Video from Grace for Purpose
Stop Trying to Make Sense of Everything & Start Trusting God
"God isn't asking you to figure out anything but rather he wants you to trust him!" from the video introduction
Stop Trying to Make Sense of Everything & Start Trusting God
"Many of the problems that plague us as Christians begin with misplaced identity.
We forget who we are as chosen, purchased, and commissioned children of God, and think of ourselves primarily through the lens of something else — success at work, the well-being of our children, the fruitfulness of our ministry, our feelings of fulfillment, or our ability to achieve our goals and dreams. We may even see ourselves almost exclusively through our sin (we are defined by our greatest temptation or besetting struggle), or through our suffering (we are defined by the greatest distress we experience).
“Many of the problems that plague us as Christians begin with misplaced identity.”
When the apostle Peter wrote his first of two letters, he was writing to followers of Christ under siege — with relentless affliction, with persistent persecution, with tenacious temptation. Suffering screamed that they were forgotten or unloved. Their opponents shouted that they had abandoned their faith, their families, and their communities and that they’d fallen for a horrible fraud. And Satan whispered that nothing had changed, that they were who they’d always been.
As the believers were assaulted with these messages, Peter intercepts their missiles with promises from heaven: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). You are not who you were. You are not what you feel. You are not where you’re tempted to fall. Now, you are his.
1. You are not who you were.
One of the easiest ways for Satan to lure you back into sin is to make you think you never left.
Peter says, “Once you were not a people. . . . Once you had not received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10). He’s honest about how bleak things were before they found Christ, when they were dead and rotting in their trespasses and sins, when they let the passions of their flesh have their way, when they were sons and daughters of never-ending torment (Ephesians 2:1–3) — separated from Christ, cut off from his promises, “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). That was you, Peter says.." from the article: Know Who You Are Not
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