A New Identity (May 4, 2008)
Romans 8 M6
Title: A New Identity
Text: Romans 8: 12-16
Big Idea: We can move from fear to freedom when we hear the Holy Spirit tell us that we are sons and daughters of God.
Sometimes people who are having troubling believing in God, will ask me why I believe…
One of the DVDs that plays in my mind from time to time goes back to the time when I first gave my to Christ life as a teenager.
I had worked really hard to get into the elite, popular “in” group (I kind of just barely made it in). I worked fairly hard to excel in sports.
Even I was in the “cool, in group” and a reasonably good athlete, I had so many insecurities as a teenager—I think more than most… (I wouldn’t want to relive my high school days).
After I had given my life to Christ, I began eating lunch and spending time with a kid who was a nerd, who had given his life to Christ. People at the high school began to ask me, “Why I wasn’t hanging around with the cool kids anymore?”
Being part of the in-group had been such a big source of the self-esteem I had, but I started hanging out less with the “cool” and popular group after giving my life to Christ.
But, then to my surprise, for the first time as an adolescent, I started feeling good about myself in healthy way… I had this new joy and inner peace…
One of the signs that a person truly has been reborn with the help of Jesus Christ into the family of God…one of the signs that a person really is a son or daughter of God… is that he or she increasingly hears in their heart the voice of the Spirit affirming who they.
Now that doesn’t mean that, like Joan of Arc, we constantly hear an almost inaudible voice in our mind, but we find that we are increasingly led by the Spirit of God (as Paul says in Romans 8:14). If we are sons and daughters, we are led by the Holy Spirit into the way of God, into the way of wholeness and peace.
One of the ways that the Spirit speaks to those who belong to God is that he tells us, deep in our spirit, that we are a beloved son or a daughter of God.
Paul writes in Romans 8:14-15:
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father."
Paul here says the person who is led by the Holy Spirit cries out in their inner being ABBA! FATHER! Abba is the most personal word a person can use for God. It might be equivalent to our saying PAPPA or DADDY. It conveys a deeply intimate connection.
In the text Paul says in verse 15, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you have to live in fear again, rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship (or daughter-ship).”
Paul here is describing the identity of 2 kinds of people—one of them is a slave and the other is a son or a daughter.
Paul’s Jewish hearers would have been intimately acquainted with the world of slavery. They would have remembered that their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt for more than 400 years. As inhabitants of the Roman Empire, all of Paul’s hearers whether Jew or Gentile, if they were not slaves themselves, would have been able to immediately grasp the plight of a slave, as it was a widespread practice in their day.
It may be a little bit hard for us to imagine because none of us, as far as I know, have been literal slaves.
But, imagine what it would be like to be a slave or a servant. If you were able to imagine that, perhaps you would have pictured yourself living in fear. A slave or an indentured servant tends to be fearful because he or she does not have real security in the household or in the organization in which he or she works. If the slave does not perform up to par, the slave is on his or her way out… Let go… fired. So a slave or servant lives in fear.
Second, a slave or a servant serves out of a sense of duty. They serve because they have to serve; it is their job. Their livelihood depends on it.
Third, a slave or a servant serves out of self-interest. He or she knows that one must work to go on living, so their motivation to work arises from self-interest—survival.
In contrast, the son or daughter, at least in a healthy family, does not live with fear. The son or daughter in a healthy family does not help with dishes or cut the grass because he or she is afraid. The son or daughter in a healthy family knows that he or she is secure in the love of a father and mother (or parent figure). So their life and work is not motivated out of duty, but out of gratitude. The son or the daughter who knows he or she is loved and does not serve merely out of self-interest, but out of love for his or her parents.
As I said, most of us have not been slaves or servants in a traditional sense. But many of us know what it is like to have the mindset of a slave. Some of us here came from families where our parents had unrealistic expectations of us. They wrote scripts for us that reflected their ambitions and their insecurities, rather than the ecology of our personhood.
A good friend of mine, whom I spoke with recently, grew up in a family where her dad won the Nobel prize in physics. This friend of mine grew up with a father whose expectations were so high she could never meet them. She went to one of the best universities in the world. She is beautiful, sophisticated, gifted and succeeding in her career, but I know that there is a part of her that feels like she is not doing enough great things to be a truly “worthy” human being, and, in her head, she knows she should not think like that, but there is a part of her spirit that lives in fear--the sense that she has to do more and to do better.
Maybe my friend’s case is a little more extreme, but most of us, to some degree or another, are tempted to consider ourselves worthy if and only if we have been successful in the areas of our life that matter to us, whether it’s school, at work, ministry, or some recreational pursuit, or some relationship, being liked. And when we don’t fulfill our goals, when we don’t hit the level of performance we desire (some of have no thermostat to know whether the mercury is high enough), we feel a sense of shame, and we try to just step things up. And some of us have this mindset of a slave.
Some of us feel worthy only if we have certain things. The right kinds of clothes, the right kinds of electronic gadgets, mountain bike, car, apartment…
In the novel the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby who grew up with very little money amasses enormous wealth, allegedly through bootlegging alcohol, buys a home in a fashionable, upper class neighborhood on Long Island and throws lavish great parties, in the hopes of winning the affection of Daisy, an upper class woman he has been in love with from the time he was a young man…. a woman whom he apparently couldn’t win back when he was younger because he didn’t have enough money.
Like Jay Gatsby some of feel worthy only if we have certain things…
We can also be a slave or a servant because our worthiness depends on what others think of us. We may think we are above all that, but most of us are affected by that more than we care to admit. It starts pretty early. As a child and as a teenager I genuinely loved sports, but as a teenager I noticed that while I continued to love sports, I was no longer just playing for the pure love of a particular game. I knew, from experience, that if I played basketball well, I would attract the attention of girls who were clearly out of my league. If I played well, the popular girls would want to associate with me… be around me. If I played poorly, on the same girls would kind of turn their heads and walk past me in the hallway as if I had some kind of open, contagious sore. A big part of my well-being as a teenager rose and fell on my performance in sports because a big part of my approval rose and fell on my performance in sports.
I wish I could say as an adult I am completely free of that. I grew up with very loving parents… and I have a very loving wife …and considerate friends... (and a dog who takes me as I am). I know I shouldn’t be this way, but there is still a part of me that feels like I will be worthy if I can do certain things well and if I can win the approval of certain people.
What Paul is saying here in Romans 8 is if we experience the deep work of the Holy Spirit work in our life, along with that we will experience a new sense of God’s love for us. We will hear the voice of the Spirit saying, “You are my beloved son and my beloved daughter,” and we will find ourselves becoming more and more free.
A slave or a servant’s security and sense of significance is based on what they do, what they have and what others think of them. A slave is motivated by fear. A son or a daughter’s security and significance is rooted in being deeply loved by God. A son or a daughter’s motivation to serve and to contribute is gratitude.
Are we a slave or son or a daughter, or part way in between? Often I find that I am part way in between.
How can we become people who live as the beloved son or daughter of God?
The first step, of course, would be to become a son or daughter of God… by giving our whole self to God… When you become a son or daughter of God… we become according to Romans 8:29 a brother or sister of God’s son Jesus Christ… deeply loved.
Once we are sons and daughters of God, the next step is to really believe( we are loved) we are loved by God….
Henri Nouwen in his book The Beloved says:
One of the voices that seeks to claim our hearts and souls is the voice of self rejection. It is the voice that says, "You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody--unless you can demonstrate the opposite"….
However, this voice of self rejection "is the greatest enemy to the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the 'Beloved'"….
It is our belovedness, not the rejection of ourselves, that is the core truth of who we are. And knowing that we are the Beloved--that we are God's Beloved--is what it means to be blessed….
God our Father has blessed us, and indeed blesses us even now, in this very way. As the voice of the Father pierced through the heavens and spoke into the core of Jesus' soul, "You are my son, whom I love. In you I am well pleased," the voice of the Father breaks through anything and everything that seeks to keep us listening to the voice of self rejection and claims us as his Beloved.
How can we know that we are beloved? How can we are loved by God like that?
Sometimes we know it in our head, but not in our heart.
Part of the way we can know we are beloved is through the affirmation of another.
The priest and writer Henri Nouwen was once at a Catholic retreat. At this retreat it was made known that only baptized Catholics could take communion, so Henri Nouwen began another line of people who could take communion and he blessed by simply telling them who they were… By the end or retreat his line was longer than the line for those taking communion. We can bless others by telling them who they are…
Do you have someone who tells you who you are and whose you are?
My close friend Chris Woodhull is a respected political leaders and poet who also leads Tribe One, a community organization that seeks to help and transform young African American men out of street gangs by employing them in for-profit enterprises.
“My friends, in working with these gang members,” Chris says, “people don’t change because they think, ‘I’m crap,’ they change because they get a glimpse of the beauty and power with them.”
If you can hold that beauty and power before them… they can change.
Do you have a friend who tells you who you are, and can hold a mirror before you showing your beauty and power as son or daughter of God?
The Holy Spirit in answer to prayer tells us how deeply we are loved…
We must pray for a new sense of God’s love in our heart…
How can we know that even in our brokenness—or rather especially in our brokenness we are loved by God?
Because when we were broken and sinning against God, God demonstrated his love for us in Christ by dying for us so we could experience homecoming.
On the night Jesus was betrayed he took bread and broke it and said this is my body given for you…
Remember you are loved… and respond out of gratitude by giving yourself to the God who loves you…
(The sermon can be heard on line at: www.tenth.ca/audio)
Title: A New Identity
Text: Romans 8: 12-16
Big Idea: We can move from fear to freedom when we hear the Holy Spirit tell us that we are sons and daughters of God.
Sometimes people who are having troubling believing in God, will ask me why I believe…
One of the DVDs that plays in my mind from time to time goes back to the time when I first gave my to Christ life as a teenager.
I had worked really hard to get into the elite, popular “in” group (I kind of just barely made it in). I worked fairly hard to excel in sports.
Even I was in the “cool, in group” and a reasonably good athlete, I had so many insecurities as a teenager—I think more than most… (I wouldn’t want to relive my high school days).
After I had given my life to Christ, I began eating lunch and spending time with a kid who was a nerd, who had given his life to Christ. People at the high school began to ask me, “Why I wasn’t hanging around with the cool kids anymore?”
Being part of the in-group had been such a big source of the self-esteem I had, but I started hanging out less with the “cool” and popular group after giving my life to Christ.
But, then to my surprise, for the first time as an adolescent, I started feeling good about myself in healthy way… I had this new joy and inner peace…
One of the signs that a person truly has been reborn with the help of Jesus Christ into the family of God…one of the signs that a person really is a son or daughter of God… is that he or she increasingly hears in their heart the voice of the Spirit affirming who they.
Now that doesn’t mean that, like Joan of Arc, we constantly hear an almost inaudible voice in our mind, but we find that we are increasingly led by the Spirit of God (as Paul says in Romans 8:14). If we are sons and daughters, we are led by the Holy Spirit into the way of God, into the way of wholeness and peace.
One of the ways that the Spirit speaks to those who belong to God is that he tells us, deep in our spirit, that we are a beloved son or a daughter of God.
Paul writes in Romans 8:14-15:
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father."
Paul here says the person who is led by the Holy Spirit cries out in their inner being ABBA! FATHER! Abba is the most personal word a person can use for God. It might be equivalent to our saying PAPPA or DADDY. It conveys a deeply intimate connection.
In the text Paul says in verse 15, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you have to live in fear again, rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship (or daughter-ship).”
Paul here is describing the identity of 2 kinds of people—one of them is a slave and the other is a son or a daughter.
Paul’s Jewish hearers would have been intimately acquainted with the world of slavery. They would have remembered that their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt for more than 400 years. As inhabitants of the Roman Empire, all of Paul’s hearers whether Jew or Gentile, if they were not slaves themselves, would have been able to immediately grasp the plight of a slave, as it was a widespread practice in their day.
It may be a little bit hard for us to imagine because none of us, as far as I know, have been literal slaves.
But, imagine what it would be like to be a slave or a servant. If you were able to imagine that, perhaps you would have pictured yourself living in fear. A slave or an indentured servant tends to be fearful because he or she does not have real security in the household or in the organization in which he or she works. If the slave does not perform up to par, the slave is on his or her way out… Let go… fired. So a slave or servant lives in fear.
Second, a slave or a servant serves out of a sense of duty. They serve because they have to serve; it is their job. Their livelihood depends on it.
Third, a slave or a servant serves out of self-interest. He or she knows that one must work to go on living, so their motivation to work arises from self-interest—survival.
In contrast, the son or daughter, at least in a healthy family, does not live with fear. The son or daughter in a healthy family does not help with dishes or cut the grass because he or she is afraid. The son or daughter in a healthy family knows that he or she is secure in the love of a father and mother (or parent figure). So their life and work is not motivated out of duty, but out of gratitude. The son or the daughter who knows he or she is loved and does not serve merely out of self-interest, but out of love for his or her parents.
As I said, most of us have not been slaves or servants in a traditional sense. But many of us know what it is like to have the mindset of a slave. Some of us here came from families where our parents had unrealistic expectations of us. They wrote scripts for us that reflected their ambitions and their insecurities, rather than the ecology of our personhood.
A good friend of mine, whom I spoke with recently, grew up in a family where her dad won the Nobel prize in physics. This friend of mine grew up with a father whose expectations were so high she could never meet them. She went to one of the best universities in the world. She is beautiful, sophisticated, gifted and succeeding in her career, but I know that there is a part of her that feels like she is not doing enough great things to be a truly “worthy” human being, and, in her head, she knows she should not think like that, but there is a part of her spirit that lives in fear--the sense that she has to do more and to do better.
Maybe my friend’s case is a little more extreme, but most of us, to some degree or another, are tempted to consider ourselves worthy if and only if we have been successful in the areas of our life that matter to us, whether it’s school, at work, ministry, or some recreational pursuit, or some relationship, being liked. And when we don’t fulfill our goals, when we don’t hit the level of performance we desire (some of have no thermostat to know whether the mercury is high enough), we feel a sense of shame, and we try to just step things up. And some of us have this mindset of a slave.
Some of us feel worthy only if we have certain things. The right kinds of clothes, the right kinds of electronic gadgets, mountain bike, car, apartment…
In the novel the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby who grew up with very little money amasses enormous wealth, allegedly through bootlegging alcohol, buys a home in a fashionable, upper class neighborhood on Long Island and throws lavish great parties, in the hopes of winning the affection of Daisy, an upper class woman he has been in love with from the time he was a young man…. a woman whom he apparently couldn’t win back when he was younger because he didn’t have enough money.
Like Jay Gatsby some of feel worthy only if we have certain things…
We can also be a slave or a servant because our worthiness depends on what others think of us. We may think we are above all that, but most of us are affected by that more than we care to admit. It starts pretty early. As a child and as a teenager I genuinely loved sports, but as a teenager I noticed that while I continued to love sports, I was no longer just playing for the pure love of a particular game. I knew, from experience, that if I played basketball well, I would attract the attention of girls who were clearly out of my league. If I played well, the popular girls would want to associate with me… be around me. If I played poorly, on the same girls would kind of turn their heads and walk past me in the hallway as if I had some kind of open, contagious sore. A big part of my well-being as a teenager rose and fell on my performance in sports because a big part of my approval rose and fell on my performance in sports.
I wish I could say as an adult I am completely free of that. I grew up with very loving parents… and I have a very loving wife …and considerate friends... (and a dog who takes me as I am). I know I shouldn’t be this way, but there is still a part of me that feels like I will be worthy if I can do certain things well and if I can win the approval of certain people.
What Paul is saying here in Romans 8 is if we experience the deep work of the Holy Spirit work in our life, along with that we will experience a new sense of God’s love for us. We will hear the voice of the Spirit saying, “You are my beloved son and my beloved daughter,” and we will find ourselves becoming more and more free.
A slave or a servant’s security and sense of significance is based on what they do, what they have and what others think of them. A slave is motivated by fear. A son or a daughter’s security and significance is rooted in being deeply loved by God. A son or a daughter’s motivation to serve and to contribute is gratitude.
Are we a slave or son or a daughter, or part way in between? Often I find that I am part way in between.
How can we become people who live as the beloved son or daughter of God?
The first step, of course, would be to become a son or daughter of God… by giving our whole self to God… When you become a son or daughter of God… we become according to Romans 8:29 a brother or sister of God’s son Jesus Christ… deeply loved.
Once we are sons and daughters of God, the next step is to really believe( we are loved) we are loved by God….
Henri Nouwen in his book The Beloved says:
One of the voices that seeks to claim our hearts and souls is the voice of self rejection. It is the voice that says, "You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody--unless you can demonstrate the opposite"….
However, this voice of self rejection "is the greatest enemy to the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the 'Beloved'"….
It is our belovedness, not the rejection of ourselves, that is the core truth of who we are. And knowing that we are the Beloved--that we are God's Beloved--is what it means to be blessed….
God our Father has blessed us, and indeed blesses us even now, in this very way. As the voice of the Father pierced through the heavens and spoke into the core of Jesus' soul, "You are my son, whom I love. In you I am well pleased," the voice of the Father breaks through anything and everything that seeks to keep us listening to the voice of self rejection and claims us as his Beloved.
How can we know that we are beloved? How can we are loved by God like that?
Sometimes we know it in our head, but not in our heart.
Part of the way we can know we are beloved is through the affirmation of another.
The priest and writer Henri Nouwen was once at a Catholic retreat. At this retreat it was made known that only baptized Catholics could take communion, so Henri Nouwen began another line of people who could take communion and he blessed by simply telling them who they were… By the end or retreat his line was longer than the line for those taking communion. We can bless others by telling them who they are…
Do you have someone who tells you who you are and whose you are?
My close friend Chris Woodhull is a respected political leaders and poet who also leads Tribe One, a community organization that seeks to help and transform young African American men out of street gangs by employing them in for-profit enterprises.
“My friends, in working with these gang members,” Chris says, “people don’t change because they think, ‘I’m crap,’ they change because they get a glimpse of the beauty and power with them.”
If you can hold that beauty and power before them… they can change.
Do you have a friend who tells you who you are, and can hold a mirror before you showing your beauty and power as son or daughter of God?
The Holy Spirit in answer to prayer tells us how deeply we are loved…
We must pray for a new sense of God’s love in our heart…
How can we know that even in our brokenness—or rather especially in our brokenness we are loved by God?
Because when we were broken and sinning against God, God demonstrated his love for us in Christ by dying for us so we could experience homecoming.
On the night Jesus was betrayed he took bread and broke it and said this is my body given for you…
Remember you are loved… and respond out of gratitude by giving yourself to the God who loves you…
(The sermon can be heard on line at: www.tenth.ca/audio)
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