Identity
Summary
In week 2 of Beauty: See Again What God Calls Good, Dominic Jackson explores how our identity is formed and healed in Christ. Starting with Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31), this sermon reframes self-love as learning to see ourselves as God sees us—so we can love others more truly. Drawing on Paul’s repeated language of being “in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3–14), Dominic invites us to resist the pull of competing voices that name us and, instead, to receive our truest identity as chosen, adopted, forgiven, and sealed by the Spirit. Along the way, he contrasts WWJD with the deeper question of what Jesus has already done for us, and what it looks like to live from that reality today.
Questions for reflection
What voices or stories most often try to name you—success, failure, family expectations, politics, personality types, social media, or something else? How have they shaped you lately?
Dominic suggests that loving your neighbor “as yourself” can also mean loving your neighbor as your true self. What would change in your relationships if you really believed that?
Paul’s phrase “in Christ” reframes what is true of us. Which identity words from Ephesians 1 do you most need to receive right now—chosen, adopted, forgiven, sealed, or beloved?
Where are you tempted to either erase parts of your identity or elevate them above everything else? What might it look like to hold those parts “in Christ”?
Dominic quotes the idea that the difference among Christians is often between the aware and unaware of God’s love. What practices help you become more aware of that love?
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Before I get into our text, I wanted to start by sharing an embarrassing and dumb story if I may, which is always what you want to hear. Before a sermon years ago, I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles, and it was a side of town that I didn't spend a whole lot of time in the nice side of town, silver Lake, if you've ever been there. And we hung out for a while. I parked in the garage, we hung out. It was great. And then on my way back, I was ready to drive home. I think I was on my phone looking up directions or a podcast to listen to or something like that. So I'm on my phone trying to figure out where I'm going to go, how I'm going to get home. I get into my car and I plug it in.
I'm ready to go. However, the strangest thing happens. I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I'm in my car. I'm getting ready to back up, and there was a car directly behind me. It was mostly an empty parking lot. There's a car right behind me, and they at the exact same time decided they were going home. So we started to back up at the same time. And me being the nice follower of Jesus that I am, I was like, I'm going to let them go first. And so I just wait there for a second and they apparently were trying to out polite me in this moment. So they're sitting there waiting on me to go. So we're both having the standoff to see who's going to be nicer. And so I'm just sitting there, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. I'm like, okay, I'm in la, not the best drivers, so maybe they need a little bit of extra room.
So in this moment I decide I'm going to pull back into my spot to give 'em the space. It was kind of a small, tight parking lot. Well, in that moment, a second later, they decide to do the exact same thing. Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes I theorize conspiracy, not about things like the moon landing or whatever, but sometimes I'm like, someone's messing with me here. And I imagine that in this moment somebody was hiding with a camera and I was going to end up on YouTube and it was some prank or something like that. So I'm like, this is too much of a coincidence. But I'm like, all right, I'm going to get out of here. So I decide to slowly start backing up. They start backing up like, okay, this is getting ridiculous. So I'm fed up at this moment, I decide just to throw, I'm in reverse.
I'm just going to step on the gas and get out of here as soon as possible. I'm doing that. They do the exact same thing. This is not a dream, by the way. This is a true story. They're backing up. I'm going super fast, and then I have to slam on the brake. I'm like inches from hitting them, and I'm very upset at this moment. And so I put it in park. I kick open the door. I'm about to say some things, use some words that are probably not found in this book here, and I'm like stepping out. A second later, they're stepping out. It's like a scene in a movie and I'm pointing at them. Then all of a sudden I see movement in their hand as well, and then I look up and I see them. There was this weird, I was confused for a moment.
I mean, they almost caused this accident, right? For what? Somebody doing a prank or whatever. And so for the first time, we finally make eye contact and it takes a moment for this to register what's going on, but I recognize them. In fact, it's someone I've known for a very long time. All of a sudden, all of my anger turns to confusion just for a moment, at least before. Finally, I get in my car and I drive home still reflecting on what just happened. So one piece of information that might be helpful to this story to fill in some blanks. True story, by the way. Apparently in this particular parking garage, I don't know, maybe they were tired of bad drivers. It was a tight space. They had installed this giant mirror in the whole back wall right there. It was so small and I was on my phone, I wasn't paying attention.
It was dark. To be fair, I drove a little white Ford car. There was probably a hundred of them, and I was on my phone, but still nobody was there but me. And as I'm there backing up, it was me who was backing up and keeping me. And some of you're looking at me like, I will never drive with that guy. I get it, I get it. But I think about this story a lot, not just because of how dumb I felt in that moment, but still I think about this, not even just when I'm driving or parking, but in many areas of my life. And it also works as kind of a cheesy illustration, but just go with me. My biggest enemy in my life in that moment was myself, specifically not recognizing myself. And this morning we're going to talk about identity. And under this, we can imagine, if you will, us in the driver's seat in a lot of ways, somehow staring at ourselves and yet somehow completely unaware of ourselves.
And if I haven't overused the metaphor enough, one more last connection. As I was driving on the freeway back home, laughing to myself though incredibly embarrassed of what just took place, the thought hit me that there was probably a security guard and a little booth just watching me go to myself, oh man. And so I was thinking about what they were thinking at that moment, probably cracking up, probably reporting my license plate. I don't know what they were doing, but still me going back and forth. And I often wonder how God sees us for so many moments of our own lives, going about our days, how we watch ourselves, and all the things that we have convinced ourselves are so incredibly important to who we are while missing out on a different perspective, a new perspective, the most important perspective as created, who our creator sees us as. So let's pray and then we're going to look at our text one more time.
Lord Jesus, my prayer is just a simple one this morning, help us to see beauty around us. Help us to see beauty in others and circumstances and opportunities. But first Lord, before we can see beauty in others, in our lives, in our jobs, in our community, even in ourselves, we must first know you. And so my prayer this morning is for a nuis sense of awe and wonder and beauty for us to wake up to what you're doing in our lives and for us to become aware of the gift we have each day with you. And because of you. Let me pray this in the name of Jesus, amen.
When I first came to faith 20 plus years ago, I had what I now recognize was a mini identity crisis. And this was coming from two conflicting messages. I was hearing at the same time, sometimes from the same people, whether that be my pastor or different religious leaders or books I was reading, I was hearing these two conflicting messages. On one hand, I heard the message, you are special. You are amazing. You are loved, you are pursued. Jesus is crazy about you. And basically Dominic, you're a unicorn. You're a snowflake. You are one of a kind because God made you me. And he did so intentionally, wonderfully, purposely. And then they would offer up a whole bunch of Bible verses to support this claim. But then on the other hand, I would hear basically the complete opposite from pastors and leaders and books that I was reading.
It would either be a message on how sinful and corrupted and carnal a word. I don't hear a lot anymore, but how corrupt I was as a person and sinful and flawed. And basically, no, Dominic, you are not special at all because you are deeply flawed, sinful. And I'm lucky that God even tolerates me or same conclusion, but different ammunition to get there. I would hear I'm not special or unique because the call of the follower of Jesus is to put these things away. And the truest faith is a death to oneself. And by the way, to state the obvious, they would say, if everyone is special, no one is special, right? And here are a bunch of Bible verses to support this. And maybe you grew up hearing one of these two extremes. You are the most special person to ever exist or you are not at all.
And so I remember wondering, which is it? Am I the apple of God's eye? Am I God's favorite or am I just another cog in the machine? The machine being the church, the body, humanity. I don't know the Gloria Record, formerly known as Mineral. One of my favorite nineties Midwestern indie bands has this great line in one of their songs. The chorus is you're just like everyone else. There's nobody like you pointing out how our uniqueness is also entirely and completely unique rights or just unique. I don't know the etymology of that, right? But still. And so today as we talk about beauty, and maybe by the end of it, I will call you beautiful. If so, don't blush. Or maybe I'll call you mediocre and run of the meal. If so, don't throw things at me. But it's a fair question. Are we unique and special?
Is this a good thing or does God desire us to abandon our uniqueness, our individuality? And I'm going to frame this in three parts. Love in community, love and identity, love and worshiping or more simply loving others, loving self, loving God. So first, let's take a look at ourselves in community. If you have a copy of the scriptures, you want to turn to our texts, mark 1230. We're going to look at our communal self here. And as a story many of us are familiar with, some of you are having flashbacks to a couple months ago when we spent a whole series on the Shamal, we did the series where we're looking at what does it mean to love God with our entire beings, our hearts, our souls, our minds, our bodies. And so the text reads is we're hopping right into the middle of a conversation.
Mark 12:30, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second command is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There is no command greater than these. And we see here that the prescription that Jesus is offering is connecting, loving God with loving one another. There is a connection here. Somebody asked Jesus for one command and he gives two, and there's this connection between them and he mentions loving our neighbor as ourself. And this is actually an Old Testament reference back to Leviticus 19, but the original context was in Levitical law, the question was who and what wasn't in and out? Who was our neighbor and who wasn't? This leads the man who's originally asking the question to ask another, who is my neighbor as in who is qualified to receive this love?
And we're not going to look at this story we have in the past, but still, I do wonder how often we ask the same qualifying questions when it comes to the teachings of Jesus about loving our neighbors. Jesus says, love your neighbor. And many of us hear this and we have follow up questions, okay, but are they here legally? What is their sexual identity? How do they vote? What are their religious beliefs? Do they look like me? How much money do they make? How do they feel about me or people like me? In which as the meme suggests, Jesus would respond by saying, did I stutter? But back to the text, it's interesting that this question, who is my neighbor that the man asks is rooted in obligation. The man isn't interested in who he is, free to love who he gets, the love who he has the opportunity to share love with.
Instead, he is curious who he must love because clearly there must be many who don't make the cut. Again, a sermon for another day. But this morning I'd like to focus on everything that happened before the parable that Jesus shares the parable of the Good Samaritan. I would recommend we all look at it this week. It's a great story. But what I've been asking myself is whether or not Jesus's response is as much a command as it is an invitation, if as yourself is a bar to set a standard to our relationships, but is also a reminder of who we are. I'll explain. The first way to read this, love your neighbor as your yourself is if your neighbor is like one of mine, your neighbor, we'll call him Bob, and he's kind of annoying and unthoughtful, and he blasts terrible music from his garage all the time for the whole neighborhood to hear, and he leaves his trash cans in front of your house.
Or he does that thing where he parks right in between so nobody could park right in front of you, right? I'm getting way too specific, but it's okay. Bob's not here, but still. And this person, your neighbor, is hard to love. Let's just call it what it is. And so we read the words of Jesus as love him, not just tolerate him, not just coexist together. But when you think about him, think about his needs, his wants, his desires, and about yourself. What do I want? What do I long for as a human being? What does every human want at our core? Whatever that is, the invitation for me is to treat Bob that way, right? Maybe love is bringing his trash cans in or it's inviting him over to dinner because he lives alone. Or maybe it's looking past his obnoxiousness and seeing that this person beside you, not as a project, not as an obligation, but as a person, deeply loved and desired by Christ Jesus and cared for by Jesus and praying to God to see him, for me to see Bob in the same way that God sees Bob.
And so that's the first way we hear this. Love him as yourself. Dominic. Love Bob like you love Dominic. The second way I'd like to suggest this morning, which is where we're going today, is loving my neighbor as myself means knowing myself my true self. Dominic, love Bob as the person you were created to be. Love your neighbor as the man you were created as full of love and compassion to experience and to share love. Love your neighbor as your true self, who you were created to be and how you were created to love. It means changing, not just how I see Bob, but how I see Dominic. It's almost like a loving rebuke from a parent if we read it this way, where the parent tells the kid, I don't know if you ever heard this growing up. I heard it a lot. I didn't raise you to be this way.
Or when a kid gets caught cheating or bullying or whatever, the parent saying, this isn't who you are. This isn't who you were made to be when you'd go skip basketball practice or how you act at the school dance or in the cafeteria, show up as yourself, your true self. Not whoever it is you're pretending to be, or who your friends have convinced you are, but your true self, right? In the same way, love your neighbor as yourself is a great standard. But love your neighbor as yourself is also a reminder of the intention of who and how we were created to be. But before we can get to that, we should know who we actually are. If Dominic is supposed to love Bob as the truest form of Dominic, as the way God created me to be, to live and love instead of the Internet or Netflix or Jordan Peterson or Nietzche or Tom Cruise or whoever telling me who I am, I should go to the source, the created to look to the creator, right?
Because I can't do anything as myself if I don't know myself. However, this leads to the third part. We're going to skip two for now. Loving God, we can't love our neighbor until we know our neighbor. But we also can't love our neighbor until we love ourselves, or more importantly, know ourselves who we are created to be. I would also argue back to the Shama, back to this connection that in order to love God, we must of course first know God. But there's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. Before I met my wife, somebody could have printed out and given me a giant folder of every single fact about her and detail and characteristic and checked every single box that Megan would check and handed me this 30,000 page documents about this woman I had never met. And even if I would have read and memorized the entire thing, I couldn't have loved her until I knew her.
And there are plenty of people out there who have memorized a lot of verses in this book, and they have multiple PhDs when it comes to New Testament theology and things like that. And they know a lot of facts about God, but that doesn't mean that they know God, which means they can't love God. And many people would disagree with this, but I would say before we can love God, we must first know ourselves. Romans 3 23 for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Before we can see God as our savior, we must first recognize the pit that we're in, the fact that we need saved. Before we can recognize God as king, we must first recognize that we are in a kingdom. Before we can see God as friend, we must first recognize our own need and desire to be known, truly known.
Do you see the sandwich here? Before we can love and know others, we must first know and love ourselves, but before we can love and know God, we must first also know ourselves. And by the way, I'm far from the first person to suggest this. I got a couple quotes here. Augustine or Augustine, how can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self? Grant, Lord, that I may know myself, that I may know thee. This is from confessions. This whole book is about this premise of who am I or St. Theresa. Almost all problems in this spiritual life stem from a lack of self-knowledge or message to our Eckhart. No one can know God who does not first know himself, which leads us to the middle part. The second part, how do we love ourselves in a healthy, biblical spiritual way?
What is our identity, our true identity? I'm going to suggest that you are so much more special than you ever could know about yourselves than you ever assumed and believed and still somehow so less unique. And at the same time, you are loved as you are, not as you should be. But in being loved by God, you are also transformed into being more like Christ or another way to put this. You are becoming more like Christ and less like yourself, which means you are becoming your truest self. The Apostle John writes a prayer. It's really like a plea. I must decrease. He must increase. Does this mean the total erasure of John or does it mean to become the fullest picture of John in Christ? What if instead of seeing Jesus, living like Jesus, becoming like Jesus as an unattainable ultimate goal, we saw Jesus as the means and the bridge to get there to that life.
Jesus, not as just a standard to reach, but more so a way to become. Let me explain or actually let Paul explain, and then I'll ask a more tangible question. Ephesians one, and this is pretty dense. I will get in front of that. This is pretty dense, but just go there with me, try and meditate on these words. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. Listen for that in Christ, for he chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight, in love. He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the richest of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.
He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times reached their fulfillment to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. One more in him. We were also chosen having been predestined according to the plan, who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will in order that we who were the first to put our hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation when you believed you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, one more verse, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance into the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of his glory.
So there is a lot there. We could literally spend the next 10 years preaching on just this text. But something you may have noticed is all over this passage. In fact, this whole letter, you'll find over 150 times in the New Testament, mostly from Paul, a sentence starting or ending with in Christ. Almost anytime Paul or the New Testament authors describe or define a characteristic or trait connected to our identity, you'll read in Christ paired along with it. This is a way of not just pointing to Christ, but connecting to Christ. It redefines the attribute, but it also frames it in an entirely new way. This is as much about allegiance as it is union. Think about Matthew 28, the Great Commission you were baptized in the Father Son Holy Spirit. And when we end our prayers in the name of Jesus, this isn't just a way of saying in conclusion or sincerely, Lord, but it means there's power in this name and Christ becomes a representative.
A go-between, Bridget Wright says it this way, when Paul speaks to us as being in Christ, the center of what he means is that the king represents his people so that what happens to him happens to them. And what is true of him is true of them. Think of David fighting Goliath. David was representing Israel. He had already been anointed as king. And it wasn't long after his victory before people realized that he was the one who would lead Israel into God's future. So with us, Jesus has won the decisive victory over the eldest and darkest enemy of all. And if we are in him, in the king in Christ, we shall discover step-by-step what that means. David's victory. If you know the story of David versus Goliath, David's victory was Israel's victory. He was sent as a representative, and what happened to him happened to everybody, and the victory of Christ also becomes our victory.
One more quote, Karl Barth says it this way. Sorry, I got a lot of old dead guys and gals today, but I like to quote people smarter than me. Christians are described as in Christ, meaning they are in Him, and they're in him because Christ has adopted them into unity with his being, which means that in virtue of their baptism, they have put him on like a covering garment as they are in Christ. They acquire and have a direct share in what God first and supremely is in Him, what has done by God for the world and therefore for them in Him and what is assigned and given to them by God in Him. What's true about Christ is now true about you and I. Paul connects these attributes of Christ that can only be true of Christ. We could not live up to this.
And yet still He connects us with who we are now, right? Just looking through. We are filled with every spiritual blessing. Verse three, chosen before the creation of the world. Think about that. God just daydreaming about you and I before any of this existed. Verse four, we're holy, we're blameless, we're love. Verse five, adopted in God's will to the praise of his glorious grace. Verse six, redeemed, forgiven rich in God's grace, chosen, included, saved, sealed with the spirit, God's inheritance. And this is just the opening line. Read the first three chapters. It also says where his creation were described as God's poetry, his beloved, his child, his friend. And more and more, all of these things are now true about you and I in Christ because of Christ. And so often when questions of identity comes up, we often start at a place of decision or action.
If I am God's child, should I fill in the blank? And we're at this crossroads, here's the Jesus way, and here's the way I really want to go, or everyone's favorite. WWJD, what would Jesus do? And this isn't just about God's character as asking about our own character or motives or actions, but a better question is first to ask WDJD, what did Jesus do on the cross and what does living in light of that? Or better yet, what does living in Christ look like? Or maybe an even better question, if we still want to ask, what would Jesus do in regards to stepping into our identity, our true self, who we were created to be? Dallas Willard reframes it this way. Who would Jesus be if he were me? We then take these things which are true about Jesus, which are now our inheritance because of Jesus.
We're loved, we're known, we're chosen, all of those things. And then we start with this knowledge of ourselves to inform what we do versus attempting to change what we do to live up to that knowledge. Here's what I mean. I don't think it's nearly as helpful to ask, would Jesus be on social media today, right? And if so, what platform would he use? Would he own a minivan? How would Jesus vote? What kind of jeans would Jesus wear if he were here today? And then we try and go and do likewise. Number one, Jesus was an ancient near Eastern Jewish rabbi who essentially lived in the riverbed, owned next to nothing, and dedicated his life and mission to the will of his father and to destroying evil. Not a normal Monday for me. But if we start here as the standard, as a lot of crazy radical books that came out 20 years ago suggested, we are already doomed to fail.
And I personally don't think this is what Jesus desires of us all. We all can't live in the riverbed. Who are we ministering to? And so I don't think his desires for us to all quit our jobs, leave our families live off the grid, and to try and live how Jesus lived 2000 years ago. What instead would it look like to take what happened 2000 years ago on the cross and to apply that to our lives today? Not because of what we do, but because of what Christ did. It's a matter of the horse and the cart. Which one goes first? Back to Willard's point, starting out who we are in Christ, we then ask, who would Jesus be if he were me, if he had my family, my background, my convictions, my perspective, my gifts, my experience? What if the invitation for me wasn't trying to turn Dominic into Jesus and failing miserably, but instead trying to become the true Dominic I was created to be in Christ?
Or what would it look like to be a teacher or a custodian or a daughter or a father or accountant or single or white or Asian or a rock climber or a Frisbee golfer or whatever, any characteristic about you in Christ and fight the temptation to either erase our identities or to elevate it. What if we allow Jesus instead to give us our identity? This changes everything changes who we see others as changes. How we see God changes how we see ourselves. It changes us. Brenan Manning says the real difference between Christians is not what one might think. The biggest difference between Christians is not liberal or conservative, Protestant or Catholic, fundamentalists or charismatic, Democrat or Republican. The real difference between Christians is between the aware and the unaware aware of what the love of God he says. When somebody is aware of that love, the same love that the father has for Jesus, that person is just spontaneously grateful.
Cries of thankfulness become the dominant characteristic of interior life, and the byproduct of gratitude is joy. And how do we become aware? I would say, by looking in the mirror first, not looking at us instead of Jesus, but looking at us through the lens of Jesus. And it's only then we see ourselves the way that God sees us as somebody deeply loved and cherished and known and uniquely created, not just with purpose, but for his purpose. Let's pray together, Lord, as we look to you to give us our identity, our names, in many ways as we look to you to learn who it is we really are. Lord, I just pray first for in many ways a hardening of our hearts to any distractions or any voices or any lies out there, which will tell us things that are untrue about us. But Lord, I also pray through your spirit for a softening of our hearts, to see ourselves as we see you, and also to see ourselves how you see us.
And so, Lord, give us your eyes to see our neighbors as loved and known and cherished. Help us to see you as being worthy of all worship and praise. Help us to see this relationship we have as a gift, as an opportunity where you not only created us and gave us our identity, but you also desire a relationship with us. But you walk with us. And so, Lord, thank you. Thank you for how you love us, how you teach us what true love is and how you give us our truest meaning and names and purpose. Pray this in the name of Jesus.