Discover Your True Self - You are Wanted, Part 1

Have you ever been rejected by family, a friend, maybe a mate even, or at work or at church? Do you hate walking on eggshells or finding yourself always trying to please people all the time?

If you want a break from that, stay with me. That's today on Living on the Edge. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge is an international discipleship ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Druey, and in this program, Chip begins a new series, Discover Your True Self.

It's a series that's been decades in the making. It's grown out of a very personal journey, and we all struggle with issues of self-worth and belonging. Chip's desire through the course of this series is that you'll learn how to access the power and freedom Jesus makes available to overcome those issues. Just before we get started, let me encourage you to try using his message notes while you listen. Chip's notes contain his outline, his scripture references and much more. They'll help you remember what you hear and maybe even share what you're learning.

For a quick download, just go to livingontheedge.org and click the broadcasts tab or tap fill in notes on the app. Now, if you have your Bible handy, open it now to Ephesians chapter 1, and let's join Chip for his message, You Are Wanted. What comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. There's a secret law of your soul that you will gravitate towards your image of God, and that's why getting a high, holy, clear, loving, accurate picture of Him is the greatest thing you can do for every area of your life. But the second most important thing is that you can see God accurately, but He longs for you to see yourself the way He sees you.

Let's do a little experiment. I want you to think of a picture of yourself now coming to your mind, and I want you to describe yourself just in your heart of hearts. How would you describe yourself? What are the three or four words that depict you that you think are accurate? Is it loving, caring, warm, approachable, smart, gifted, innovative, powerful, or is it lonely, inadequate, insecure, confused, fearful, lost, angry?

Are there old labels of too tall, too skinny, too fat, loser, never amount to anything? As honest as you can, how do you actually see yourself, not how you wish you did? Father, we ask now in the name of your Son and by the power of your Spirit that you will activate the gifts, our minds, and our hearts that we could hear from you today, and that as we walk out of this building by a supernatural unction of your Spirit that you'll take the written word and make it the living word and allow us, at least in some measure, Lord, in a significant measure to see ourselves the way you long for us to see ourselves. Pray that in Jesus' name.

Amen. If you pull out your notes, what we've just talked about is something psychologists call our self-image. If you want a definition of that, it's the mental picture or conception of oneself. It's a person's idea of your self-worth.

It's the composite pictures of all the mirrors. There's all kind of things. Your parents have the biggest impact on that. Authority figures, people in authority. When you're a teenager, your peers begin to greatly influence you.

Culture, media. In other words, there's all these mirrors that have told you over time who you are. And you unconsciously believe them. Some of them actually you believe things about yourself that you're not even aware of. It's a lot like walking into a fun house and there's a mirror when you walk in and you look eight foot tall, and you look at another mirror, you look eight foot wide, and you look at another mirror and you're one foot tall.

In other words, they're all distortions. Some of you had great homes. Some of you came through horrendous homes. Some of you had traumatic experiences.

Some of you were labeled early on. And all those things impact us. You have a view. It's almost unconscious of yourself, but you're living out of that. And if most of our problems are rooted in a warped view of God, I would suggest that all the rest of them are in a warped view of yourself. This isn't some academic exercise where we hope we get to the end and you can just think of yourself as wonderful and everything's great and you don't have any problems. That's not the world that we live in.

But in a fallen world, everyone has warped mirrors. I can tell you about every single one of us, you do not see yourself accurately, nor do I. But the more that you do, the healthier you become, the more you do, the more you're able to receive love and the more you're able to give love. And at the end of the day, I will tell you, there's a lot of things in life, but receiving love and giving love is all that really matters. For some, when I said, you're smart, you're warm, you're innovative, you honestly said, yeah, I think that's pretty true of me. For others, when I talked about inadequate, insecure, loser, some painful emotions, some memories came back. I have some cards that we're going to look at a little bit later and they're cards that I would say unequivocally not only transformed my wife's life and my life, but it saved our marriage.

It's a very personal series to me. My wife came from a horrendous home background and experienced rejection that I won't go into. She never heard her father say, I love you.

She never got a hug that she can ever remember. And that was just the beginning. After that, like most young girls who aren't loved well by their father, they look forward to other places that built tragedy and lots of pain in her life. And then she came to know Jesus and God loved her. And I met her a couple years later. And then a year or so after that, we got married.

And 18 months into our marriage, I'm thinking, I don't think this is going to work. She couldn't receive love. She was beautiful, smart, loving, caring, and passionate in her relationship with God. But when she looked in the mirror, she saw someone that was unworthy of love, who was a loser, who was rejected, who was absolutely unfit for anyone to care for her.

And so she couldn't receive my love or other people's. And I will tell you what, sitting in a counselor's office trying to figure that one out was painful. By God's grace, we had a counselor that wasn't just good in psychology, but he was a theologian.

He was a retired senior pastor. And he saw beyond all the psychological issues and saw that my wife had such a warped view of herself, she needed to see herself the way God saw her. And so he had her begin to write down misbeliefs that she had. A misbelief like, I need other people's approval in order to be happy.

And then at the bottom, stop sign. And then the truth, I want people's approval of me, but I don't need it. With God's approval, I'm no longer compelled to earn love and acceptance.

I'm free to be me. And then he gave her a passage about belonging. And she read it over.

For two years, we would read over these cards. Because you'll notice on your notes, there's some very dysfunctional and ugly things that happen when you have a warped view of yourself. One, it builds a sense of rejection. We all deal with rejection.

Some of you, it's a huge issue, some a smaller issue. But because we do, we become people pleasers at all cost. Some people that are overly sensitive to criticism, it's like, boy, don't you reject me too. For others, you withdraw to avoid. You know what, you just don't risk, you don't engage in certain things or certain activities because you don't want to get hurt.

Some of your greatest success, some of your achievements, some of the reason you get up earlier and you work harder and you've made it and you've achieved and everyone thinks it's so great, behind all of that is a scared person that you always have to because your whole value is based on what you do and how you appear. As we were reviewing all those cards, I thought I was being a loving, kind husband, helping my wife come through these deep issues. But when I read those cards, what I realized was I had all the same issues. I was actually getting rewarded for my dysfunction. I thought I had to please people, I thought I had to be successful, I thought I had to be an overachiever to the point that in my 20s, I ended up in the hospital through exhaustion and then again in my 30s in the first church.

I had a doctor say, you don't even have an immune system right now, what in the world are you doing? And I gave him my schedule and he looked at me and he goes, you're an idiot. To which my wife said, I've been telling you that, you just won't listen to me. So here's what I want you to know, we're going to go on a journey, I'm going to share some of those cards with you because what we're going to do is we're going to take the lies that we believe about ourselves and we're going to replace them with this is how and who God sees you. Open your notes because we have a command here.

And the command is this is not an option. Our self perception is not like wouldn't this be nice. Romans 12 verse 3 says, for through the grace of God given to me, I say to every man among you, not to think more highly than yourself than you ought to think, but to think as to have sound judgment as God has allotted to each man a measure of faith. In other words, we are commanded not to think too high, not to think too low, but we're to think about ourselves the way God sees us. That little phrase where it says a measure of faith, put a circle around it. This isn't your personal faith. Grammatically this is the faith. In other words, notice the word to think, to think, to think and sober.

All four of those are the same root word in Greek. This is a command, you've been given a measure of the faith, this is who you are in Christ. That's the big concept. When you trusted Christ as your savior, you died with him, your sins have been forgiven. The big word is you were justified, in other words you were declared legally righteous. All your sins past, present and future are forgiven. The imputed righteousness of Christ is given to you and so as a follower of Jesus, God sees you through the lens of the forgiveness and the blood of his son.

So are you ready for this? He loves you just as much as he loves Jesus. That's what the Bible teaches. It says that if any man is in Christ, any woman is in Christ, real relationship. Not in church, not in morality, in Christ. The old things passed away, behold all things become new. It's a process. But what I want you to know is, I don't think most people understand what it means to be in Christ.

What have you received? How do you see yourself? My observation to most Christians is, we so are big on justification and we should be. Oh wow, yes I am born again, I have a new relationship.

And then it kind of stops. But the average believer doesn't know that that led to being a son or a daughter. And there's a journey. And now you have a heavenly father and a new standing and you don't ever live anymore trying to earn his favor, you've already got it. You have a loving, kind, heavenly father and an elder brother, Jesus, at the right hand of the father and he wants you to live out of a love that we already have.

But getting that from here to here and out in your life, wow, that's a journey. So where do we get this accurate view of God? We could go a lot of places but I would say the book of Ephesians is probably the best that I know of. The book is a circular letter that is written to the churches in Asia Minor and the apostle Paul had been there for quite a while and what he wanted to do, it's a huge metropolitan city, a very influential city, so it's going to be read here and all the other places and what he's going to help them understand is, first three chapters, this is what you've received and this is who you are in Christ. The next four chapters, this then in light of what you've already received is how you live. And so he opens it up, very common beginning, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God to the saints, that means just the holy set apart people that have trusted Christ, who are faithful in Christ Jesus, grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So there's this general opening. Now here's what you need to get, the structure of this passage, I encourage you maybe to follow along in your Bible or your phone, whatever you use, verse three all the way through verse 14 is one long sentence. I think it's the longest one in the New Testament. And what happens is verse three is the thesis. He makes this amazing, amazing statement and all the rest of the verses in all these prepositional phrases, he's going to wind us through a journey to say all these spiritual blessings and I think he just went off.

I think the Holy Spirit just captured him and he goes, here's all that we have and he just started going, we're chosen, we're adopted, we're redeemed, we have an inheritance, we've been sealed, but here's where he starts. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with what? Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. In other words, now that you're a part of God's family, every spiritual blessing he's given to them, here's our phrase again, in Christ.

Now I need to make a quick disclaimer here. Everything I'm going to talk about from here on is written to those that are in Christ. If you have to be visiting or if you're checking out Christianity, I'm going to talk about this is how God sees those who are in Christ. This isn't true of the whole world.

Now what I will tell you is is that he's pursuing you and he wants you and he loves you and you need to hear if you would like to join his family, this is the relationship he wants for you. But this is not how God feels about everyone. The fact of the matter is is that we were all rebels. We were all hostile to God and until we understood that we needed forgiveness and we turned to him and received forgiveness through Christ, these things aren't true. But notice what he says about those of you that understood and humbled yourself and realized I need help. He says just, what's the spiritual blessing? Verse 4, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself according to the kind intention of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace which he freely bestowed upon us in the beloved.

As you look at that, you notice there's a few key words. One, every spiritual blessing begins with this, it's he chooses you. In other words, you might write in your notes, God wants me. Some of you know someone that you want to date or you want to marry. Some of you are looking for someone to fill a position and you want this kind of person.

This word is used negatively. The FBI has a top ten list that they really want and they're pursuing. If you want them, what do you do? You pursue them. Here's what I want you to know.

This is an amazing thing. God wants you. He wants you for himself. I remember as a kid, I grew up in the suburbs so it was lawn, driveway, lawn, driveway, lawn, driveway, this is a touchdown, this is a touchdown and the big kids would play and it was tackle, stupid, I know. And I was always three or four years younger and I was small and I was skinny and so they would pick up sides and I'd get down to the last two guys and it was just, here's what, choose me, choose me, choose me, I'm stupid young kid, I'll dive on the concrete, I'll make you laugh, I'll try and tackle the big guys, I'll do whatever you want, I just want to belong, I just want to be on the team. And you know that desire is in you and me, just the team's changed, don't they?

I want to be on that team, I want to be in that fraternity, I want to be in the group that lives in that section of town, I want to have, I want to be in the group whose kids go to that college, I want to be someone that when they look at me at the gym, I have that kind of body, I want to belong, I want to be wanted. Do you realize so much of our lives is doing crazy things to want to belong to other people that honestly they don't care too much about us? And God says, I want you, I care about you. You know, I hear Christians have been Christians for a long time and a series of circumstances will happen and if it's good they go, wow, it's really lucky.

Really? There's no order, there's no plan, it's just life is about chance, you were just lucky? Instead of, you know, a sovereign God orchestrated these circumstances in this way. And then there's another group that something happens and it's like God predestined that that car, that color would be in this spot and my whole world has been planned for me and I'm a robot, everything is predestined. So let me give you a good definition of predestination and how it applies to this passage. Predestined means God has determined beforehand that those who believe in Christ will be adopted in his family and be conformed to the image of his son. The theological concepts are twofold and I just want to touch on this because I don't want your mind going places rather than why this passage was written. Sovereignty of God, the scripture clearly teaches that God is all powerful, all knowing and in control from eternity past to eternity future. He knows the beginning from the end.

Right? That's just a truth, that's a reality. You read this book from the beginning to the end, God is never surprised. By contrast or actually in parallel, the responsibility of man. As you read through, scripture equally teaches that men and women are responsible and culpable for their actions. They must choose to accept or reject a relationship with God.

So it's not like everything is all lined out and your choices don't matter. We hold these two truths in tension and we do it produces a couple of things. One, reverence for God's word. When the apostle Paul who wrote all about this idea of sovereignty and responsibility, when he got done, he didn't have an argument, he broke into praise and said, oh, the depth of the riches of both the knowledge and the wisdom of God. How unsearchable are his ways and his paths beyond finding out.

And so what we know is it does a couple of things. One, respect for God's word and then humility with each other. And just all for the unsearchable wisdom of God.

Here's what I want you to get. Often when people go through Ephesians, they want to argue about is it more responsibility or is it more sovereignty. Can you imagine getting a love letter from someone overseas and arguing about now is this blue ink or black ink because I can't quite tell. And miss the point, it's a love letter. The purpose is I want you, I love you and here's the implications.

This wasn't written for people to debate. This was written for people to know that the awesome God who spoke the galaxies into existence sent God the son and he died in your place. And when he did, you cannot just be forgiven. But he wants you and whosoever will. The scripture says God is not willing or desiring that any should perish, but all would come to a knowledge of the truth. And he says Ephesians, I chose you just like I chose Israel and I chose Israel not to reject other nations.

I chose them so they would be alike to share it with other people. You've been listening to part one of Chip's message, You Are Wanted from his series, Discover Your True Self, How to Silence the Lies of Your Past and Actually Experience Who God Says You Are. Chip will be right back with his application, but before he is, I hope you'll take a second and go online or tap share and encourage others to join us for this series too. We all struggle with doubts about self-worth and value, but the facts about who we are change when we put our faith in Jesus. Chip's teaching from the book of Ephesians to help us understand who we are as believers in Christ. He explains the nature of the new creation we become and how to leave old thinking and doubts in the past. For a limited time, resources for Discover Your True Self are discounted and the MP3s are always free. To order your copy or to send it to a friend, visit us online at LivingOnTheEdge.org.

For additional information, just give us a call at 888-333-6003. Well Chip, before you get to your application, I'd like to read an email we got recently. He starts out, Dear Chip and the Loat Team, Thank you so much for the study in Ephesians chapters 1-3.

Those are the passages in our current series. He goes on, I can't express how much of a blessing it's been in my life. One of my biggest stumbling blocks is to believe and really accept that God loves me just for who I am. Maybe the biggest takeaway I have from this whole time together is that I am now living from God's approval rather than for God's approval.

Isn't that great? Could you fill people in on the resources he's talking about, Chip? Well Dave, that is our daily discipleship video series where I meet one-on-one with people and I walk them through Ephesians chapters 1, 2, and 3. Now, they're hearing me preach it on the broadcast, but this isn't preaching. This is actually going through the passage systematically, learning how to study the Bible, learning how to not just talk to God, but to hear God's voice, and literally going through the Scriptures in a way where over time you understand what the passage teaches, what it really means, and maybe most importantly, what it means to you. We did this and over 10,000 people signed up and did it with us in the fall. We've had literally hundreds of thousands of views and emails and letters like this of people who've said, I've been a Christian for a long time, or I'm a brand new Christian, or even one lady who says I came from China and I prayed to receive Christ, and now walking through this with you, I understand how God sees me. It's changed the course of my life. That's what the daily discipleship is, and I would just love to meet with every single person hearing my voice.

Good deal. Thanks. Daily discipleship with Chip is a course of 10-minute videos where Chip walks you through how to study a passage from the Bible and really hear God's voice. These sessions are designed to help you get into the practice of doing that every day. The study Chip's recommending is based on his current series, Discover Your True Self. Because you see yourself as God sees you is essential to overcoming your deepest struggles, having healthy relationships, living in freedom, and fulfilling your life's purpose. You're going to find the Daily Discipleship with Chip at LivingOnTheEdge.org on the home page.

App listeners, just tap Discipleship. As we close today's program, I want to take just a minute to ask you to really consider something. See, we're going to talk about some theology, and we're going to talk about some things about this is how God sees you.

But it could be academic. I mean, you can learn about redemption and some great doctrines and hear amazing things that you're gifted, that you've been empowered, that you've been sealed, that there's these wonderful things that are true. But if you don't embrace them, if you don't lean in, if you don't go along with me day by day and begin to ask God, Oh Lord, I want to see myself the way you see me. Do you realize that you are so shaped by what other people have told you all your life? You are so shaped every day by media and you're bombarded. And many of those messages are you don't measure up. You're not pretty enough. You're not strong enough.

You're not smart enough. And God wants you to know that He has made you specially, that He saved you. He has an amazing plan for your life, but it's going to require for you to want to experience that, to want to see it. So here's my request. Would you just pray a prayer and say, Oh Lord, I'm going to go on the journey for the next two or three weeks and I want to hear your voice. I want the mirror that I look at that tells me who I am to be the mirror of your word and the truth of your spirit.

I will tell you, it'll be the greatest investment you've made in a very, very long time. So I'll see you next time. And if you happen to miss a day, you can go online, you can download the notes, you can hear it again on the app.

Let's do this together. You'll find the message notes, Chip just mentioned in a couple of places. Online, just go to livingontheedge.org and click on the broadcasts tab. App listeners will find them by tapping fill in notes. The misbelief cards Chip's talking about throughout this series, all of his scripture references and much more are there to help you get the most out of each message. Well, be sure to join us next time. And until then, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.