Phil spoke on living your life in such away it makes it easier for others to believe in Jesus.
Please note that this recording stops after about 30 mins.
Questions for discussion are in bold.
Identity - Chosen, Loved, Saints
Introduction
• We've been looking at Identity
• It's one of the reasons the children of Israel didn't enter the promised land the first time and could have been the second time had it not been for a prostitute named Rahab
• Our identity used to be based on family background, education, race, physical attributes and maybe some other things.
• But because of what Jesus has done we have been given a new identity for free.
• The life we now live we live by faith in Jesus (Galatians 2:20). It is through faith we understand that we are now radically loved by God
• You may have defined yourself or others have done it for you, maybe a parent or a teacher a boss or some other person who has had influence in or over your life.
• God has defined us as anointed, walking in authority, adopted into His family, ambassadors for Him, part of a royal priesthood and heavenly citizens.
• Realizing this identity change is foundational to being a true disciple of Jesus as our behavior comes from our beliefs.
Are you living in the good of your new identity in Christ?
Romans 1 v 1-8 : Paul makes 3 statements about our identity
1. Chosen
• Knowing you have been chosen or called
• Illustration from being chosen for a team
• God chose you to be in Christ before the foundation of the work he has a plan for your life drawn up before you were born
• When Jesus called the first disciples it was a simple "Come Follow Me" I guess the thing was they were receptive to the call, fishermen called Simon and Andrew, and James and John, Mark 1:16-20
How do you Know God Chose you.?
2. Loved
• We sing many songs about his love and being loved by God
○ Your love never Fails
○ How he loves us
○ Good Good Father
• When you know your loved you it brings safety and security
• There is only one way to know how God loves me: Listen to what he tells me, and believe him.
Loved with a Great Love
“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world. . . . In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:4–5). He loved us before we were created or adopted.
This is what he tells us in the Bible about how he loves us. He saved us “because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave [you] in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9). Before creation he loved you like this.
Paul calls this a “great love.” And what marks it as great, he says, is that because of it, God came to me and you in our bloody, filthy, traitorous, deadness of heart, and made us alive. “Because of the great love with which he loved us, God made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). Great love made us alive. You
“To know this love, to feel this love for what it is, requires the experience of this love.” - How are you experiencing this love of God?
3. Saints
Crossing the line
Saints not Sinners:
5% Sinner v 95% Saint or do you feel that should be the opposite way round?
100% Saint -Fact
• When Jesus died on the cross we died ‘in Him’ and so we are now dead to sin and alive to God.
• We are no longer sinners who occasionally do the right thing but saints who occasionally sin.
• This means that we fight sin not by trying harder but by first recognising that sinful behaviour is no longer what we naturally do. Is this true for you?
• Discipleship is not self-help; God rescues and empowers us! One of the outward signs of this inward change is baptism in water, that all believers of the water).
• How does the realisation that you are dead to sin affect your approach to biding a disciple?
• Have you been baptised in water as a believer?
