Beloved: Who Am I? Series

INTRODUCTION:

Theorist Erik Erikson coined the term "identity crisis" and believed that it was one of the most important conflicts people face in development. According to Erikson, an identity crisis is a time of intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of looking at oneself. Those with a status of having a scattered identity tend to feel out of place in the world and don't pursue a sense of true identity. (https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermon-illustrations/79842/identity-crisis-by-derrick-tuper)

Erikson placed this conflict in the adolescent years of life. Pastoral theologian Donald Capps takes Erikson’s theories of human development and looks at them through a biblical lens. In his book “The Decades of Life” he breaks human life down into decades corresponding to the seventy or eighty years that the Bible speaks of in the Psalms.

Capps places the struggle for identity in the fifth decade of life, the forties. He says the conflict in the middle of life is the same as in the teenage years, the conflict between “identity” and “identity confusion.” The question being asked is, “Who am I?” To come out of these crises successfully is to have the virtue of fidelity. Fidelity is “the quality or state of being faithful.” It is loyalty to who one truly is. To be true to who God has created one to be.

Capps notes that most autobiographies are written in the fifth decade of life. It is when people are at a crossroads of life where they’ve come too far to go back and must live forward, and so autobiographies are meditations on what has brought one to the place where they are and a look ahead to what is coming and what one will be in the future. The first autobiography in the history of Western literature was written by Augustine, his “Confessions.” He writes the famous line, “[Lord] Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” In his struggle to find himself, he found that the Lord has called us into a relationship where we are called “beloved” and outside of that realization we will continue to struggle for a lifetime.

This morning, I want to begin discussing our identity in Christ. “Beloved: Who Am I?”

OPENING:

We live our lives on a short timeline. Life is a vapor (James 4:14). Moses said, “we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:9-10 KJV). Against the backdrop of the timelessness of God and the ancientness of creation, our short journey in the world is a drop in the ocean.

From the moment we can talk we are asking questions. We ask what things are and why things work the way they do. Eventually, often around puberty, we start asking who we are and then humorously repeat this question during mid-life. We want to know who we are, and who we are supposed to be.

Mark Twain quipped that the two most important days in a person's life are the day they are born and the day they find out why.

Our search for meaning drives us to all kinds of things and in our short timeline of life the search for who we are can cause us to have extreme highs and lows along the way.

When the opinions of others define us, we can live in the extremes of life. We must develop a core sense of identity to mature into what God has designed for us to be.

Genesis 1:26 tells us that we are made in the image of God. There has been much that has been written about this idea. David asks in Psalm 8, “What is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him?” There have been three basic answers that have been given through the years about what it means to be the image of God:

• The image as a substantial likeness to God

• The image as a function in relation to creation

• The image as relational to other human beings

Is humanity like God because of the substance of their being? Their moral sense that is different from the animals? Yes. Does humanity have an innate sense that God exists? Yes. Does humanity have an intellectual and creative mind like the Creator? Yes.

Is there a functional aspect to the image of God? Does humanity have a special function in their stewardship of creation? Yes (Genesis 1:26). The image of God is reflected in humanity’s function. ANE kings would place images in the far-reaching realms of their kingdoms. Genesis portrays God as doing the same. Humanity is here to represent God.