Relating to Self

1 Corinthains 1:26-31

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to R UF at KSU Podcast. First Corinthians chapter 1, we're going to be looking at uh verses 26 through 31. Now, normally in large group, what we do is we'll take a book of the Bible and go through it over the course of the semester. But this semester we're doing something slightly different. We're doing a series on relationships. And we think that's a good thing to do because the Bible has a lot to say about relationships. Think about the greatest commandment of Jesus. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's all about a relationship with God and a relationship with other people. And the point is, we all live in human relationships. If you are living and breathing, you have a different relationship. Parents, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. So we want to think about how we can live that out as Christians, how we can live in our various relationships to the glory of God. So let's look together now at 1 Corinthians 1, uh chap 1 Corinthians chapter 1, starting in verse 26. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Alright, tonight we are talking about one of our most complicated relationships. It's a relationship that you think about maybe too much. You sometimes love this relationship. You sometimes hate it. At times you actually even forget that you're in this relationship. There is no way out of it. You can't break up with them or ghost them. Because, of course, I'm talking about your relationship with yourself. Tonight we're talking about how we relate to self. And, you know, this was really popular years ago. I think it still is. You all tell me, like personality tests, I know are a big thing. Anyone a big fan of personality tests? Alright, a couple of people, yeah, okay. A lot of people know. Alright. Uh so maybe you're like really into Myers Briggs, that's one, or Enneagram was really popular for a while. Maybe you're more like Harry Potter houses, you know. What does that say about you? Uh if you want to know about me, I'm an ISTJ, uh, one wing two, and I'm in Slytherin, okay? So you just learned a lot about me. Shocked that I'm in Slytherin? Come on, y'all, we're people too, okay? We deserve your dignity and respect. Uh but personality, our sense of self, right? It's a pretty big topic. There's a whole department of bookstores on self-help books, right? People are always talking about be yourself, trust yourself, know yourself. Uh, it's commonly in our language, in our minds and in our hearts. And look, we've got social media accounts that are dedicated to presenting ourselves to the outside world. But if we're honest, they're often carefully curated. You know, we put on our social media what we want people to think about us, and not exactly what is the reality of who we are. And look, this is something that people have been thinking about for centuries, uh, for millennia. Socrates famously said, know thyself. Aristotle famously said, knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom. Oscar Wilde famously said, be yourself. Everyone else is taken. All right, but even John Calvin, one of our famous reformed uh writers, said, nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. So even in our theology, understanding ourselves is something that we need to consider. But, you know, if we think about the messaging on like our self-understanding today, we're often told to love ourselves. And yet the reality is we often don't even know ourselves. So we don't really even know what to love. And if we're being honest, many times we don't love ourselves. We actually tend to hate ourselves. We look down on ourselves, we struggle with our sense of self. When we get to know ourselves, we actually don't like what we see. I have a friend who, I'm gonna be honest, was is a very dramatic person. But it's a very telling story. Uh he said when he was in high school, uh, he's like 15 or so, he came down the steps of his house. Uh, he was, you know, going out to catch the bus or something. He looked in the mirror and he was like so disgusted at what he saw. He found a marker and drew on the mirror, like a face, to cover it up because he hated the way he looked so much. He hated what it said about who he was. Maybe a little dramatic, but I think it speaks to something that we all struggle with. We often don't like being alone with ourselves. We would rather look at a phone, pretend we got a text, than to like feel like no one's talking to us or we have nothing to do. And we're often hardest on ourselves as well. You know, we often tell ourselves, you gotta do better, work harder, you need to wake up earlier, read your Bible more. I mean, how often to the question like, how are you? How are you doing, do you respond with actually self-criticism? Well, I need to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I need to manage my time better. I need to do this. That's often a response of how we're doing. Alright, so how are we supposed to relate to ourselves then? If that's the problem, what does the Bible have to say about this issue? Well, looking at this passage, there are three things I want us to notice here. The first up is going to be our search for self. The search for self. The next one is gonna be our struggle with self, and then the final one will be the solution for self. Okay? So let's look at the search for self. Paul, he's writing to this church in Corinth, and this church in Corinth, they had a very confused sense of self. Uh, they were all pretty much new Christians, uh, and like some of them were from different backgrounds. It tells us later on, like some of them were former slaves, some of them grew up Jewish, others did not, some were religious, others were not, different social and economic backgrounds. And when you put all those people together, even though it was a church, they were still trying to figure out what their identity is in Christ. What is the thing that really unites them? And instead of looking to Christ for that, they were often looking at the things that they personally were good at or talented in or gifted in. And so Paul starts out the section by saying, consider your calling, or we could put that, remember your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Paul, man, pretty brutal. He's like, remember, a lot of y'all aren't that smart. Like, ouch, Paul. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many of you were powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. So Paul is saying, look, remember your identity before you came to faith in Jesus. Remember what that's like. Remember who you were before Christ came in your life. And so when we're thinking about identity, when we're thinking about self and who we are apart from Christ, uh, we tend to like be able to figure that out two different ways. There's kind of two approaches to the search for self. So the first one would be the traditional way, which is how people for thousands of years kind of had a sense of self, which was usually uh it was assigned to you through your family, through your culture, through the society you were in. Uh, like if you grew up in a family, they were like, all right, your role in the family is this, and the point of your life is to live up to that standard. Great example of this is The Lion King. Great movie, right? Come on, y'all. Lion King, yeah? Thank you, David. All right. Lion King is great, thank you. Someone clapped. Uh and think about little Simba, right? He's been raised his whole life being told, one day this will all be yours. One day you're gonna be king. You gotta live up to that. And little Simba, he just can't wait to be king, right? He just can't wait. He's so excited. But the reality is, when he's faced with challenges like a king, he ends up running away. He doesn't want to embrace it at first. It's a scary thought to try to live up to the standard. And come on, living up to Mufasa, like that's an impossible standard, right? So much pressure. So, in the same way, people often would get a sense of identity by the family you grew up in, the community, the culture, and that would have a massive impact on your sense of self. Traditionally, you would seek to live up to that, you'd be less concerned with your personal uniqueness, your personal desires. That your sense of self would come from the approval of society, whether you liked it or not. Now, uh, for some of you, maybe that seems really foreign because American culture is not big on that, but I know many of you like you're the children of immigrants to this country, and often that sense of kind of traditional uh sense of self and identity is still there. You know, it's kind of a joke, but often it's like with immigrant parents, it's hey, you can be anything you want as long as it's a doctor. Right? Like the idea is there's a standard you have to live up to to bring honor to the family, you know, to make like the sacrifice of coming to the US worth it. And some of you feel that. Some of you feel the pressure of like, I cannot fail out of college. Like, this is core to what my family wants me to be. There's a high expectation. But hey, maybe even if your parents aren't immigrants to this country, maybe they just had high expectations. Maybe it was high spiritual expectations. Maybe you went to college and your parents were like, you're gonna go to church, you're gonna go to RUF, and I'm gonna check on you every day to make sure you're doing that. Like, do not fail us in this regard. And you feel this intense pressure to be a perfect Christian in college when you're still just trying to figure out how to do the basics. You know, for some of you, actually just coming to KSU was actually pretty devastating to your sense of identity. Because maybe you thought you were the type of student who would end up at UGA or Georgia Tech or somewhere else. But for whatever reason you didn't get in. And you're here, and now you're feeling like you let down your parents or your friends, or really just your sense of self. You let down some standard outside of you that you thought you had to achieve. The point is trying to live up to that kind of expectation can be crushing to you. And so we tend to go towards a modern way of looking for identity. The modern search for identity is to look inside of ourself and to look at our desires and our feelings and let that determine who we are, to let that determine ourselves. So instead of being given an identity from family or culture, you get to decide, and anything anyone else says about it doesn't matter. Right? My sense of self comes from what I feel to be true, regardless of whether society approves or not. Your desires, your choices, that's what really matters. A great example of this comes from the movie The Greatest Showman. Any greatest showman fans? Okay, a lot more people. Wow, alright. Lion King. Okay. Greatest Showman, right? There's that great uh song, right? This is me, where the woman singing says, like, look, when the sharpest words want to cut me down, I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out. I am brave, I am bruised, I am who I am meant to be, this is me. Look out, because here I come. And I'm marching on the beat of the drum. I'm not scared to be seen, I make no apologies, this is me. And you're like, yeah, you know, like it's like this kind of epic moment in the movie. Uh, but it's a perfect example of just this approach of like, I'm gonna determine who I am. And it doesn't matter if people don't like it. This is me, hear me roar. This may sound better to us. It may sound better than the traditional option, but when the weight of the world is actually solely on your shoulders, it's actually worse in so many ways. Because the reality is, if it is all up to you to determine what your identity and self is, then the reality is you have to be successful. You have to be pretty, you have to get the right grades, you have to stay in shape, you have to be funny, you have to be super spiritual, you have to perform and keep working, because if you can't prove that you're unique or special in any way, then who are you? Just average and forgettable. But that's the brutal reality of getting to determine your own identity apart from anything else. You know, and we know this is true because, like, right now you could post something on Instagram and get like 500 likes and feel amazing, and then tomorrow post something and only get 200 likes, and it's soul crushing to you. And you can laugh at that, but like I know for some of you actually that's the case. That our identity gets so caught up in how other people like us and see us as special and amazing or beautiful or smart or whatever it may be. If your identity is all up to you, then you have to constantly prove yourself to the world that you are somebody worthy of other people caring about. I can't tell you how many times I sit down, especially with y'all engineers, and there's that sense of like, man, like the currency y'all trade in is competency. And if you fail that standard in any way, right, then like okay, I must like now be worthless to the world. I love uh the movie The Materialist, I've mentioned it a lot of times, and it's all about like this woman who's like a what do you call it? Like, she pairs people up on dates, she's like a matchmaker. Uh, and she's talking about one woman she's been working with, with one of her coworkers, and the coworker is like, why is she not getting matched with anyone? Is there something wrong with her? And the main character says, There's nothing wrong with her, she's just average, and the app doesn't reward average. That in a world where you have to prove your worth because it's all up to you, and there's no external standards to live up to, then actually your sense of self and identity is all on your shoulders. You have to constantly market yourself and give justification for your very existence. It leaves actually you with a very fragile sense of self. And ultimately, what we want is we crave an identity that justifies our existence and that makes us feel valuable. And look, y'all, I want to take it one step further here, because I think there's like an even more contemporary version of this, which is our love of labeling ourselves through like mental health titles and things like that. What do I mean by that? Well, like, look, there's a reality that we want to be identified in some way. We want something to explain who we are, that explains everything across the board. And we've really in recent years like turned towards therapy speak and mental health language to give us that sense of identity. And I could explain it, but I think uh the writer Freya India, one of my favorite writers, explains this really well. This is somewhat of a long quote, but man, is it a gut punch? So just hang in there with me. She describes it like this therapy speak has taken over our language. It's ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and how we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore. In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human, every habit, eccentricity, every feeling too strong has to be labeled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No, it's worse than that. They're being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately I think ourselves. Every Instagram post is now six things that I thought were my personality, but are actually my undiagnosed mental health issues. Pause for laughter. You are the way you are, you are the way you are, not because you have a soul, but because of your symptoms and diagnoses. You are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits, but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. For every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, uh every annoying, interesting piece of you is now categorized. The fond ways your family describes you is now medicalized. We can't even talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached or codependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatized, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything about them. They are trying to hold on to themselves. Every piece of their personality is contained within them. Oof. What a quote. Uh, what she's trying to say there is look, like uh we have turned the benefits of therapy and counseling. Let me be clear, we're not anti-therapy or counseling or things like that. But we've turned the language of that and made it our entire personality and our entire sense of self. So, like, oh, I got diagnosed with ADHD at one point, and so now that is me. That's my entire personality. But look, y'all, when we do that, the problem is it leaves no room for God in your life. It leaves no room for understanding that there's sin in your life, and certainly no room for redemption in your life. Because if your entire personality is your anxiety, then there's nothing to be delivered of. It's just who you are. But the truth is, the thing that scripture is pointing us to, is that there's more to us than that. That we are not just the families we were born into, not just the identities we concoct for ourselves, and we're not even just our physical or mental health issues. That we were created in the image of God, and God wants so much more for us, especially when it comes to life in his church. Alright, so that's our search for identity or for self. Let's look at our struggle with self. So Paul goes on, right? He's talking about remember who you were, not many of you were wise, not many of you were powerful or of noble birth, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being may boast in the presence of God. So what he's trying to get them to see here is look, like a lot of you struggle with your sense of identity. You think you're bringing God something that he needs, but the reality is God doesn't choose people on the basis of what they can do for him, but on the basis of what God can do for people. God likes delivering and saving sick sinners, people who are dead apart from his work in their life. And he's saying the problem in this church here is that they're boasting about these human things. Why do we do that? Why do we tend to boast about our human identities apart from God? Well, it's because we crave something that justifies our sense of self. When we're thinking about ourself and our relationship with ourself, uh, we can definitely resonate with the words he talks about, that we are weak, that we are unwise, that we are even despised at times. Because so many of us have that in our stories. That your struggle with yourself may be because of deep wounds that you've had in your life, shameful experiences that have formed who you are. And that's different for everyone in this room, and I never want to assume that everyone's had the same experience or experiences things, and we don't have to like compare pain of like, well, my pain's better, or you know, yours is worse than mine, or something like that. Because the reality is we've all experienced that on some level. But just to say, like, I can resonate with it, and one of the reasons I love this passage so much, uh, is because it was key in my own family's life. My mom and her siblings, I've mentioned this before, like, grew up single parent household in the projects, uh, you know, grandfather essentially abandoned our family. They grew up very poor, you know, in a very like crime-infested area, uh, just like awful things happened to them. And they were really destined for just a life of poverty. And by God's grace, some people in a church came by and like ministered to the neighborhood, and eventually they got involved there and came to faith, and it changed their life. Uh, but my mom, my uncle, my aunts, like they were. Even now they'll say, like, man, it wasn't until essentially we really understood what our faith in Jesus was like that this sense of self really came to change. Because for them, like growing up poor, growing up without a father, you know, growing up like different in the culture and society they were in, like just so many messages over and over again, we're reminding them of things that they should feel ashamed about. We're reminding them of the wounds that they should let form their entire being and personality. That what happens over time is if it's not transformed by Jesus, that we end up struggling so much with our sense of self that we see our heart just harden more and more and more. And that we look for other ways to justify who we are. And I like how Tim Keller points this out. He says, look, one of the reasons we crave a strong identity that justifies us so much is because deep down, like, we know we should be perfect, and we're so frustrated that we're not. We know that this world should be perfect, and yet we're frustrated that it's not. And in our sin, we end up looking for further imperfect answers to try to give ourselves a reasoning for it all. I mean, think about how many times when like you've been told to love yourself or told to accept yourself, and yet the reality is when something stressful or bad happens to you, you say things to yourself like, I'm not good enough, or I hate myself, or I want to be someone else or somewhere else. That in those moments we're feeling that sense of we need something outside of us to deal with this struggle of self, that we can't solve this on our own. You know, we're constantly told by our culture, just look inside, just look inside, and you'll figure it out. But I think Shrek said it best, right? He said, look, ogres are like onions, right? Why are they like onions? Is because they sprout hair, you know, because they stink. No, they've got layers. Ogres are like onions because they've got layers. All right, but what's at the center of an onion? You ever peeled an onion? There's not a piece of gold or chocolate or gum or something. It's just more onion. So, like, the more you peel an onion is a lot like the more you dig into yourself. Like, it stinks, you cry, and you're kind of dissatisfied with what was in the middle. You're left with just more onion. The reality is, the more we try to dig into the core of our own life, looking for something unique and special that's going to give us a sense of justification and explanation for everything in life, all we find is a hard heart. All we find is a hard heart. And that's where one of my most famous, uh, most favorite passages in the Bible comes through here. Uh, Ezekiel 36, where the prophet hears from God and God says, Look, I am going to take your heart of stone, and I'm going to give you a heart of flesh. That I'm going to take the thing at the core of you that is so dissatisfying and toxic and poisoning and just makes things worse, and I'm actually going to give you a new heart altogether. That if you really want a better sense of self, a sense of self that isn't just based on what you can do or what other people are requiring of you, you need God to give you a new heart. If you want the struggle with self to end, then you've got to experience a new sense of self that only Jesus can give you. And then that ultimately is what we can boast in. And that's Paul's point here. Remembering what God has done to change our identity. And so that brings us to the final section here, which is thinking about our solution for self. And look, the solution is really good. And this is one of the reasons why I love this passage. Because Paul uses this key word in verse 27. Right? He says, Remember who you were, verse 27, but God shows what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, what is weak in the world to shame the strong, what is low and despised in the world to bring to nothing the things that are. That word chose there is huge. That's the thing we can build our identity on first and foremost. What's the solution for self? And hear the good news that though you may be hard-hearted and full of sin, that God chose you. That though you may be weak and low and despised, that God chose you. That though you may be anxious or depressed or codependent or autistic or whatever you may be struggling with, God chose you. If you've ever told yourself, I hate myself, I'm not good enough, God chose you. That if you are in Christ Jesus, that you don't bring your awesomeness to Him, you don't bring your nobility of birth or all the great things you can do for God. No, God is saying, I know actually how bad you can really be, and I'm still choosing you. That's the good news. That's the foundation of a new and better identity that only Jesus can give. That whatever identity or sense of self you came in here with tonight, I want you to know that God can take that and do so much more than you ever thought possible. That only the gospel lets us deal with ourselves. That only the gospel helps us overcome our struggle with self. Because first we have to learn the self-awareness that only the gospel can do, that only God's word can give us as a standard of truth. That because we need the rest and grace that only God's word can offer to those who believe in Jesus, that it's from that place that we can relate to ourselves in a godly way. That it is ultimately pointing us to a standard outside of us, but it's a good standard because it's a standard based on God and not just what your family says or not just what you determine that you feel like should be true. That if your identity is in Christ, you know you have a reason to boast, and you can boast now in the Lord. That it's not God, I'm so excited to tell you all the great things I can do for you today, but it's God, I'm so excited to see what you are going to do in my life, in your church, in other people's lives as well. That's the thing that we can boast in and feel confident in. That you can praise God for what he has done in your life, that you can celebrate his goodness, and you have a reason to celebrate, even when you're going through tough times. Even when you're in a very dark and messed up world, because it's not all on you. The burden is not all on us because ultimately the burden fell on Jesus. And no matter what people have said to you, no matter what you've said to yourself, you now have the word of God speaking to you constantly of your value and how much you are loved by Him. That'll change an identity. That when God saves someone, he gives them ultimately everything they need. I love how Paul starts to wrap it up. He says, Look, because of Jesus, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. So that as it is written, let the one who boasts boasts in the Lord. That what he's doing there is cluing us into this new identity in Christ. What does it mean to have your identity now shaped in Christ? Well, it's now to have his wisdom in place of your foolishness. It's to have his righteousness in place of your unrighteousness, his sanctifying holiness in place of your sin, and his redemption in the place of your slavery. What I love about God's wisdom is it's not based on your gray matter. It's not, oh, you know, God gives wisdom to those who are really smart and bright. No, the reality is God's wisdom is a gift to us. So if you're the type here who's like, I fail all my classes, I'm really struggling, I don't know why I'm in college, uh, guess what? You can be wise in the Lord. Uh if you're like, hey, like I'm new to all this, I don't really know what it means to like live a godly life. I feel like every time I'm trying, I'm screwing it up in some way. Guess what? Jesus can show you the way in that. That your hope is now in him and not in your natural ability. And so, what effect should this have on like how we relate to ourselves? Uh, I ran into Claudia earlier and she was like, Chris, I'm so excited that you're gonna have like three tips for how we can do this. And I was like, okay, I need to come up with three tips on how you can do this. Uh so, what effect should this have on how we relate to ourselves? Because I do think it does have an effect, and I think we can be somewhat practical here. Alright, the first effect it should have is to think less of yourself and more about Jesus. I know a lot of you have read the book, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, by Tim Keller. It's really good. Uh, and he has a quote here, really quoting C. S. Lewis, that sums it up well. He says, Look, C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes a brilliant observation about gospel humility at the very end of his chapter on pride. That if we were to ever meet a truly humble person, we would never come away from the meeting thinking they were humble. They would not always be telling us they were a nobody. Because a person who keeps saying they're a nobody is actually a self-obsessed person. The thing we would remember from meeting a truly gospel humble person is how much they seem to be totally interested in us. Because the essence of gospel humility is not thinking more of myself or less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. Gospel humility is not needing to think about myself, not needing to connect things with myself. It is an end to thoughts such as, I'm in this room with these people. Does that make me look good? Do I want to be here? True gospel humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation with me. In fact, I stop thinking about myself altogether. The freedom of self-forgetfulness is the blessed rest that only self-forgetfulness brings. That's the effect of Jesus' work in our life. That we not think low of ourselves or think too highly of ourselves, but just think about ourselves less and think more about Jesus and other people. That there's a beautiful thing about that. Like, as Christians, we want to meditate on God's word. We want to meditate on his work in our life, we want to meditate on his character. That's what should be filling our thoughts and our words. And so, with that, like, if that's the first thing, think of less of yourself and more about Jesus. Let's get specific here. Think about Christ's character. Like, who am I and what I can boast in is Jesus' person and work? Right? When I struggle, uh, he is still righteous. When I mess up and feel foolish, he is still wise. When I struggle with unholiness, he is still holy. When I feel like a slave to sin, his redemption is still true in me. What are we trying to get at here? The point is my identity is not based on my feelings, which change day to day. You ever wake up and like, you know, I don't know what is true anymore. I don't know if I'm much of a Christian, I'm just kind of doubting all of existence. Okay, you know what's great about that? The reality, the truth of Jesus is not based on how you feel that morning. That his truth doesn't change. So meditate on that. Think on that. Your identity is not based on your feeling, but on a complete status change. You've been delivered from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. And finally, how to let this play out, uh, think less of yourself and how you can serve others. Like, maybe if you find yourself in a dry season or your faith seems to be kind of plateauing, it might mean that maybe you should be looking outside of yourself for ways to pour into others. That we spend so much time navel gazing, thinking about what I need and how I need, you know, this, this, and this, that we actually missed out on what God may be calling us to all around us. That God is doing work in the lives around us and he wants us to be a part of that. Look to others. Glory in God's work in other people. Alright, to close, one more quote. You know I love a good quote from C. S. Lewis and Mere Christianity. I think he sums it up beautifully here. He says this the very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real new self, which is Christ's and also yours, and yours because it is his, will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for him. Does that sound strange? The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose yourself and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day, and death of even your whole body in the end. Submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in. That's my final word to you all. Look to Christ and find everything else thrown in as well. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your word, for the ways that you challenge your sense of self. Lord, forgive us for the ways that we would try to bring our natural talents or abilities or background as a way of justifying ourselves before you. Lord, break us of that kind of thinking and help us to firmly root our identity more and more in Christ and His character and what He has done to deliver us from sin. And Lord, we pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's stand and sing.