Recover Your True Identity

I just wanted to let Dr. Yousef know that I prayed for his safety and I so enjoy listening to him because he's so enthused about his message because I know he loves the Lord so very much and he is born again and you can hear it in his sermons and it's just thrilling to listen to his messages from the Lord. It's very inspirational and I thank the Lord for him and I pray that he will be able to continue his messages wherever the Lord calls them. Thank you. Thank you for joining devoted listeners across six continents for Leading the Way audio with Dr. Michael Yousef. If Leading the Way has impacted your life in a special way, Dr. Yousef would love to hear about it. Call our special testimony line at 877-941-7934.

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We are ltw.org. These days, you don't need to go far to hear something about someone's identity. The culture has made identity fluid, changing with the season, often disputed, and a point of personal and even political conflict. In a moment, pastor and international Bible teacher, Dr. Michael Yousef, shares a message he's called Recover Your True Identity, taking you to the words found in 1 Peter about your identity in Christ as a child of the living God. Stolen identity has become a huge problem in America today. And those of you who have experienced stolen identity, I know many of you have said to me, what an incredible ordeal and how long and how hard you had to work to restore your stolen identity. And protection from stolen identity has become a huge business as well. But bad as it may be of experiencing a stolen identity, an identity crisis is far worse, cannot even be compared. Because you recover a stolen identity. But a loss of identity is very difficult to restore.

And those who suffer from identity crisis, you find that they flounder through life. They go from one thing to the other. They accomplish very little, if any.

They run after every show in town. They stumble from one task to the next. And they have no aim in life. In many ways, they feel like Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown said to Linus one time, he said, talking about his identity crisis, he said, you see Linus, my identity crisis goes all the way back to the beginning. He said, the moment I was born and I set foot on the stage of life, they took a look at me and they said, not right for the part. Now many people in our culture feel they're not right for the part. They feel that they don't fit anywhere, that they uncomfortable in every situation.

And so they curse through life, stumbling in the dark, looking here and there. In fact, I can tell you right now that if your identity is in your profession or in your job or in your title or in your family name or in your wealth or in your accomplishments or in your education and the string of degrees you might have or anything else, the moment you lose that thing, you suffer an identity crisis. But when a Christian sees his or her identity only in Jesus Christ, they can never lose their identity and nobody can take that away from you.

I want you to please hear me right on this one. The importance of personal identity cannot be exaggerated or minimized and I'm not doing either. But immensely more important is your spiritual identity in Christ because it will carry you in the valleys. It will carry you in the mountain tops. It will carry you in the tough days and the dark days and in the good days. It will carry you in the joys and in the sorrows.

It will carry you throughout life and take you all the way safely home to heaven. And God in his word makes it very clear that there are only two categories of people. Not three or four, a dozen, no, just two.

Listen to me. Only two categories of people. When God looks at his humanity that he created, he sees only two categories. Either unforgiven, alien, self excluded from the household of God by their sin and by their unbelief or they are children of the living God belonging to his family through faith in Jesus Christ.

That's it. And that, my beloved friend, is the identity that a Christian could never lose. According to Peter, he tells us that our identity and he refers to it as a living stone. You're identity in Christ, a living stone. He uses that in 1 Peter 2 verses 4 and 5 that we, the believers in Jesus Christ, are living stones and therefore we are connected to other living stones. We are connected above all to the cornerstone, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And that connectedness is the greatest and possibly the only antidote to both identity loss and identity crisis.

Listen to me. I've been through a lot of stuff but the one thing that kept me above all of that stuff is knowing that God loved me enough for Jesus to die on the cross in my place. Is knowing that precious blood of Christ, the Son of God, the only sinless, holy, unrighteous God-man Jesus, that that blood that was shed was shed for me to redeem me. That, my beloved friend, will give you a complete confidence in your identity in Christ. In verse 4, 1 Peter, as you come to Christ, now I'm going to stop here before I get to the rest of the verses. As you come to Christ, what is he saying here?

This is important. That's why I'm going to stop here for just one sentence and get back to the text. He indeed saying that before we came to Christ, we were nobody. I don't care how high you might be in society, how rich you are, you are nobody as far as heaven was concerned. Before we come to Christ, we're dead ducks. Before we come to Christ, we were dead in the water. Before we came to Christ, we had no real permanent and lasting identity. Before we came to Christ, we were dead stones, but then Jesus came and he's breathed in us and became living stones.

Now Peter uses a lot of figurative speech. One of these images that he uses here is that of a house. Now I'm telling you all that before I even read the text because you have to get that picture in your head, a picture of a house. Back 2,000 years ago when they were building houses, the most important part of that building is the cornerstone. It's the cornerstone. The cornerstone was the solid foundation.

If you get the cornerstone right, you get the whole house right. That is why today we see too many church that are built on an imaginary Jesus. And many a church that are built on a Jesus that is a figment of imagination of some. That is built on a Jesus who's not God the Son. Built on a Jesus who's not the only way to the Father, the only way to heaven. Built on a Jesus who is the man's creation in their imagination. Built on a Jesus who's weak and helpless. Built on a Jesus who's obedient to man. No wonder these churches are falling apart. And no matter how long they last, they will fall apart.

Listen to me. You get the cornerstone right in your life and everything will fall in place. You get Jesus there as the cornerstone of your life, as the Savior and Lord of your life and your life will be built on him.

When you discover the right cornerstone, the rest of the stones are going to fit together. Now, let's continue with the verse. Verses four and five. This house can be understood in two ways. It can be understood to be a place where the family dwells under the headship of the Father. And the house in this particular incident is a house that is dwelled by the believers, the family of God, under the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Or it can be understood as a temple in which God dwells with his people.

Only the priests were able to get into the inner sanctum of that temple. And that is why the Bible tells us that we are holy priesthood, that we are royal priesthood. In the New Testament, we do not need a priest to intercede between us and God. We do not need anybody else to intercede between us and God. Because God says everyone that turn his life and receive Jesus as Savior and Lord, he becomes a priest.

Every woman, every man, every boy, every girl who committed their life to Jesus Christ become priest. Whenever a true believer meets, there is a temple. Whenever the Lord is presiding over a group of people, there is a temple. It could be a home. It could be a Sunday school class. It could be a coffee shop. It could be an edifice like this one.

Whatever it may be makes no difference. As long as the high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ is the cornerstone, as long as the priests or the believers are meeting together, offering the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and adoration and intercession, there is a temple. And as I said, in ancient time, everything hinges on the cornerstone. If the cornerstone was strong, the building is strong. If the cornerstone is weak, the building is weak. Back then, the cornerstone was laid at the intersection of two walls. The foundational stones are placed in relationship to that cornerstone. And as the building goes up, every stone that is placed in that building is put in relationship to that cornerstone.

But there's something else I need to tell you, something very important. Why didn't the Apostle Peter say, we are bricks? He said, oh Michael, they did not have bricks back then.

Oh yes, they did. They were using bricks 2,000 years before Christ. But he deliberately chooses stones. Why? That's a deliberate choice of words here. It's a deliberate choice.

Why? Because the bricks all look the same. They all have similar measurements. They all have the same dimensions. They look the same.

They almost look identical. And beloved, listen to me, God did not mass produce his children. He did not mass produce you. Every one of you individually known to God, he doesn't expect all of us to do the same things. He doesn't expect all of us to have the same gifts. He doesn't expect all of us to do the same tasks.

No. The worst thing you can do is you try to be somebody else and not who God made you to be. When you try to do another person's task, you're going to fail. When you try to reject your own gift, try to somebody else's, you're going to fail.

No. God uniquely shaped each one of us differently from each other. And God did this for a reason.

He did this for a reason. God uniquely gave each one of us different dimension. God uniquely gave every one of us different shapes so that we can fit together. God uniquely made us so that when one is lacking something, the other one fulfills that lack. The Christian life is not meant for people to come as spectators and sit and listen and become a professional listener, come every Sunday, say, let's see what the old boy have to say, and then leave. That's not the Christian life. Now there's something else about the stones that I need to tell you, something very important.

I don't want you to miss it. You see, when the master builder lays those stones, he gets them all kind of fit together. You see, the master builder, as he picks one stone and he looks at it and he sees that he will have to chisel away the bulges in a given stone.

Sometimes the master builder has to chip away at the jagged edges of a given stone. And God uses his body to do that, to get us to fit together. In fact, God uses our living in communities, in close fellowship, in accountability fellowship, in order that we might grow more and more like Jesus. And we don't like the chipping, we don't like the chiseling, come on now, am I telling the truth?

You don't like it any more than I do. But that's the only way for us to grow like Christ. Theologians give it a big word because sanctification, what does it mean? It's just meaning every day grow more like Jesus, that's all it means. And when you're growing more and more like Jesus, you're putting down sin and put on holiness. You're putting more down sin and more on holiness. That's what happens when you live with other believers. In fact, this type of shaping, this type of sanctification, God uses in communities. That's precisely so why so many people stay away from being living stones. It's precisely why many Christians don't want to be in close fellowship with one another.

They don't want to minister to one another. It's precisely why so many people just like to go to church and leave. We've got spectators. We've got an audience.

What a tragedy. And that's why many Christians don't want to minister to one another. Because ministering to one another is hard work.

It's revealing of ourselves. It takes time. It takes efforts.

It takes commitment. But as long as your identity in Christ is missing, you will go for the easy way out. And when you go for the easy way out and staying away in the moment, the first crisis hit and you start wondering in the desert of life. I was thinking about wondering in the desert of life and I thought of a true story from the first Gulf War 1991 where a group of British soldiers were lost in the Arabian desert. And they were wandering around for hours and going in circles and didn't know where they were. And to their relief, they saw a four star American general who was in his jeep surveying the land.

Great. So one of the Brits brashly yelled out, do you know where we are? And the general was really indignant at the fact they did not address him properly as sir. He looked at them and he said, do you know who I am?

One of the Brits says, great. We don't know where we are and he doesn't know who he is. The truth is this. There are some people who refused to fit in the rightful place. They do. And that is why they refused the shaping of the master builder. And so they minimize their contacts with other stones, other living stones. Stay away, even from the cornerstone to their own detriment. The problem is they miss out on the victorious life they really do. They miss out on living a vibrant Christian life. They miss out on coming out of isolation. Not only do they miss out on being blessed, but they miss out on being a blessing to others.

Somebody says, can I really be a blessing to some? Yeah. Yeah. With all your quirkiness and all your failures, all your.

Yeah. I want you to imagine a building that's missing few stones. Think about that.

It's going to be very drafty. Every living stone belongs to the building. Now I challenge you to recapture your identity as a living stone.

To be a Christian means that you have responsibility to one another, that you have responsibility to the cornerstone, that you have responsibility to other living stones. And yes, we do all of this with all of our weaknesses and with all of our faults and with all of our inadequacies and with all of our quirkiness, with all of our idiosyncrasies. And if you think you don't have any of that, ask your spouse.

If you don't have a spouse, ask somebody as close to you. But that's the good news. God uses us in spite of these things. And we all have them. But here's the good news. You can recover your loss of identity. You can recover.

You can come out of your identity crisis. Another piece of good news here is that with all of our quirkiness, with all of our inadequacies, with all of our failures, we're still chosen by God as royal priesthood. If that does not put you on your knees in gratitude and thanksgiving, I don't know what at the sovereign choice of God. When I think of Christians who live in isolation, false piety, I couldn't help but think of how the city of Constantinople was lost to the Muslims back in the 15th century. When the Turks came and besieged the city of Constantinople, a Christian city, for over a thousand years, the beleaguered garrison, Christian garrison inside that city sent out a word to the mountains where the monks and the priests living up there in isolation. And they pleaded with him. Please come down. We are beleaguered. We need you to go around to pray with the troops, to sing hymns to the troops, to sing psalms to the troops, to encourage them and lift up their spirits. The answer came back from the mountain.

No, we're too busy spending time with God. We can't help you. And Constantinople was lost for good. May I plead with you? Don't live up in your high tower, whatever it may be. Come down. Come down. Come down to minister to others and receive ministry from others because that is the most desperate need of today because I am telling you is getting darker out there.

It's getting darker out there. And that is why the body needs the body. Don't be a spectator because you don't only need the fellowship, but the fellowship needs you. You don't only need to be blessed, but to be a blessing. Thank you for listening to Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Yusef. Do keep in mind that Leading the Way is listener supported, meaning that Dr. Yusef relies on God's provision from God's people to spread the message of the gospel. Be a part of the movement that's changing lives for eternity.

Give us a call, 866-626-4356 or ltw.org. Now that's also where you can reach out to get Dr. Yusef's new book. The Bible reveals how the early church experienced and gracefully endured severe persecutions.

And today we're also seeing a growing wave of hostility against Christians. In his new book, God's Final Call, Dr. Michael Yusef takes you to the compelling and comforting words of Jesus in the book of Revelation. You'll be challenged to faithfully run the race of faith, reclaim and renew your first love, and follow Jesus more closely and faithfully. Reorder your copy of God's Final Call by Dr. Yusef from Leading the Way today. Find out details about the life-changing content and get your copy on the way to you when you go to ltw.org, ltw.org. Get further details at that website, ltw.org. And of course, you can always speak with a ministry representative. Reach out to the Leading the Way Call Center at 866-626-4356. Well I do have to say goodbye for now, but remember that you're invited to join and gather with friends far and wide right here next time for Leading the Way. This program is brought to you by Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Yusef. Connect further with audio and video content at ltw.org or through your favorite social media platform, including YouTube, Facebook, and more.