ephesians 1 – ptr. vetty gutierrez – 10am morning service
TRANSCRIPT
EPHESIANSMarch to June Series
I AM ___
WHO DO YOU THINK
YOU ARE?
What is your IDENTITY?
It’s the one thing that changes everything,
because when you know who you are, then you
know what to do. If you don’t know who you are,
then you don’t know what to do.
How do you see YOURSELF?
How does your IDENTITY alter
and affect your DESTINY?
WHO DOES GOD SAY
YOU ARE?
GENESIS 1:26-28
26 Then God said, “Let us makemankind in our image, in ourlikeness, so that they mayrule over the fish in the sea and thebirds in the sky, over the livestockand all the wild animals, and overall the creatures that move alongthe ground.”
GENESIS 1:26-28
27 So God created mankind inHis own image, in the imageof God He created them;male and female He createdthem.
GENESIS 1:26-2828 God blessed them and said tothem, “Be fruitful and increasein number; fill the earth andsubdue it. Rule over the fish inthe sea and the birds in the skyand over every living creaturethat moves on the ground.”
GENESIS 5:1
1 This is the writtenaccount of Adam’s familyline. When God createdmankind, He made themin the likeness of God.
Who are you? God says, “I’ve made you in
my image and likeness.”
That’s your identity. There’s the identity
statement.
FOUR THINGS THAT
GOD SAYS WHO YOU ARE:
1YOU ARE A REVELATION
RECEIVER.
That God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit have been
communicating with one another forever, and they make us in their image and likeness,
and they make us as revelation receivers. They speak to us - the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do.
God speaks to us.
You don’t have to determine or decide what your identity is
because God has already chosen to
reveal it.
You must be in the Word of God and have the Word of God in you, because you
were created as a revelation receiver. God wants to speak to you through His Word. He
wants to hear from you through prayer.
2YOU ARE HUMBLY
HONORED.
Humility, the root of which literally means to know your place, is
to know that your place is under God, but above lower creation.
3YOU ARE MADE TO
MIRROR.
WE WERE MADE TO MIRROR.
aGod is loving, and when we love, we reflect His love to
others.
bGod is truthful. When we tell the truth, we
reflect His truthfulness to others.
cGod is forgiving. When
we forgive others, we’re reflecting His grace and
His mercy to others.
dGod is generous, andwhen we’re generous,we’re reflecting Hisgenerosity to others.
So many of our identity decisions are about, “How will this make me look?”
That’s the wrong question.
“How could they see God?” That’s the right
question.
That is why Jesus is called the image of the INVISIBLE GOD.
Everything that could be seen about God’s character is made visible on the earth
through the life, death, burial, resurrection of Jesus. He is the image of the invisible God. If we’ve seen Him, we’ve seen the Father.
3YOU ARE BLESSED
TO BE
A BLESSING.
Adam and Eve had not done anything.
He just blessed them.They didn’t earn their
blessing.
aOur God is a God who begins with
blessing.
bOur God is a God
who likes to bless His people.
cOur God is a God who is filled with grace, and filled with love, and filled with mercy, and in an
infinitely perfect way, far superior to mine, He’s a Father who adoresHis kids and would do anything
for them.
IN FCC, WE ARE BLESSED TO BLESS.
aWhatever God
teaches you is so you might teach others.
bWhatever God gives you is that you might
give to others.
cWhatever God does for you is so that you could learn to do that
for others.
TWO THINGS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OUR IDENTITY:
1YOUR IDENTITY IS
RECEIVED,
IT IS NOT ACHIEVED.
Adam and Eve didn’t do anything to obtain this identity.God made them, God spoke to them, God defined them, and God blessed them. It’s all God.
Your identity is not achieved, it’s received. It’s not something you do, it’s something God does. It’s not what you earn, it’s what He
gives.
2YOU ARE NOT MORE
VALUABLE THAN ANYONE ELSE AND YOU ARE NOT LESS VALUABLE THAN
ANYONE ELSE, AS WELL.
All people equally bear the image and likeness of
God.
One of the great lies is that some people are more valuable than others.
Your net worth has nothing to do
with your self-worth.
WHO DOES SATAN SAY YOU
ARE?
Genesis 3 Satan tells us who he
thinks God is and who he thinks
we are.
An angel who was, according to the Bible, dissatisfied with their identity. Their identity
was created and under God to serve God.
Angels are created as messengers and ministers of God, and the Bible says that
Satan was an angel who became proud in his heart. He
didn’t want to be under God, he wanted to be alongside of God or over God. He didn’t want to
obey God, he wanted to do what he wanted to do.
The Bible says repeatedly that he’s a liar, he’s a deceiver,
and he’s a killer.
GENESIS 3:1
1 Now the serpent was morecrafty than any of the wildanimals the LORD God hadmade. He said to thewoman, “Did God reallysay, ‘You must not eat fromany tree in the garden’?”
But the first thing he does is he questions the
authority of the Word of God.
Satan is always going to question the clarity and
the authority of the Word of God.
GENESIS 3:5
5 “For God knows thatwhen you eat of it youreyes will be opened, andyou will be …”
What?“LIKE GOD”
Satan erodes their confidence in the Word of God and
lies to them.
IDENTITY IDOLATRY
EZEKIEL 14:44 Therefore speak to them and tellthem, ‘This is what theSovereign LORD says: When any ofthe Israelites set up idols in theirhearts and put a wicked stumblingblock before their faces and then goto a prophet, I the LORD will answerthem myself in keeping with theirgreat idolatry.
1Idolatry is when we take
a good thing and we make it a God thing, which is a bad thing.
2Idolatry is when we take a created thing and we put it in the
Creator’s place.
3Idolatry is when we live for something or someone other than
Jesus.
4Idolatry is when our identity, our
hope, our joy, who we want to be, and who we want others to
perceive us to be is something achieved, by us or others, and not
received from Him.
5The Bible says it has two
categories: worshippers and
idolaters.
ROMANS 1:25
25 They exchanged thetruth about God for alie, and worshiped andserved createdthings rather than theCreator—who is foreverpraised. Amen.
DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF
I. D. O. L. S.
Idols make promises they never
keep. Lies never bring life, they only
bring death.
ITEMS
So, you’re your own idol. All you care
about is what you think about yourself.
DUTIES
Again, idols can be good things in a God place, which is a bad thing.
If your identity is in your duty, you try to find your
thing.
WHO YOU ARE DETERMINES WHAT
YOU DO.
OTHERS
“If you will idolize, you will demonize.”
PROVERBS 29:25
25 Fear of man willprove to be a snare,but whoever trusts inthe LORD is kept safe.
LONGINGS
SUFFERINGS
UNDERSTANDING YOUR IDENTITY
CRISIS
Most of us don’t even know we have an identity idolatry
until we have a crisis.
1You live in fear that
your identity idolatry will fail you or be taken
from you.
2Your identity idolatry
crumbles under the weight of being in God’s place in
your life.
3When your identity idolatry begins to
crumble, you become panicked.
JESUS AND HIS PEOPLE
That’s all that ultimately matters in the end, and the only
thing that will be together forever is
Jesus and His people.