A Crisis of Identity

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION

“The ministry of the church in contemporary America is distorted because the cultural lives of many Christians, including their deep assumptions about reality, the practice and activities that they pursue guided by those assumptions, have been decisively shaped more by modern, western culture than by the church’s own account of reality as outlined in the Scriptures. This is in part because the church has too often abandoned its necessary and prophetic task of being involved in cultural formation, in favor of a more readily acceptable task of being chaplain to the cultural status quo.”

~Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio in After Evangelism

“It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.”

~Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), English writer

“If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.”

~Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

“The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.”

~Martin Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518)

“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.”

~St. Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), one of the first followers of St. Francis of Assisi

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

~Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) in Invisible Man

“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude”

~Roger Scruton (1944-2020), English philosopher and writer

SERMON PASSAGE

Colossians 3:1-17 (ESV)

1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.