Circumstantial Identity
Jeremy MacDonald · Tidal Church Moncton · February 18, 2024 · Who Am I? series
Jeremy MacDonald looks at Ephesians 4:17-32 and shows that following Jesus starts with receiving a new nature from His Spirit, not a list of dos and don'ts. Right actions grow from belonging to Him, and He gives us our identity.
More from Jeremy MacDonald · The Who Am I? series
Topics: Holy Spirit, Identity, Discipleship
Transcript
[1:08] How do you convince a 16-year-old guy to follow Jesus? It's a real question. If you've ever been a 16-year-old guy, you know that's a really intense, significant question. If a 16-year-old guy's ever lived in your house, you would realize that's a very big question to try to wrestle through. And if you are a 16-year-old guy and you're in the room, we're glad you're here, but this is a legitimately challenging question to wrestle with. So if we've never met, if you don't know a bit of my story, I grew up in church, and so I remember being a 16-year-old guy trying to decide if I was going to follow Jesus. But then I went off to university. I actually got a degree in trying to answer this question. I have a bachelor's degree in ministry to the next generations focused on adolescent faith formation, and so in lots of ways, my whole life and job has been wrestling through this really, really critical, simple question, but challenging to answer, and that is: how do you convince a 16-year-old guy to follow Jesus?
[2:14] And the reason why I think it's a really interesting question, even for us to wrestle with, no matter where you're at in your journey and who you are, if you know anybody that's 16 years old, what it does is it forces you to wrestle with, what do we really believe and think about this particular faith? We gather in a place like this, and you're here for whatever reason you're here for. Some of you, it's like, "Yeah, I'm here because this God is a God that I want to serve and follow, and so this is a powerful opportunity for me to participate." And so you're in, and wrestling with this question reminds you of maybe the core parts of what we actually believe as Christians, as Jesus people. But if you're here just because of the cute girl that invited you, or you're here because somebody forces you to come, answering this question is revealing to what you believe about what this whole thing is, and what this is actually and really and truly about.
[3:08] And I don't know about you, but for me, part of answering this question, oftentimes if we wrestle with it, we end up coming up with, usually or oftentimes, and maybe this has been your experience, a bit of almost like a chart. I don't think this is the right way to do it in any stretch, and yet this is kind of how the experience usually goes in dealing with this particular question. It looks like this. Imagine again, talking to a 16-year-old guy, but we end up communicating this kind of thing, a list of dos and a list of don'ts. Right? This is almost like the faith is like it boils down to this experience. And if you're a 16-year-old guy and this has been what you've heard, stick around, because hopefully, we're going to expand the horizon a bit. But this is the experience, and this is oftentimes what the... And maybe if this is what you've heard about faith, maybe this will be hopefully a little bit interesting or helpful to add some extra elements to the conversation. But maybe this is what you've heard, is that don't have sex, don't do drugs, and don't listen to rock and roll.
[4:03] Which is an interesting list, but has been a part of some people's faith trajectories. Which, say what you will about rock and roll, but I think you've got to engage a bit. And sometimes you get prescriptions, and if you're married, you should be having a lot of... But that's another message. We're not going to go there today. But let's just be clear, if you're married. But the point is that this is this list that we give out almost to guys, which feels challenging, or for students or for people generally. And then we tell them there's a list of dos. You go to church, you read your Bible, you engage in prayer practices. And what we're trying to articulate is that there's something about the Christian faith that if we were wrestling with it, it kind of comes out as trying to articulate some kind of maybe ethic.
[4:53] That there's a sense that there's this all-encompassing thing, but it's more than just an ethic, right? There's almost a sense that to be a Christian, to follow after Jesus, that it should become or should be articulated almost perhaps as a way of being. And then even that doesn't fully encompass it. There should be more to the story and more to the conversation, because what we're trying to invite people into when we talk about Jesus is we're talking about this allegiance to Him, to align ourselves towards Him. Or maybe put it even differently, it's this idea to follow Him and to follow His way. And so with that in mind, when we approach these kinds of teaching series, when we ask this big, giant question, this question that for the last few weeks we've been dealing with, who am I?
[5:45] The idea is that if we could take that question, we could recognize that from a faith perspective, this way of Jesus actually speaks to all different parts of our life. That it's not this box that we can put Jesus in, but instead that His way over years and even decades reveals things about us and about our motivations and who we are, and expands our thinking, and all of a sudden, we could realize that to follow Jesus will have impacts on our purpose and our identity. That Jesus will challenge meaning and conviction in our lives. That as we follow Him, we'll discover joy and pleasure in perhaps ways that we wouldn't have thought before. That it'll come out in hope and optimism and love and this idea of anti-loneliness as loneliness increases and people talk about it publicly.
[6:37] And as a public health emergency, there's this sense that at the core of the Christian faith is an anti-loneliness and a call to community, and there's confidence and strength in all of this. That the way of Jesus at one point, and then this is not all that the story is about, but there's a part of it that really represents, and we should be clear as Christians when we're communicating the gospel, that there's a sense that it's about human flourishing. That the way we were designed and created on purpose, for a purpose, if we lean into that, we could experience something that is transformative and is good and is even better than what people experience apart from God. Or maybe put this way, and this is again, not perfect, but a way to articulate this maybe is that Jesus makes your life better.
[7:34] It's not that He makes your life richer or healthier, although there's an element that maybe some of that could be true. And better doesn't mean everything that you think better always means. And yet, when you talk to the saints that have followed Christ for years or decades, they would articulate this goodness about His ways, that their life is good and better than it would be otherwise. And if you're seeking or you're skeptical or you're unsure, I just want to make sure you realize we have this sense that the way of Jesus is actually really good. And not just that, but that Jesus actually makes you better at life. That the way you interact with people and pursue your goals and your dreams, everything changes in light of following after Him.
[8:24] And it's with that in mind, I want to bring you to a passage of Scripture in the New Testament where the early church was wrestling through some of the specifics of what it means to follow this Jesus, what it means to be able to actually have this idea of His way being the way for our life. What does that look like? And the author writing to the church in Ephesus, Paul, makes a case and articulates a plan that to this day we can live into, but it perhaps is sometimes surprising or changes a bit of our perspective of Jesus and how to pursue a faith in Him. So let's go to Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17, and it says this: "With the Lord's authority, I say this," Paul writing to the church and emphasizing the authority as he writes that this is something worth following. He says, "Live no longer as the Gentiles do, for they," the Gentiles, "are hopelessly confused."
[9:26] Now, this is a little bit confusing because the group that he's writing to holds many, many Gentiles themselves. And so when he's writing to this group, he's writing to a group that would technically affirm, "Hey, I'm a part of that community." And if you didn't realize, Gentile is simply referring to this distinction of it being a group that aren't Jews. So the Jesus movement started with Jesus being a Jew amongst the people of God, the Israelites, and then the message spreads to the Gentiles, those that aren't historically, and from a nationality standpoint, the Israelites, the Jews. And so Paul says there's this way of being apart from God represented in his word and his call to being the Gentiles that everybody in his audience would say, "There's a sense I can understand that, but nationality-wise, I'm still represented in this category of Gentiles." And what he's trying to articulate, one of the commentators writes, is that there's something happening here that their new unified identity overrides their ethnic distinctiveness.
[10:29] There's this sense in this passage that he's calling them to something not about ethnicity, but about identity. And so we go back to the passage with that in mind, and it says, "The Lord's authority I say this: 'Live no longer as the Gentiles do,'" which is this call, "Hey, you shouldn't live that way. You should live differently." Some people wrestle with how this is written because, to be honest, there's also a sense that it's not necessarily an imperative, calling you to something like this, but instead a reminder that this is how we are already meant to be. "Live no longer as the Gentiles do." Well, how do the Gentiles live? He's going to explain that. "But they are hopelessly confused." And he explains kind of what that means, and Paul's setting up this argument of two different ways of being, and so he articulates it this way.
[11:20] He says, "For the Gentiles, their minds are full of darkness. They wander far from the life that God gives because they have closed their minds and hardened their hearts against Him." There's this sense that the darkness and the life, he's creating an argument and trying to articulate that the way the Gentiles live, the way that life is apart from God, actually has darkness to it. And not just metaphorically, but actually really importantly, practically. And that the life that he's inviting people into in following after Jesus actually has life and goodness to it. That this way of being is dramatically different and categorically separate from the way of the world. And so as he's articulating it, he's trying to set up and help people understand the differences between these two places. He goes on and he says this.
[12:10] He says, "They," the Gentiles, "have no sense of shame. They live for lustful pleasure and eagerly practice every kind of impurity." Which is kind of where we get this sense of our chart, right? We get this idea of trying to create distinctiveness. And so when we go to the dos and the don'ts, we're trying to kind of cast a vision for an ethic that separates ourselves from the way of the world. And again, roughly, again, this is not correct. But the idea behind it is trying to put words to it. But the issue, of course, is that by starting at just the behaviors, we miss the heart of what Paul's trying to articulate. He's trying to explain that this other way of being, it's not about just the specific actions, but there's actually darkness in the midst. It doesn't lead to flourishing.
[13:05] There's brokenness and heartache. That as you express yourself in a way that is distinct and different and apart from the way of God, that you experience hurt and heartache in ways that God is desperate for you to turn away from. That He wants you to experience flourishing. He wants you to move from that life. And so Paul, making the case for these Christians to see in this light and in this way. He says, "Since you have heard about Jesus and have learned the truth that comes from Him, throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception."
[13:50] You see, for Paul, this wasn't about a list of dos and don'ts. It was about at our core, who we are, and what that represents, and what that leads us to. Or put another way, and maybe more helpfully, one of the commentators says, "We see that this former way of life is not simply a lifestyle, but it was an expression of a former self." That for Paul, the idea of life apart from Christ is a life that's, again, not just about the sum of the parts, but about at the core of who you are and what you think about yourself and how you think about the world, different than what God wants to invite us into. And so as he's separating these things out and he's trying to articulate is that as Christians, there's a way forward, and then for anyone that would look on the group of Christians and be skeptical, and again, here you're wondering what this Jesus thing is all about.
[14:47] You look, hopefully, counting the cost of what it might mean to follow this Jesus, and look at the ideas and the invitation that we find from Scripture and decide, does this actually hold true? Is this worth it? Is this worth what I'm being invited into? And so Paul would say, if you're on the outside looking in, this is what you get invited into. This is what you get to do. This is what you get to experience. And he explains it in Ephesians 4:23. He says this. Sorry, let's go to the next slide. "Instead," Paul writes, "let the Spirit renew your thoughts and your attitudes."
[15:34] You see, Paul doesn't start with a list of dos and don'ts. He starts with something much deeper and at the core of who we are. He says that the way of Jesus and following after the Spirit actually changes your own internal being. When you close your eyes at night and it's just you and your head, the messages that you hear and the things that go on around and cycle around, that isn't static. That can actually be changed. That when you're left all by yourself wrestling with who you are and what you're called to do and what is good in life and what should tomorrow bring, that your thoughts and your attitudes are actually able to be changed and renewed. And hopefully, this is good news for anybody that's ever wrestled with or been frustrated by their own experience and their own expression and their own pressures that they put on themselves to recognize that it doesn't have to be that way. It can actually be different, that you can experience something new, and that there might be somebody good and perfect that's willing to renew your thoughts and attitudes into something much better.
[16:44] And if you've ever wrestled with your internal monologue and your internal thoughts, you would know that if only you can find healthy goodness in the midst of that, that changes everything. That's worth anything. As you hear in our culture today, this conversation about mental health and the challenges around loneliness, it's a conversation about people's, the things that are going on internally. And I'm not saying that this transforms and changes every bit of our culture's wrestle with their mental health. There's lots of things at play, and there's lots of reasons why this is challenging. And yet, there's this invitation from Scripture that the Spirit of God might be willing to come into your world and transform your own internal monologue. But more than that, and much deeper than that, Paul writes this. He says, "Put on your new nature, created to be like God, truly righteous and holy."
[17:44] This invitation to become something new. Throughout the New Testament, we read different examples of this idea of being a new creation. We've talked about this over the last couple of weeks, that there's a transformation that can happen. There's a renewing of your mind that can happen. That the Christian life, that the Christian ideal is more than just a list of things to do and to not do. That the Christian life comes with freedom and a new nature. And the way that Paul's articulating this is it's not something that you're trying to achieve or you're trying to summon almost. The way that he's talking about this is that for anyone that chooses to follow Christ and align themselves with Him, this is something that you actually already are.
[18:31] Or Constantine Campbell writes it this way, a little bit more specifically. He says, "Believers are to be what they already are. They are to behave in a way that is consistent with who they are in Christ." And so what happens is sometimes we get this kind of mixed up and it looks a little bit different. Let me walk you through this idea. So there's a sense that when we choose to follow Jesus, there's this, what we would call salvation, this moment of turning away from our old selves and turning towards Him. And that's a critical piece to it for sure. But then what comes next is maybe surprising and maybe new information and maybe helpful when you think about our lists of dos and don'ts. And so what happens next is that you about our lists of dos and don'ts. And so what happens next is that you Experience and receive this new nature.
[19:18] That Christians, this is not something you work towards. God gives this to us. This is the good news. This is, you were dead in your own sin. You couldn't achieve anything. God's going to come in and offer this to you free of charge. Welcome to the new reality, your new nature. And when we experience that, that's the thing that allows us then to move towards the new and renewed thoughts. That's where the transformation comes from. It's the power of God's Spirit inside of us. This is the gospel. This is the story. And so if you've ever felt like maybe you haven't measured up, or maybe you haven't been able to live up to a particular ethic, perhaps you've just gotten the story flipped upside down.
[20:04] Because the story starts with the renewing of our minds that comes from being a Jesus follower. This is our inheritance. This is our story. This is what we, as Jesus followers, get to experience. And if you are searching, this is what you could experience even today, that by aligning yourselves to Jesus, everything changes. But it's not just about the renewal of our minds. It leads us somewhere specific, and so Paul will articulate this. He actually goes into some fairly specifics that I want to show you. Later in Ephesians 4:30, he says, "Do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way that you live."
[20:50] This idea that the ethic doesn't matter is a falsehood. The ethic matters deeply. It just matters differently than sometimes we've been told, or that we've been led to believe, or we've thought on our own. So Paul says, "Don't bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way that you live." Remember, He has identified you, you, you and you and you. He's identified you as His own. The God of the universe, the Spirit, has looked at you and said, "You are Mine." And because of that, you're guaranteed that you'll be saved on the day of redemption. But so much more than that. It changes how you view even your own life and your own motives and your own mind.
[21:42] A way to think of this, and again, from Andrew Lincoln as he writes about this passage in Ephesians, he says, "Through the reception of the Spirit associated with their baptism, believers are those who have been stamped with the holy character of their owner." And this is a guarantee. This is a guarantee of His final and full possession of them. Stamped with the holy character of their owner, labeled by the owner. Do you know who has the right to label things? You have things in your home. If you own them, you can label them. You get to decide how they operate and what they're used for. It would be odd for me to come to your house with my label maker and write labels all over your stuff and tell you how you should operate with them because I'm not the owner.
[22:37] I haven't bought them. You purchased those things for a price, and because of that, as the owner, you get to decide what you do with them. Jesus has purchased us with a price, a heavy price, His death on the cross for our sins, and that purchase of us means that He has stamped us as His own. He gets to label us. He gets to offer us identity. And if you are somebody that's considering this idea of following after Jesus, you should recognize one of the things that happens when you choose to follow Christ is that He gives you your label. You don't have to worry about it anymore. He will tell you who you are.
[23:25] And friends, He will tell you beautiful and wonderful things about who you are, because it's no longer about what you've done, and it's no longer about what you struggle with. It is now about this nature that His Spirit wants to give you every single day. And so when we come back to this chart and to this idea, we experience salvation, turning to Him. We then receive this new nature, which renews our thoughts. But even more than that, it leads to the idea that we can have actually righteous actions. This is really intentional, and where we get it mixed up is sometimes we think that the righteous actions are the things that we have to deal with first. That's not it. The story goes, the salvation of God is what gives us our new nature, and then we just have to live into it.
[24:18] Now let's be clear. When we test ourselves in community with one another, we're asking ourselves questions, or you're married to a Jesus follower, and you're like, "Yeah, their righteous actions are surely lacking these days. I can make a list." And I'm like, "Yeah, I get that. You can talk to my wife." We all have lists of things that aren't yet righteous actions. But the point of that is that it should kick us back to the top of this chart, this flow. We should recognize that where our actions don't line up with what God is calling us to, it's not a bug of who we are, and it's a myth that we've forgotten who we are. We have to go back to the source. We have to go back to the vine. We have to go back to this Jesus who has said, "You, on your own, can't do these things, but through My Spirit and power, you can."
[25:12] And so for us, the lists of the do's and the don'ts, they come, and they're specific. In fact, Paul actually explicitly states a long list of do's and don'ts that should make all of us a little bit embarrassed. And I just want to show you, and we're not going to go into all the specifics, but take a look at what he says. In this passage in Ephesians, thinking about your new nature, thinking about the stamp that God has put on you, what does it mean to be a Jesus follower and a Christian? It means that we do a number of things. He says this. He says, "Tell the truth. Use your hands for good, hard work. Give generously to others. Be kind to each other. Forgive one another just as God through Christ forgave you. Be thankful to God." There's a list of things to do, friends. There's a lot of specifics that Christians are meant to be about, and there's a lot of things we're meant to avoid, specific things.
[26:02] In fact, the list is much longer than the do list in this section. Don't tell lies. Don't steal. Don't be sexually immoral. Don't tell coarse jokes. Don't talk foolishly. He actually goes on. There's lots more. Let's take a look at a few others. Don't be filled with bitterness. Don't slander. Don't speak harsh words. Don't participate in evil behavior. But the point of that list is for us to wrestle with ourselves and in community, not so that we feel the shame, but so that we're reminded of the power of the Spirit that we have to go back to. And so you should, in community, check yourself and your heart. And in your small group, as you wrestle with this, this week, we've got small groups meeting, dozens of them, throughout this week, all throughout the city of Moncton.
[26:52] As you wrestle with this, it'll hopefully cause you, again, not to feel the weight of your guilt and shame, but it should prompt you to go back to the source of the new nature and be desperate enough to ask God to transform you even more. And this is the call. And if you're on the outside of faith and you look at a list like this and you're like, "Gosh, I wish all the Christians were like that," I'd say I agree with you. I wish I was more like that. I'm trying, and we're trying, and we apologize where we fall short of the glorious standard that Jesus has set for us. But hear this, that if you're exploring faith and your story's been marred by Christians that haven't lived these things out, maybe a part of that story is a reminder that no matter where you're at in your journey, God's ready to receive you, too, in the midst of your own mess and inadequacy and inability to measure up.
[27:57] If you've wrestled with who you are or who you want to become, you can receive freely an identity that you don't have to achieve. And so we go back to Ephesians 4, and we say, "Don't bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way you live. But remember," and this is what we remember, "that He has identified you as His own." And so for somebody here, it's this wrestle where you feel like you haven't been able to live up to what you've been preaching or talking about or wanting to experience and live, and this message for you is a call back to the source of all good things. It's a call back to your Father, your Heavenly Father.
[28:48] And through faith and trust in Him, you can be transformed. For somebody that is like, "I'm not sure what this whole Christian thing is, and maybe it's for me or maybe it's not. I'm still seeking it out," I would say, listen, He is a good God. Test Him in this. Lean into Him in this. Trust that in God's Spirit, you could experience all of the goodness that comes from following Him. It's not easy. And there's no health and wealth in all of this. There's a lot of heartache and difficulty. But in the midst of it all, there's a goodness that apart from Him is absent. And apart from Him, there's a darkness that over time only feels more and more hopeless.
[29:39] For some of you that have been wondering how to talk and how to communicate this gospel, there's people that you care deeply about. The hope is that you would see and experience that because of the new nature in Christ, He will transform you to become the person that will draw those others in towards Him, and that the message that you share with them isn't the message of the do's and the don'ts. That's the last part of the story. The message that you share, the message that you bring, is this incredible invitation that through salvation in Christ, that we can experience this new nature. That's what we want people to know, and that's what people are hungry for. And so as those of us that call Him our King... Would we be the kinds of people that would wrestle this to the ground in our own lives so that as an outpouring of that, we would be so excited for others to experience it?
[30:33] Would we be the kind of people that would deal with this so strongly in our own personal journeys that it would be this outflow of the God giving us this new nature that would be so compelling, we just want everybody to experience it? What do we want them to experience? This new nature, this renewed thought, this life that is full of His abundance. But it comes. It comes from Him and His power in our lives, not from our own ability to stir it up and to make it happen. So what we do here is we pray. We invite God's Spirit to take this passage and to instill it into our hearts, because although I know that these kinds of things can be convicting, I don't know exactly your story, but the Spirit of God does.
[31:19] And whatever He does in your heart in the coming moments, I trust that He would be doing a work that would draw you closer to Him in whatever that looks like for you. And if it leads you to a place where you want to pray, we make space at the end of our service with our prayer team. You can always come, you can always pray. You can always write on the cards that are in the seat pockets behind you. You can always write your contact info. We can reach out. I'd love to chat with you. But the point is that if you'd be willing to turn your eyes towards this Jesus and let Him transform you, that, my friends, is a life. That is a life worth living, and that will answer the question who you are, because it answers the question whose you are, and you belong to your Heavenly Father.
[32:08] Let me pray. Jesus, it is a thousand years of Christians wrestling with this and not living up to it, because we are broken, and we're fallen, and we mess it up. And so, God, I just want to start by apologizing, and for any one of us that have not lived out this large ethic and way of being that You've called us to, and we've missed it, and it's caused people around us to miss their opportunity to turn to You because of our own sinfulness, God, I ask for forgiveness from that. And God, I pray that Your Spirit would be so strong in me and so strong in us that it would be Your power at work in us that would transform us, and that people around us would recognize something's different, but that we would lead them not to a place of celebrating our own righteous actions, but that we could tell the story of Your Spirit at work in us, that Your new nature is what we carry, and that that's what we want them to experience. That's what we want everyone to know.
[33:14] And so, Father, give that to us and strengthen us for what You're calling us to. And God, for those that are still not quite sure what this means and what this looks like for them, God, would Your Spirit just be so real, even in this moment and in this service and in this time, that we would be just caused to move to a place where we'd be willing to acknowledge that You are our King, and that we would give up anything to follow You, that we could surrender everything to look to You, and that You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins, to cleanse us, and to make us new, and that that can happen for anyone this morning. And so, God, we just ask that in this service, in this time, wherever we're listening and watching, that You would work in our hearts and in our lives to Your perfect end. We pray this in Jesus' name.
[34:05] Amen.