Who Do You Say That I Am?

Who Do You Say That I AM?

12 Sep 2021

Richardson

Who do you say that I am?

......

Oh to be a fly on the wall. For a while I ran a number of customer service groups with one of them happen to be a team in Mexico. There was a bunch of extra work that needed to get cleaned up so I decided to pull in two of the ladies from Mexico to go up with me and dig in. So, the three of us sat in this little room banging away on or keyboards. The two would all talk in English with me but when the two ladies talked to each other, they spoke in Spanish.

Eventually their conversation turned to gossip and they began talking (all in Spanish) about one of their coworkers back in Mexico. I just sat quiet. Thinking I didn't understand, the talk got pretty explicit about the other lady’s escapades. The one term they were using during their descriptions was “chinky winky”. After they talked for a while the conversation dropped off again.

Wanting to see their reactions, without obviously looking up I just flatly said “comprende todo. Excepción, ¿qué es "chinky winky"? (meaning “I understood everything except what is chinky winky”?)

I had never seen darker completions turn so red as the both looked over at me wide eyed and said “NO TRANSLATION!” Never did get a good translation of the term but hope I didn’t just cuss in Church.

I had been waiting to see if they were going to talk about me, but that was an opportunity too good to pass up.

It’s human nature for us to talk about others. We all point out the highs and lows of each other’s individual personality quirks.

Obviously this has happened since the creation of man. Even Christ talked about the way we discuss each other when he talked about how we love to point out the mote in another’s eye.

I was reading an article about gossip and they said that a lot of what we talk about when we gossip about others really speaks more about the kind of person we are then what is says about the person we are talking about. They used an analogy of a dog looking in the mirror, barking and moving around because they see another dog, not realizing it’s a reflection. So when we spend all that time barking about others, we’re judging ourselves. (1)

I know. It sounds just like a line from the Brady Bunch parody move were the Mike Brady character says: “Cindy, you know by tattling on your friends, you're really just tattling on yourself. By tattling on your friends, you're just telling them that you're a tattletale. Now is that the tale you want to tell?”

But really though… the article I read pointed out that this goes back to Freud with the inner process called Projection. That’s when we unconsciously push one of our traits onto someone else and then judge them by it.(3)

So that gave me a whole new perspective to think about in Mark 8 it says:

27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?” 28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”

What answer do you think he was looking for?

I think what he was really asking was “If they cannot picture me, whom they call the Messiah, as the Son of God, how could they ever picture themselves as children of God either?”

Man had only been told since the Garden of Eden that we were children of God, but how many of us act like it? Is it because we can’t picture ourselves in that manner? And if we can’t picture ourselves that way, then really, how on earth could we ever picture the Jesus as the Son of God?

The other thing it told Jesus was if people were willing to believe in the fulfilment of prophesy when it happens right before their eyes.

The people were well aware of the scriptures and what was said of the coming messiah There are hundreds of prophesies of the coming Christ. For instance, here a just a few of the prophecies:

2 Samual 7

2 When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

Isaiah 11

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit