Imprinted Ministries

I completed teaching the first session of the “Excursion” for single adults at my church.  We’re using a book by Andrew Farmer, “The Rich Single Life”. Pretty well written with a great perspective on singles living to the fullest during this season of their life, investing it, rather than just sitting around waiting for the season to end. The underlying message is that as followers of Christ, we are all called to live with an undivided devotion to the Lord and His purpose no matter our marital status. Many times our marital status prevents that pure devotion for Christ to be our priority in and through our lives so that He may be cherished and viewed as our life’s greatest treasure.

Tonight’s session was on our being “Rich in Identity”, a place where I believe many of us face our greatest challenge: not allowing the world around us or the forces within us to dictate who we are. Dr. Myles Munroe has said, “If you ever want to know the purpose or function) of a thing, never ask the thing!”  The question and pursuit of who and why we are is as old as creation. We seem to pursue the “expertise” from other ‘fellow-thing’ to give us clarity of who and why we are.  The world around us tries so hard to pigeon hole us into a mold that has little to do with our true value as defined by the Creator and not by the creation or its creatures.

Essentially we are made of material both from this world and from beyond this world. Regardless of what humanistic science attempts to posit and declare as law, though man is indeed made up of stuff you can find on the Periodic Table, the core essence of man, is “extra-terrestrial” and not chemical (mind, soul, spirit). (Be careful there…I ain’t going the panspermia lunacy, where humanity came about as the result of a race of aliens from other planets who seeded this planet with their DNA) Nope I am actually referring to a much higher, significantly more dignified stock of personhood.

“Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.” Genesis 2:7

Yep…we were Mud Men until God gave us being by His breath, which contained something far more transcendent to O2. His breath not only gave life to man, but gave Him being, sentience, and even greater, divine dignity, and the ability to be in relationship with the Almighty God! When God gave us His breath, He stamped us with an extension of Himself.

Another way to look at it: think of the wealth and heritage of a child who is born into the family name Disney, Gates, Graham, Obama. Well think of the inestimable worth of those born with the descriptive, “son/daughter of the Living God!

God made us in His image, a reflection of His divine self, but through our selfishness and willfull rebellion, we sinned and marred, distorted that image, but did not destroy it. (Finite beings cannot destroy divine essence). Jesus, the perfect God-Man, offered His sinless life as the just payment and resolution of our penalty of sin against a Holy God. Now those who, by faith, trust in Christ and receive His grace, are truly resuscitated and resurrected with divine life, from spiritual death, and are given a new name and a new identity, heredity, a new priority, security, and destiny. As a born again creature of and by love, our identity is no longer dictated by what we did and who we were. Christ has forever changed that when His blood paid the adoption fee for us to become the righteous children of God.

Now, we must live in light of Whose we are, and what He did to make us His. This essence of true indentity with new heredity and heritage can become…must become… the basis for the way we see, think and live. Like Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:

“…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”