Identity Crisis

“Identity Crisis” Luke.9.18-20

“Who do people say that I am?”

It was George Harrison who said there are 3 pivotal questions we need to ask ourselves. "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" and "Where am I going?"

Yet to be honest how many of us go through life never asking ourselves these 3 fundamental questions to life. We tend to talk about everything else under the Sun but not talk about these pivotol questions. It was another band member out of the Beatles: John Lennon who said, “People generally talk about rubbish because they don’t want to face reality?”

I recently heard of a man who was rushed into hospital to face heart surgery, it was touch and go whether he survived. I overheard his first conversation after him coming out of intensive care to a visitor. He asks his friend, “Did you tape fools and horses for me?” That’s a UK sitcom for my American friends. He was facing eternity in the face and yet these were the first words out of his lips... Utter rubbish

Hopefully we will not be talking about rubbish tonight but real life and death issues. People often say to me, “Christians are just escapists, who want to get away from the real world.” I always retort back “A Christian is about being a realist facing up to very important issues of Identity, love, life, death and eternity.”

So rather than being the preverbal ostrich with its head in the sand my head is out of the sand and looking at life and questioning it! To help us do that we are going to be looking to a life of a person who claimed to have the answers to these questions and more the historical figure Jesus Christ.

Luke.9:18-20

Here we have Jesus asking the question to the disciples “Who do the crowds say that I am?” Jesus is not suffering here from a case of amnesia and trying to find out who he is because there was never no doubt in his mind.

Who he was! Where he had come from! And where he was going!

But he is asking his disciples whether the crowds are waking up to his identity, because that is the key to life when we wake up to his IDENTITY we can begin to find our own.

"Who am I?"

If evolution is true then the question of our identity takes a whole new paradigm shift, life becomes meaningless you are just a morass of elements found in the dust of the ground. (17 trace elements in fact) That you’re long lost ancestor was probably a piece of rock floating about in the galaxy. (Meet the ancestor show a rock ) that your whole life is just an accident. Have you ever been told from a parent your birth was an accident? It hurts.

A whole world philosophy comes out of evolution, everything is expendable because that’s just the survival of the fittest. So part of the fall out of this philosophy is a low view of human life. As a result people have an “Identity Crisis” That’s adds to the fact that life is expendable that’s why every 3 seconds children die as a result of poverty.

Identity crisis effects all strata of life:

Even in the west life has become meaningless to many. We have so much we are so affluent we have never had it so good yet why is it that so many people are just so unhappy? Even amongst the rich and famous Nicole Kidman, can earn over 15 million dollars per film and yet here is a women who recently said “I don’t know who I am, or what I am, or where I’m headed.”

"Who am I?" continued: Many people feel like their just statistics, who nobody cares for look upon our streets look within the homes of many families we see young people crying out for an identity remember Iron Mike Tyson? He is one such person. After his final defeat against journeyman Kevin McBride, he was quoted to say “Who am I? What am I? I don’t even know. I’m just a dumb child whose been abused and robbed by lawyers, I’m Just a fool who thinks he’s someone.”

Take your name away, who would you be? The Boy with no name, the girl with no name. We are more than a name, we are more than a number. That’s closer to the truth in the west with the call of identity cards. Governments tell us they care for us, but to many politicans they only care for themselves, at the age of 16 we are all given a number in the UK its called a national insurance number mine is NH 50 43 20 D what’s yours?