Transcript:
Cody H. –
Some of you know that I’ve been pursuing, for a few years, a Biblical counseling certification through the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors.
We pray for Michiana Biblical Counseling Center, right over here in Osceola, regularly. They’re part of that association.
Lately, in this process, I’ve been seeing more and more how important it is to base my identity in Christ, to find my identity in him. So many issues arise when I don’t do that. When I try to find value or identity or purpose in anything or anyone else other than Jesus. I think this is true for every believer.
So, I finished phase two and I’m looking at phase three now and it’s 50 hours of observed counseling. So, I’ve got my first counselee. We’re actually having our second meeting tonight. I’ve committed to him that I’ll do each homework assignment that I assign to him. I’ll do them, then we’ll review our work every week.
So, this week, one of the assignments was Ephesians 2. And we wanted to write down the identity statements found in that passage about believers. If we’re in Christ, who does it say we are? What does it say we receive? It’s a pretty remarkable passage.
This is really a good exercise to do every so often. There are lots of passages you could do this for. But as I was doing it, my heart was just busting with gratitude and thankfulness to God. It’s really amazing because these things are true. These are realities now about me, about you, if we’re in Jesus.
So, I wanted to encourage us here today with some of these things. Verse four starts out with what John Stott called, “…the two greatest syllables ever spoken in the English language.”
Does anybody want to guess what they are?
“But God!” – “But God, because of his great love.”
So that’s in verse four; verse five starts out:
“God made us alive with Christ, even as we were spiritually dead in our sins.”
So just I’m going to rattle through these, just think about how they start stacking up. There’s so many things here.
“He raised us up with Christ.”
“He seated us with Christ in the heavens.”
“In the coming ages he’s going to display the immeasurable riches of his grace through his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
“We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.”
Like the Titus verse today, and by the way, “God prepared these works for us ahead of time,” Paul says.
“Previously, before Christ, we were gentiles in the flesh.”
So, this used to be our identity in the past.
“At that time, we were without Christ. We were not citizens of Israel. We were not part of the covenant of promise. We were without hope. We were without God in the world.”
That was our identity.
“But now…” another two great words.
“But now we’ve been brought near by the blood of Christ.”
“Christ is our peace. He has torn down the dividing wall of hostility, separating us from God through his life and death on our behalf”
Paul wrote, “…he made of no effect, the law consisting of commands and regulations.”
So, what does this mean? Looking into that a little further, it simply means the law has no power over us anymore.
In God’s eyes, because we’re in Jesus, it’s as though we kept the whole law. He kept the whole law.
“Through him we have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
And then, we hear some elements of living in Christian community. What does it mean as a believer, our identity is in Christ, to be living in Christian community?
“We’re no longer foreigners and strangers, we’re fellow citizens and we’re members of God’s household. With Jesus as our cornerstone, we’re being put together and growing into a holy temple in the Lord.”
So, we’re described as a holy temple.
And then at the very end, he says, along with other believers, “We are being built up together for God’s dwelling in the Spirit.
So, we’re being built as a community of believers into a dwelling place, into a holy temple for God.
Just reading and meditating on these things, letting these things sink in, these realities sink in—they’re very powerful. For me, it did two things:
- It produced a lot of gratitude in my heart.
- And it really propelled me to action, it propelled me to want to serve the Lord faithfully.
But these things do me no good if I’m not rehearsing them, if I’m not reminding myself of them, if I’m not preaching them to myself regularly.
So, one of the most helpful ways I’ve found to preach the gospel to myself regularly is to try to find something I do every day anyway, piggyback off that thing, and while I’m doing that thing, I can preach these truths to myself. Bring these truths to mind.
Erica has talked in the past about Milton Vincent’s book, A Gospel Primer. That’s a really solid book and a great set of reminders as to why we need to preach the gospel to ourselves every day.
So, I hope this is encouraging to you today as we go about our work. It’s been encouraging and challenging to me.