at the same time, there is a critical moment. What are you going to do in this crisis? How will you react? How will you handle it?

For the last several weeks, I’ve been suggesting that we handle this critical moment as seeing it as a new beginning. Based upon God’s Word and His promises, this is an opportunity for us to have a new beginning, a fresh start. But before we can get there, before we can have that new beginning, we need to deal with the danger. We need to deal with the loss in our life.

Last week, we went through the stages of grief and understood that’s kind of a fluid thing as we flow through that. This week, we want to zero in on two very big issues, the loss of identity and a loss of self worth. And if we’re going to get past those two, there are three things we need to do, three important things that we need to know.

The first one is this: We need to find our true identity, find out who we really are, find out what our true identity is. No, I’m not suggesting that we sit in a lotus position in the middle of daisies and try to find ourselves. I’m talking about really understanding who it is that we are because, in a crisis such as this, specifically when you have a job loss, there is the very real danger of losing your identity. Think about it for a moment. How is it that you describe yourself to other people? Don’t we define a lot of who we are by what we do? The standard small talk when you meet somebody is, “So, hey, what do you do for a living?” “Hey, where do you work?” It’s the common question. We define ourselves by the things that we do, the work we’re involved in. It kind of makes sense. A large portion of our life and a large portion of our waking hours are spent doing our job, 40, 50, 60+ hours a week. Sometimes, it’s Monday through Friday. Sometimes, it spills into the evening. Sometimes, it spills over into the weekend. Now if you add on to that, if you have a real passion for what you do, you really love your job, you have a real passion for your career and then, all of a sudden, it’s gone, then who are you? If you’ve defined yourself by what you do and the job you have and that’s taken away, there’s the danger of losing your identity.

The same could be said if you’ve lost a loved one, specifically a spouse. Don’t we, in our culture, usually talk about people in couples? And depending upon how many years you spent, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years together and now, all of a sudden, you’re not, all of your social networks, all of your friends, they’re built around the two of you as a couple. Who are you then if you’re just by yourself? You see, there’s a real danger of losing our identity. We need to find your true identity.

We find the true identity by looking at God’s Word and this is very important. God does not define you by what you do or the relationships that you have. As important as they may be, as important as the roles you may have in life, whether it’s at work or whether it’s at home, God does not define you by what you do or the roles or the relationships that you have. God defines you as an individual. God defines you this way, we heard it a moment ago from Colossians, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved.” That’s how God defines you. He looks at you and He sees His people. He claims you to be His own. We flip over to Galatians 3. You were all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have closed yourselves with Christ. You see, that’s how God defines you. God defines you as one of His children, one that He’s laid claim upon. That’s your true identity. Our true identity is that we are a child of God. God doesn’t define you by what you do. God doesn’t define you by the relationships you have. In fact, He looks past all of that. What is it that St. Paul said? St. Paul said, “Here there is no Greek or Jew. There is no circumcised or uncircumcised, Barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, Christ is all and Christ is in all.” So God doesn’t define you as a laborer. God doesn’t define you as in banking. God doesn’t define you as being in insurance. God doesn’t define you in any other way. In fact, the only way He defines you is in Christ. He defines you as His child.

Take a look at Jesus’ ministry. Jesus didn’t define people by what they did or their relationships. His disciples, 12 guys that He pulled together, look at the variety in His disciples. He has everything from a fisherman to a tax collector, everything from the guy that you’d get your evening meal from to the guy you hated and despised because he cheated you out of your money. And yet Jesus doesn’t look at him as a tax collector. He doesn’t see him as a fisherman. He sees them as a child of God. Jesus, when He heals people, He doesn’t define people on what they do or the relationship they have or even their ethnic background. He healed the Roman centurion’s daughter and then His own disciple, Peter’s, mother-in-law. No distinction for Jesus.

How about when He sat down for a meal? What were some of the accusations against Jesus? “Look, He eats with ‘sinners.’” That means gathered around His table were prostitutes, liars, cheats, thieves. And yet, at the same time, He entertained religious dignitaries, pharisees, priests that come and dine with Him. Jesus doesn’t define people by what they do nor by the relationships that they have. He sees them as God’s creation. He sees them as one in which God has claimed to be His own. That’s your identity. That’s who you are. You are a child of God, above and beyond everything else. The only way that you should define yourself is one who has been claimed by your Father in heaven. That’s your identity. You’re God’s child.

Knowing your identity, then the second most important thing you need to do is know your self worth. Know what kind of value you have. Because in crises such as what we’ve been talking about, there is a danger. There’s a danger for us to call into question our value, to call into question our self worth. It’s very easy for us to devalue ourselves. It’s very easy for us to see ourselves as worthless. “I can’t hold a job.” “I can’t maintain a relationship.” “I don’t know what to do with myself.” “I’m not contributing to the family anymore.” “I’m not contributing to society anymore.” “There’s nothing good about me.” “There’s nothing that I’m giving back.” And so you devalue yourself and you see yourselves as invaluable, that is, that you have no worth at all inside yourself. If you keep going down that road, you can spiral right down into a very deep, dark depression and then, my friends, you are no good to yourself or to anybody else. The danger is to call into question your self worth.

Once again, you need to look to God’s Word. What value does God put on you? You find your value when you remember your identity. You remember that God claimed you to be His child and you need to know that was no small feat. That was no easy deal for God to claim you to be His own. Lest we forget that we have a holy God, a perfect God, a God who will not and cannot be in the presence of sin or in the presence of sinners. My friends, that eliminates each and every one of us. It was no small deal for God to claim us as His very own, to claim us as sinful human beings and yet, to lay claim upon us as His children. God had to do some mighty big work if He was going to make us His children.

St. Peter put it this way in his first letter, Chapter 1, “For you know that it was not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed from your empty way of life but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” With the precious blood of Christ. That’s how God brought you back. How do you put a value on a father giving up his son? How do you count the cost of a man laying down his life for someone else? And yet, God says that you’re worth it. God says that you’re so valuable, He was willing to sacrifice His Son. His Son was willing to lay down His life.

There’s a danger here, my friends. There’s a danger for you to hear that and for it to pass from ear and out the next, especially if you’ve heard it your whole life long about how God loves you and the sacrifice that God has made for you. You may be tempted just to take it for granted. You may be tempted to pass it off. Those of you who are going through a crisis right now, at some part in your mind you may be saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, God loves me but He doesn’t pay the bills and He doesn’t heal my heart.” Are you sure? Are you sure? You see, you’re never going to have a new beginning unless you make it past this part, unless you know how valuable you really are and how important you are in God’s sight.

Maybe we could look at it this way. For just a moment, I want you to think about the men and women in the Armed Services. I want you to think about them deployed around the world and then I want you to think about those men and women who died in the line of duty. They died defending you and defending our country and the freedoms that we enjoy. Could you imagine going up to one of their parents, one of their moms and dads and saying, “You know, I’m not worth it. This country is not worth it.” Would you really want to tell them that their son or daughter’s life was for nothing? You see, they sent them off into harm’s way and those men and women went believing in something and believing that this country is worth it and they were willing to put their life on the line. We dare not tell them anything else. We dare not come to our Father in heaven and say to Him, “I’m not worth it. I don’t have any value.” You mean to tell God that His Son died for nothing? Would that not be insulting and hurtful? God is the one who determines whether you’re worth it or not. He’s the one who determines what your value is and God says that you’re so valuable that He’d send His Son and Jesus says that you’re so worth it that He’d go to the cross and He would remove the sin from you so you could be claimed as a child of God. That’s how important you are. That’s where your real self worth comes from because God says you’re worth it.

And if God says you’re worth it, then that takes us to the third thing we need to do and that is to treat every day as a gift from God. Every moment, every minute of every day is treated as if it was a gift from God. When you’re in crises, the danger here is for us to squander away the moments, the hours, the minutes that God has given to us. When we’re in crises, such as what we’ve been talking about, it’s easy for us to pull inward, to cocoon and to hide ourselves from society and the world.

If you’re out of work, it’s easy for you to say, “There’s no reason for me to get up in the morning.” You can stay up until wee hours in the morning and then sleep all day long. And if you’re without somebody else, you can say, “There’s no reason for me to go out. There’s no reason for me to go out in public,” and for you to just crawl inside of yourself. And yet, every expert says the absolute worse thing you can do, the worse thing you can do is hide away in yourselves. In other words, you cannot sit around on the sofa, eating Cheetoes, watching movies all day long. It doesn’t work. You can’t sit around sipping coffee updating your Facebook all morning long. It doesn’t work. Every day is a gift from God.

I want you to listen to Psalm 118:24. I’m guessing you’ve heard this verse before. “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Now lest you think the writer of this Psalm is having a perfect day, lest you think that his life is rosy and he wakes up every morning with a smile on his face, we probably should read the entire Psalm if we’re going to do that. So let’s go back to Verse 5, “In my anguish, I cried out to the Lord.” How about Verse 10, “All the nations surrounded me.” Verse 11, “They surrounded me on every side.” Verse 12, “They swarmed around me like bees.” Verse 13, “I was pushed back and about to fall.” The guy’s in crisis, my friends. He is in danger, danger of losing his very life. But he knows his identity in God and he knows how valuable he is to God. And so he says, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let’s rejoice.”

Let’s treat every day as a gift from God. That means you don’t want to squander away any of the moments you have. For those who have lost their jobs, those who you know have lost their jobs, they need to keep a routine. They need to still set their alarm, get up and they’re going to go off to work. Their new job is to find that new opportunity. They’re going to have regular set hours. They’re going to have a routine that they’re going to follow. It’s the best thing they can do because they’re going to not want to waste one moment of one day.

For those of you who have lost someone and you feel like there’s no reason to get out, you need to do the opposite. You need to face life. You need to go out and get new friends, new networks. You don’t want to waste a moment, not a minute of any day that God has given to us because this is the day the Lord has made. Let’s rejoice and be glad in it.

If we’re going to move past this crisis, if we’re going to move past the danger and if we’re going cease this critical moment, we need to know. We need to know that our true identity is found in God, that you are a son or a daughter of God. He’s claimed you to be His very own. You are so valuable and God considers you so important, He was willing to die for you. And every single day when you open up your eyes, it’s a gift from God and we want to treat it that way. Amen.