023 Core Beliefs: Identity

One of the greatest battles you will ever face in life is the battle for your identity. The enemy of your soul wants to feed you lie after lie about who you are, telling you that you are shameful, guilty, and fearful because of some thing that has happened in your past. In this episode, Joey will teach you how to discover your true identity and live in indescribable freedom as you rediscover who your Creator intentionally made you to be.

Transcript

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If a man misunderstands who he is, he will struggle to live how he should. One of the biggest battles in life is the battle over identity. This doesn't matter if you're a man or if you're a woman. One of the biggest battles you will ever fight is the battle over identity. Let's take a little time. Let's talk about that. Welcome to the Iron Pursuit Podcast where men are forged by the truth of God's word. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. This podcast is a call to biblical manhood. Here, we challenge men to rise above comfort, reject passivity, and live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Each episode is designed to strengthen your faith, sharpen your character, and equip you to lead with integrity, and grace. So whether you're a husband, a father, a brother, or a friend, this is your invitation to pursue the kind of manhood that honors God and changes generations. This is the Iron Pursuit. All right, everybody, thank you so much for coming back and being with us again. We are continuing on through our series of core beliefs, and we've come down to episode number 23. I can't even hardly believe that we've been doing this for 23 episodes. That would mean um 23 weeks, I guess, because I've tried to drop an episode each week. Um, and here we are, man. We're all the way down to episode 23, and today we're going to talk about identity. We're going to try to figure out what the core beliefs are behind identity. And it's just like I said in the intro. If we misunderstand this, guys, if we, if, if we misunderstand who we are, we will struggle through the rest of our life trying to figure out how we should live. This is, um, I know I said it's one of the biggest struggles in life, but I would have to say it is the struggle nowadays. In our culture today, it is the struggle, the thing that most people battle with is to find their identity. Who are they? Um, and it and the reason they have a hard time finding out who they are is because they're listening to all of the other things that people are saying. Um, the social media that we have, they're paying attention to what everybody else is putting out there about themselves, even though it's not true. It's not all true. You can't believe what you see out there on social media. Uh, and so people are trying to use those things to help uh formulate some sort of identity uh for themselves. So it is this this idea or the concept of identity is one of the biggest battles in life uh that we will face because the world's gonna try to tell us who we are through the way that we feel, through our successes, even through our failures, uh, and and like I said, other people's opinions. The the the world, and I, and I'll say it like this, the enemy of your soul wants to try to tell you that all of these other things, these external uh these external influences, they they are the they are the things that are trying to help mold and shape your identity. And if you're not careful, you'll give in to those things uh before you remember the truth about your identity. And I want to try to help you remember the truth about your identity because if we believe the wrong thing about who we are, we're going to live the wrong way. I want to repeat that on purpose. If we believe the wrong thing about who we are, we will live the wrong way. Or I should say you'll live the wrong life. I'm going to hit on three things uh in this podcast. If you take notes or whatever, you can come back and listen to it again. Um, but number one, first core belief of identity. My identity is given by God and it is not created by me. Did you hear that? My identity is given by God and it is not created by me. You know, the culture says identity is something we invent or we discover within ourselves, but the Bible teaches us that identity is given by our creator. God formed us and he intentionally formed us with purpose. God created us with design and meeting. Meaning, I understand that there are those people out there who deny the concept of a great designer, intelligent designer, or creator. I understand that. And even though I understand that there are people out there like that, I think those are people who are uninformed. I think those are people who are simply unwilling to observe the complexities of creation. Um, and and maybe I even believe that they're just um blinded to all the many unexplained impossibilities of quote-unquote happenstance. As a Christian, um, I believe in God, okay? And that that's the foundation of this podcast. You know, it is scripture. I always try to take you back to scripture to try to prove uh the different things that we believe. And as a Christian, I believe in God. I don't believe in him not only as my creator, but I believe in God as the one who designed me to be who I am, um, to help those that I help. He designed me to do the things that I do. He designed me all the way, completely. He designed me on purpose. And the same thing goes for you. And I don't want you to walk away from here today thinking something different. God designed you the exact same way. You are not a mistake. God designed you with every talent, with every ability that you have. Don't forget that. You see, our design or our identity uh is not self-constructed. We didn't put ourselves together. And as much as our culture wants to push the concept of the self-made man, that idea is ridiculous. The self-made man is a myth, okay? It's a myth. Well, well, well, brother Joey, how do you know that? Joey, can't tell us how how how that's that's truth. Um, okay, so just tell me, give me, give me, give me this answer. Name one man who created himself. What just one guy who created himself, okay? We don't have to go any further than that. The self-made man idea, the concept of the self-made man is a myth because no one creates himself. You did not choose your birth, you did not choose your abilities, you did not choose your opportunities, you did not choose the people who shaped you. All of us have external influences in our life. We have people that come along, we have people that help shape us, we have opportunities that are given to us by other people. Uh, the abilities that we have, they are God given. Uh, even if you don't want to believe in God uh and you believe in the idea of evolution and all of these different things, evolution goes, evolution, the concept of evolution is the passing down from one generation to the other and the changing from one generation to the next. Therefore, the self-made man concept, even if you look at it from evolution, from the evolutional standpoint, you have to understand that it was passed down to you from your parents. So your parents gave you most and much of what you have today. So every life that it that there is, is it is built on gifts and influences and the grace that we receive from other people. Ultimately, the grace we receive from God. I say that because, well, guess what? I believe in God, and uh everything that I that I do goes back to that foundation. So uh what I'm saying, God created us with design and meaning, and our identity is not self-constructed. And also, we are accountable to the one who made us. You know, the greatest difference between those who believe that we were created um with meaning and those who foolishly think that we just happened is the way that we live. I want to give you that example just a moment. Think about it. Uh think about the man who believes that he was created with purpose. That man will live with an understanding that he must give an account for his life. Because he must give an account for his life, he respects others, he seeks justice, he has this burning inside of him to help protect the weak. He wants to honor others, and he lives with and he lives under authority. Now, you compare that to the man who doesn't believe that he was created with purpose, that man lives carelessly and he doesn't concern himself with the well-being of others. We can take one example in history. If we if we take a guy, uh take the guy Joseph Stalin, you know, back in World War II, historians have frequently used this dude as an example uh of how rejecting moral accountability and the value of human life can leave to, can lead to uh recklessness and destructive behavior. Stalin was a guy that did not care about anybody else, and his his life and the history that was written about him is there to prove it. But even if we were to go over uh and look for a biblical example, I could, I could give you uh quite a few, but let me just give you one. If we just think back into Exodus about Pharaoh, you know, the man who hardened his heart against God, he he actually believed that the Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh uh was God. They believed that the that their God, the spirit of their God, embodied the Pharaoh and that he was the one uh who shine shone the light, the sun rose and set on him. And so they believed this about Pharaoh. And this this Pharaoh, he did not believe in Yahweh or the God of the Bible. And so Pharaoh could have delivered all of his people from the devastating plagues that they experienced, but his stubbornness drove him to resist the obvious presence of God. And so what I'm telling you is that there are these differences between the identities of people who believe in the Creator and those who don't. And whenever you don't believe in that, whenever you don't believe this number one thing that we're touching on here is that your identity is God given and not created. When you don't believe that, then you live your life very, very recklessly. Genesis 1.27 tells us that we are created in the image of God. We understand that. Uh all of us are created in the image of God. Therefore, uh we we must, if we're, if we're believers, we must believe or we must have this core belief that our identity was handed to us by God and we should live our life as such. In Psalms 139, verses 13 and 14, the psalmist talks about how that God knitted him together in his mother's womb. So, because of our beliefs, because of uh our beliefs of a designer, because of the creator God, we believe that God did all of this stuff on purpose. You see, you will never understand yourself in your fullness until you understand that God made you. Do you believe God made you? Because the answer that you have to that question is going to help you understand the core beliefs that you have about your identity. Number two, my identity is broken by sin. Even though we were created in God's image, um, sin has deeply, deeply damaged humanity. And the world often tells people that they are basically good, you know, because um, you know, people who are lost, people who don't understand scripture, they want to believe that they really are inherently good. But the truth is that the Bible teaches that there's something wrong with the human heart. The Bible tells us that it's wicked, it's depraved, that we have problems, and we need someone to help us fix this. You see, sin distorts our thinking, it distorts our desires, and it distorts our actions. Now, in order for me to um to explain this to you a little bit deeper, I want to use the example of my marriage, all right? Uh, because in my marriage, in the early, earliest years of my marriage, the enemy, Satan, he tried to um, how can I say it? He tried to distort my vision about how I viewed my wife and my relationship uh with my wife. I've always loved my wife. I've always thought my wife was extremely attractive, and as as probably all of you have felt about your wife as well. Uh, but the problem was that early on in in my teenage years, I was introduced to pornography. Okay. And yes, I have uh I have a pornography series uh that I'm going to be uh working on and releasing. I'm still doing a lot of stuff on that. I've got a lot of prep work to do for that. And that prepping for that on top of um all of the other things that I do is it's just taking me a little bit more time to get there. But I do want to help you guys with porn addiction and things like that. I think I think I've got something that's really gonna work uh in God's helping me. So pray for me on that. All right, I digress. I was hooked on porn at an early time in my life. And as a as a young, I wasn't even a teenager. I was introduced to porn at around 11, 12 years old, and it was by uh a cousin of mine. Uh he introduced me to it. He was much older than me, he introduced me to it. It sent my life into a tailspin. I did not realize how deep that hole was going to go, um, but I was hooked on porn. When I married my wife, I was still hooked on porn. Not as bad as I was before, but I I had a porn problem, okay? I had to come to the place to where I was willing to admit that porn was a sin. Now, I knew that it was a sin, but because I kept giving myself over to it, that thought was distorted. That it the the concept that it was a sin, it was distorted. I had to come to the place to where I was willing to call sin. And I had to call porn sin. I had to describe it as sin. I had to treat it as sin. I had to get to the point where I was where I would say that is gonna hurt if I go over there, it's going to hurt me. I had to protect myself from it. The enemy tried to distort um this understanding, okay? He tried to distort the idea that porn was a sin. Now, let me explain that just a little bit. What the enemy of my soul, the enemy of your soul tried to do to me, or what he did do to me, he would put this thought in my head. He'd say, Hey, you know, Joey, God God created men to desire women. I mean, all the curves, the smooth skin, the tanned skin, the breasts, the booty, the beautiful eyes, the lips, the long lashes that bat at you and just hypnotize you as a man. God made men to desire that. And then He would say this next thing.

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So there's nothing wrong with looking. Nothing wrong with looking.

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And you see, my thinking motivated my desires. So whenever I was sinning with porn and I began to give myself into that a little bit here, a little bit there, my thoughts began to change. My thinking became distorted. My thinking motivated my desires, and the problem is that I was not desiring my wife because the use of porn was causing me to desire my wife less instead of more. I need you to hear what I said. I'm gonna repeat it. Listen closely. My thinking motivated my desires. And the problem is that I was not desiring my wife because the use of porn was causing me to desire her less instead of more. I'll go to that further when I get into the porn thing. But what I want you to know is that distorted thinking plus distorted desires equal distorted actions. If your thinking is not right, your desires will not be right, therefore your actions will not be right. Sin distorts. And whenever you give yourself over to it because you do not know your identity, it ends up affecting your actions. You see, without Christ, our identity is shaped by rebellion. And so because I kept giving myself over to the porn thing and I wanted it to be a part of my life, I didn't want to give it up. I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right? Because of that, I was rebelling against God. And without Christ in my life, without Him being the leading motivator in my life, my identity would become shaped by rebellion. Now, I want you to just think about what I'm saying here. Whenever you live your life with distortion, you're not thinking clearly. Clear is not distortion, and distortion is not clarity. So I want you to think about a teenage boy who rebels against his parents simply because he doesn't want to do what his parents tell him to do. It seems like most people would agree that it just makes sense that a teenage boy, a teenage girl should have chores and responsibilities while living in their parents' home. Uh, but a rebellious child does not see things that way. And you've been there, I've been there, maybe you're on the other side of the ball now. Maybe you have um a child that is is showing that rebellion. They they want to push back against the things that you're trying to teach them. And God's using that right now as a way to show you how you've um the way that you've rebelled against him in the past. Maybe, maybe that's what um God is is doing there uh with you right now. I I don't I don't know. Maybe so. You see, uh the rebellious child cannot make any of it make sense because in their mind, you know, they're they're in their mind, they're in their thoughts, they're in their emotions, they're in their feels, so to speak. And that rebellious child just can't make any of it make sense until they're finally out on their own, they're struggling, trying to make ends meet, and then all of a sudden they realize, man, mom and dad, I mean, they maybe they they knew what they were talking about. And the same is true with the way you view Christ. Whenever you rebel against his teachings, you try to live on your own, rejecting the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That rebellious character shapes your identity. It bleeds over into everything else you do, it causes anger and rejection and frustration and depression, all of these things. And this explains why people feel lost and empty. Because you were created by God. Because your identity is supposed to be founded in Christ, you are lost and empty when you drift away from this truth that I'm telling you right now. Man, it took me a long time to get to this place in my life for me to understand all of this. And I'm telling you guys, you have this wealth of knowledge right here, this wealth of truth that's being given to you in podcast form, not just by me, but by other believers and other leaders out there too. We are lost and empty whenever we drift away from the truth that Jesus Christ is supposed to be the foundation that we stand on. Many of us, we fight our true identity in Christ so long that it causes us to hide behind. Behind the bushes of fear and guilt and shame and regret. And the longer that we stay there, the more tolerant we become of what is wrong. And I want you to notice what I said, gentlemen. Notice what I said. I said, we become tolerant. I did not say that we become comfortable. We become tolerant. We don't become comfortable with the things that are wrong. We never become comfortable with what opposes our true identity. Instead, we tolerate what opposes our true identity because guilt and shame have convinced us that we have no other choice. And it's all a lie. It's a lie. You do have a choice. You can come out from behind the bushes of shame and guilt and fear and rejection and all of those other things, and you can step into the identity of who you are supposed to be. Romans 3.23 says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Did you hear that word, all? All includes you, all includes me, all includes everybody in the family tree. But on all of us, it says, all of us have sinned. Not all of us have continued to believe the lie that we had to stay in that sin. Everybody don't believe. I don't believe that. There was a time when I believed it that, well, this is just who I am, and I need to just, I'm stuck here. I have to keep living my life this way. But then finally, one day, bam, the Holy Spirit convicted me, showed me my eyes were open, and I understood that I did not have to continue living there. Some of us actually reached out and took the hand of Jesus as he reached down for us to keep us from drowning. He saved us. And guess what, guys? You still have time to reach out to him and be reminded of who you really are. You don't have to stay there. All of us have sinned. All of us have come short of the glory of God. But why is it that some of us have overcome that poor, that, that poor self-righteous identity and we've accepted the identity of who Jesus Christ is. It's because we did not choose to believe the lie. Jeremiah 17, 9 tells us that the heart is deceitful. This is where I was all what I was alluding to a while ago, whenever I told you that the world wants to tell you that we are all inherently good, but the truth is that our flesh desires evil. It does. The heart is deceitful and it desires evil. And you have to be willing to take your thoughts captive and surrender your will to the will of the Father, and then you'll discover what real freedom means. You see, you can't truly understand who you are until you acknowledge what sin has done to you. When you acknowledge what sin has done to you, you understand the damage that's there and you understand how to correct it. Okay? Find out where you are. A lot of times, whenever you're trying to build a plan, if you have a plan, try to build a plan of success, you want to understand where you are and you want to understand where you're going. And when you pop, when you plot out those two points, you can start at the finished goal, wherever your goal is, and you can work backwards to see what road is going to get you to where you are right now. And therefore, that road will get you to where you want to be. That leads me to number three, our final point in the core belief of identity. My identity is restored through Jesus Christ. You see, our identities have been distorted, right? It's been distorted by all these things, by sin. Our lives have been damaged and all of this, but we can be restored. Our identities can be restored through Jesus Christ. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus does not just forgive sin. He actually gives us a new life. He gives us a new identity. You see, when someone trusts Christ, they're no longer defined by their past or their failures or their wounds. They are now defined by their relationship with Christ. Think about it this way: the scriptures tell us that we become children of God. Once we surrender to Christ, we are no longer the orphans that the Bible talks about. We're no longer orphans wandering around without purpose or identity or a home to go to. All of a sudden, we've been adopted into the family of God and we've been called the children of God. You see, the Bible tells us also that we are new creations. That means that our past is forgiven. We are given a new outlook on life. We begin walking with Jesus, learning each day how to live our lives in true identity. Why? Why? Because our identity is now anchored in Christ. And I cannot stress this point enough. When I finally surrendered to Christ, my identity was anchored in Him. I didn't question who I was anymore. I didn't question what my purpose in life was. I didn't question what God called me to do. I knew who I was. I knew what my end my identity was. Just the other day, speaking of identity, I'll digress for a moment. Um I had someone come up to me and he asked me, he said, Brother Joey, who are you? And I didn't know if he was joking with me or what, but um he said, he said, Who are you? And I looked at him and I said, I'm a child of God.

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And and he and he was like, Well, well, yeah, but but what else?

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But who are you? I said, Well, I'm I am a child of God. That's who I am. I I identify myself as a you know, as a follower of Christ. I'm a child of God. I'm I'm other things. I I have a lot of other things. I I believe I call myself a problem solver. I believe uh in my my identity as a disciple maker and uh, you know, uh a teacher. I love, I'm a Bible teacher, but primarily I'm a child of God. And the only reason I can say that is because now more than ever, ever, at 47 years old, now more than ever, I know that my identity is anchored in Jesus Christ. You see, in 2 Corinthians 5.17, the Bible tells us we are new creations. Old things pass away, behold, all things become new. I'm not saying that God can't change everything overnight. Just like boom, there it is, and it's all done because he can. I know that he can do that. Uh, all you have to do, if you need a Bible example, a biblical example, just go to Acts chapter 9, read about Saul who became Paul. You know, you see this drastic change overnight. This guy who is opposed to God, all of a sudden he is fighting for God. Most of the time, however, when God, you know, he draws you, you surrender to him, there's this process, right? God draws you, you surrender to him, and then he changes you day by day. He leads you into sanctification day by day. He leads you through that process. Your duty changes to desire, and then your desire becomes your delight. And you know what, guys? Jesus is that delight of your life. He becomes the delight of your life. In John 1.12, it calls us the children of God, uh, just like I alluded to just a few moments ago. But do you know what it feels like, really, um, to really believe that you are a beloved child of God? Do you know what it feels like to believe that in your heart, in your mind, to know that you're a child of God. You see, when you realize this, your life changes. And I'm and I'm praying that that that you get this point that I'm that I'm saying. I I pray you get this. And I and I'm praying that you will reach this point in your life really, really soon. You see, there's there's no other freedom. I guess I can say it this way. There's no other freedom like being free in Jesus Christ. To be able to rest in the knowledge, to rest in the reality that you are a child of God. There's no there's no other freedom like that. There's nothing like that, guys. And and I'm not, you know, this podcast has a lot of different purposes. I understand that. But I but if you really know my heart, you know that my desire ultimately is to do everything I can to make followers of Jesus. I want to make disciples of Christ, and I want you guys to grasp this in such a way that you begin to make disciples too. But you're you're not gonna do it well if you don't understand that you are a child of God. This is why Paul was able to say over in Galatians 2.20, he says, guys, Christ lives in me. He's living in me. And whenever Christ lives in you through the infilling and the power of the Holy Spirit, your identity becomes founded on who he is without concern for outside interferences. You see, your past may tell a story about you, your past may explain you, but your past don't define you if you are in Christ Jesus. You see, we all have one, and your past can be a solid point in your testimony. I mean, you'd be able to go back and tell all those things that that you've done, the things that you've been through, but there needs to be a defining moment in your life when you found your identity in the one who designed you on purpose. You see, guys, your identity, if I should say if your identity is built on success and approval and masculinity and reputation, then it's only a matter of time before it collapses. It's a house of cards. Your identity is a house of cards. If people say, hey man, who are you? and and it just has to do, and your your answer just has to do with what you do, where you've been, what you've accomplished, man, it's gonna fall. It's gonna eventually it's gonna collapse. But if your identity is built on Jesus Christ, it becomes unshakable. You see, the most important belief that you will ever settle is this, and I want to leave you with this question. It's the most important belief that you'll ever settle is this question right here.

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Who am I in relation to God? Who am I in relation to God? Gentlemen, spend some time and answer that question. Let me know what the Holy Spirit tells you.

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Hey guys, thanks again for listening. Remember, share, like, and subscribe. If you think this podcast could help someone else, please share it with them. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook at the IronPursuit. If you're interested in my personal or marriage coaching, send me an email at theironpursuit79 at gmail.com. Thanks again for listening. And remember, never run from the clashing because that is where the iron is sharp.