Beyond the Spotlight: Finding Identity in God’s Design

• Identity and Self-Definition 00:00:41 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor explores how individuals define themselves through various life stages, from childhood to adulthood, noting the challenges and shifting definitions at each phase.
• Critique of Secular Identity Sources 00:04:14 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor argues that self-identity cannot be found in spouse, career, bank account, or family, and rejects the need for self-actualization or manufacturing one's own identity.
• Rejection of Nihilism and Post-Modernism 00:07:11 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor confronts the ideas of nihilism (no objective truth) and post-modernism (subjective truth) as inadequate answers to the question of identity.
• Biblical Creation and Image of God 00:09:54 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor uses Genesis 1 to explain that humans are created in God's image as divine representatives, contrasting this with evolutionary or mythological origins.
• Divine Foreknowledge and Purpose 00:16:21 ▶️ 📄
  > Using Psalm 139, the pastor illustrates that God designed individuals before birth, offering a permanent and perfect definition of self that transcends human struggle.
• Divine Design and Purpose 00:17:40 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor asserts that God designed individuals before birth, knowing them perfectly and creating them without mistake, countering the idea of meaningless evolution.
• Identity in God vs. Cultural Narratives 00:20:53 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor contrasts the 'spotlight effect' and societal pressures with the biblical truth that God cares infinitely for the individual, freeing them from the need to manufacture their own meaning.
• Human Brokenness and Future Restoration 00:29:00 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor acknowledges that the ideal of being a 'living, breathing representative' is not the current reality due to brokenness, promising to address the source of this tragedy and God's restoration in the next session.

• Sermon Illustration 00:01:04 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor describes the progression of identity formation from childhood (parents/family) through school years (peer comparison), college (self-expression vs. fitting in), career (commercial success), and later life (family roles), noting the challenges at each stage.
• Sermon Illustration 00:06:28 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor cites a quote from Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov' about the danger of lying to oneself and losing respect for others.
• Sermon Illustration 00:08:26 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor lists generational labels (Baby Boomers as sociopaths, Millennials as burnout, Gen X as slackers, Gen Z as anxious) to illustrate the universal human struggle with identity.
• Sermon Illustration 00:11:47 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor contrasts the biblical account of creation with Greek mythology, describing the latter as sordid, violent, and involving rape and bloodshed, whereas the Bible presents a beautiful, purposeful creation.
• Sermon Illustration 00:13:41 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor uses the analogy of a conquering king setting up an image/statue to remind people of his rule, explaining that humans are living, breathing images of God meant to represent Him.
• Sermon Illustration 00:21:12 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor references the 'spotlight effect' from psychology and quotes Eleanor Roosevelt and Elizabeth Gilbert to illustrate how people are overly concerned with others' opinions, contrasting this with God's infinite attention.
• Sermon Illustration 00:24:30 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor uses a rhetorical question about being the 'fittest' to debunk the 'survival of the fittest' narrative, noting that no one is actually the fittest and the evolutionary chain is broken.

• Pastoral Charge 00:14:59 ▶️ 📄
  > Return to the next Sunday service to continue the sermon series.
• Pastoral Charge 00:16:21 ▶️ 📄
  > Read Psalm 139, specifically starting at verse 13, to observe God's work in creation.
• Pastoral Charge 00:29:00 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor invites the congregation to return next Sunday to continue the study on the origin of brokenness and God's restoration.
• Pastoral Charge 00:29:27 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor encourages attendance at the next service to learn about the tragedy of the fall and God's restorative work.

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:00:00] My name is Tom Wiggs and I'm the pastor here at Eastside and I want to say that I'm so glad you clicked on this video.
[00:00:08] We have prayed that it would be a blessing and a help to you as you grow spiritually. I also want to remind you that part of our heart here at Eastside is that you would be growing in connection
[00:00:22] with a local gathering of believers. Don't let this video be a replacement for a local church.
[00:00:30] If you're in the Mooresville area, you would be so welcome to come worship with us.
[00:00:36] And now, here's the message.
[00:00:41] I want to take time this summer, and we're going to take the next eight weeks, and look at who am I?
[00:00:53] Whether we admit it or not, whether we say it out loud or not, this question swirls through everyone's minds.
[00:01:04] in fact if you were to back up as as a small child at home you find much of who you are from your parents and from your family and then you you move into school maybe elementary school
[00:01:18] middle school and you start looking around at people around you to see who you are and you kind of compare yourself a little bit and then you you move up into high school and then it gets
[00:01:31] really crazy. And you're trying to figure out what is life all about? Who are we? Who am I?
[00:01:39] Why am I here? Gender and sexuality starts to become a major part of how we define ourselves.
[00:01:49] You move into college, and if you think about that time frame, you have the weird dichotomy between that college age self-expression while fitting into a peer group. So it's kind of like, I want to be my own self, but I'm going to look just like all of those people over there. And
[00:02:09] do you remember that? Or maybe some of you are getting ready for that. And then you graduate college and you've got life all figured out, right? So you step into a career and you begin
[00:02:23] to define yourself by your commercial success, by your financial success, or your failure, and then fast forward a few years, and you're later on in life, and perhaps you might answer the who am I question, I'm a mother, or I'm a father, I'm a grandparent, and yet that brings
[00:02:50] its own challenges, its own troubles, because perhaps you look at the next generation and you wonder, why? What went wrong? Or every stage in life, there's opportunities, there's voices, there's things that try to answer the question, who am I? And so whether you're sitting here and
[00:03:22] and you're at the beginning stages. You're a teenager. You're in college. The kids have already left, but maybe you're in your middle age. Maybe you're looking back now, and perhaps you have found a measure of rest. You've settled into who you believe, this is who I am. Perhaps
[00:03:41] you found God's truth, but you look back and you say, I see others that are wrestling. They're in the middle of the struggle. They don't know. They're searching. How can I help? What can I say?
[00:03:53] Where can I point them? What? So I desire over these next several weeks to bring us into God's word and help us see that could it be that there's a deeper answer? What if there was something
[00:04:14] deeper, healthier, and truer to define who you are? You're not ultimately fulfilled by your spouse, your career, your bank account, your family of origin, or your kids. You don't have to find or manufacture your self-identity. Do you really need to reach deeper inside yourself
[00:04:41] to somehow reach self-actualization? What if your opinions of yourself change?
[00:04:53] And so who you thought you were before, you heard somebody say something different or it didn't work out the way you wanted.
[00:05:01] And so now your opinions have changed.
[00:05:03] There must be something that lasts longer.
[00:05:09] What if your self-perception was warped through inadequate parents, traumatic experiences, the self-proclaimed self-help social media gurus or authors this series i believe is going to be powerful as god's word speaks directly to us directly to the people around us and over the
[00:05:39] next several weeks god's word is going to push into these areas we're going to see how scripture how God's truth intersects with these questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What does the Bible have
[00:05:55] to say? And my desire is that over these next several weeks, we're going to see that God's truth brings light and freedom. We don't have to manufacture our identities. We don't have to search for it, but rather God gives us a beautiful answer and it brings confidence. It removes
[00:06:16] fear and the roller coaster of the self-answers that we search for and we can find rest.
[00:06:28] The quote that the guys put up earlier, it's from a classic book, The Brothers Karamazov, and it says, above all, don't lie to yourself. We try to do that sometimes. Don't lie to yourself.
[00:06:42] The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and so loses all respect for himself or for others.
[00:07:00] For these next several weeks, I pray that you will come and listen rightly. In fact, I would encourage you to confront some of the own lies that have either been said to you or that you
[00:07:11] are telling yourself as we come and see God's word. This is going to confront the idea of life that there's no meaning. You might know the word nihilism. That's the idea that there's no objective truth, there's no meaning in life, and we're all just kind of searching for our own way.
[00:07:33] That's not where scripture points us to. It also, we're going to confront the idea that it's post-modernism, if you've ever heard that idea, that your truth isn't necessarily the same is my truth. God has spoken throughout eternity and he gives us an answer that is lasting and
[00:07:57] powerful and deep for every single one of us. Baby boomers, the generation. Some of these are hurtful, but as we look at general trends and we look at identity, baby boomers have been called the generation of sociopaths. Sorry, I didn't come up with that. Millennials are called the
[00:08:26] burnout generation. Gen X started with the label of the slacker generation or the forgotten generation. Gen Z has the unenviable title of the anxious generation. Every person is seeking, trying to find who am I? Where do I fit? Where do I go from here? And if we want to understand this,
[00:08:53] then we have to go back and start at the beginning. So we're going to look at the biblical account of creation in Genesis chapter one. We're not going to read the whole thing. We're going to
[00:09:03] spend time here. We're going to go spend some time in God's word in the Psalms, and then we're going to finish up in Ephesians. But I desire for us to see that the Bible's account of creation is deep
[00:09:14] and meaningful. In fact, it gives us purpose and it awakens inside of us what God has created us for. It comforts and guides us so much better, so much better than anything we're going to find
[00:09:31] around us. So Genesis chapter 1, it will be on the screen and then also Brian read it a moment ago, but if you have your Bible, I encourage you to open it up to Genesis 1 and to find these verses
[00:09:45] and to follow along as we walk through and see what God's word says, either in your physical Bible or on your phone, however you want to do that. Let's look at God's word together.
[00:09:54] So Genesis 1 shows us that God appears. Genesis 1.1, in the beginning was God, and then he speaks and he begins creating, and we won't read all the way through, but as he creates, he creates the
[00:10:06] heavens and the earth and the waters. It wasn't evolution. God spoke it into being, and this is eminently important. We'll speak more of this in a moment. We get all the way down to verse number
[00:10:18] 26. Look at it with me. Genesis 1 verse 26. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Speaking of that Godhead, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. He says, we're going to
[00:10:37] create man in our image and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the livestock, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the
[00:10:50] earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created a male and female.
[00:11:04] he created them and God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens,
[00:11:16] and over every living thing that moves on the earth. These verses here, and we could unpack it and go beyond it, but these verses here have so much depth to them. These verses remind us that
[00:11:30] God created us on purpose for purpose. If you walk back through history, my wife is the history major. She loves history. I enjoy it some too. I'm not as good as she is. But if you walk back,
[00:11:47] especially if you look at some of the ideas about where humanity came from, there's all kinds of ideas. Obviously today we talk a lot about evolution and survival of the fittest. And if you go back into Greek mythology, there's a lot of fighting, a lot of backstabbing. In fact,
[00:12:09] humanity came from the rape of another god. And then there was the demigods and the humans are trying to overthrow the gods. And it's bloodshed, it's sordid, it's like the worst soap opera you could ever imagine. And if that was the origin of human life, then it's pretty disappointing.
[00:12:37] But the Bible tells us something different. It's not sordid. It's not violent. It's beautiful. You have eternal, powerful, infinite God saying, let me create. Let me form you.
[00:13:07] Let me make humanity. Let me form men and women and make them in my image.
[00:13:17] That phrase here, image bearer, has so much power behind it. So as scripture was being recorded in the Hebrew language that we now have translated into our English, that image bearer, it carried the idea of a statue, but these were living and breathing. When a conquering king, when a ruler
[00:13:41] would come in and want to remind people of who he was, he would set up an image so that when people would travel by this crossroads, when they would enter into a city, they would remember, that is my
[00:13:56] king. So what does God do in Genesis chapter 1? He doesn't find a big rock and start carving away.
[00:14:05] He doesn't get a tree and shape it in his likeness. Instead, he breathes out his word and he creates humanity, men and women, to be image bearers of God. You are created, according to scripture, not to struggle, not to fight, not to suffer. You are created by God, according to
[00:14:23] Genesis 1, to be a divine representative of infinite creator, God.
[00:14:35] Let that sink in for a moment.
[00:14:44] You were created with a grand purpose by a grand God.
[00:14:51] I understand that all of life doesn't look like this.
[00:14:57] We're going to talk about that next Sunday.
[00:14:59] I encourage you to come back and join us.
[00:15:01] But today, I want us to understand that our purpose, our life, our design is infinitely superior to anything you may have considered before. God didn't create us to struggle.
[00:15:21] In fact, Genesis 1 says that God put us on earth and he gave us everything on this planet and he He gave it so that we could represent him as we carefully care for and use all that
[00:15:36] he created.
[00:15:38] The goodness of God was meant to flow through his creation, to flow through us so that we would work for good, that we would enjoy good, so that we would represent the goodness, the beauty of God as we are his living, breathing representatives.
[00:15:57] Life isn't meaningless.
[00:15:58] yes in fact at the beginning of creation you had an infinitely grand purpose jump with me though to psalm 139 it'll be on the screen but i encourage you look at this in god's work this isn't just me this is god psalm 139 we're going to start in
[00:16:21] verse number 13. God says, you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame, who I am, my physical being as well as my internal being is not hidden from
[00:16:49] you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them. The days that were formed for
[00:17:04] me when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God. How vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake and I am still
[00:17:19] with you. Psalm 139 walks through and we see that God creates on purpose for a purpose. But here we see that God's word describes the fact that God designed us even before birth. We could talk
[00:17:40] about abortion and all of that, but that's another conversation. But can I just say that God knew you before you even knew yourself. When we struggle with that question, who am I? When we listen to others speaking into us and then we look around, can I remind you that God knows you as
[00:18:05] perfectly as an infinite creator only could. You were designed by God before you were born and you were wonderfully formed by God. You know, God didn't mess up with you. Inside you, outside you, around you, God did not make a mistake. Genesis 1 talked about male and female, your height,
[00:18:39] your build, your personality, your eye color, your skin color, your hair, your talents, your abilities, the family you were born into, God knows all of that. He formed you before you were in your mother's womb. He designed you perfectly just the way you are. God knows exactly
[00:19:11] what he's doing. In fact, Isaiah 64, can we look at this verse? Isaiah 64 says, but now, O Lord, you are our father. We are the clay. You are the potter. We are all the work
[00:19:24] of your hands. We don't have to find out who we are. God already knows. In fact, he created us perfectly. We look around, especially at younger ages, but then even as we get older, I wish I was
[00:19:38] skinnier. I wish I was stronger. I wish I was younger. I wish I was older. I wish I had more hair. Some people cut their hair off. Do you know God and all of his infinite goodness and all of
[00:19:56] his grace and all of his mercy and all of his love and all of his wisdom and all of his sovereignty and all of his godness, God created us and formed us just the way he desires. Again, we will come
[00:20:18] back and creation, life doesn't always look the way that we wish it would or even that we're seeing described here in scripture. And the Bible talks about that too. And we'll see that next week.
[00:20:33] But then Isaiah 1, Psalm 139 gives us an incredible promise beyond even forming us, creating us men and women, just how we look, who we are. It says that you're in God's thoughts.
[00:20:53] There's something that psychology calls the spotlight effect. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe not. But it's the idea that I think everybody's looking at me and watching me because I'm worried about me and life is generally all about me. And Psalm 139 says that
[00:21:12] God does care about you. In fact, those last two verses we read said that his thoughts of me are beyond number. I can't even count them. They're like the sand of the sea.
[00:21:30] I was curious. And so I went the ultimate place to find quotes that's always reliable. You can always trust everything it says. I looked at Pinterest. That was a joke, by the way, if you didn't get that. There's a Pinterest quote and it was pretty good. So I put it in here and
[00:21:50] obviously it's reliable, but it says, people don't think about you as much as you think.
[00:21:54] They're too worried about how other people think of them. Or Eleanor Roosevelt, you might know who she is. She says, you wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realize how seldom
[00:22:10] they do. That does bring a measure of freedom. This one, I didn't put it on the screen, but I thought it was good. This is Elizabeth Gilbert. She's an author and a journalist. Nobody is
[00:22:23] thinking about you. Nobody was ever thinking about you anyhow. They weren't. They never were.
[00:22:29] People are mostly just thinking about themselves. People don't have time to worry about what you are doing or how well you are doing it because they're all caught up in their own dramas.
[00:22:40] So don't we do this? Younger, older, middle-aged, wherever you are on the spectrum, you're trying to figure out who you are and then you're looking all around you trying to figure out what other people think. You're listening to voices speaking into you, whether it's social
[00:22:52] media, whether it's your parents, whether it's the news media, whether it's some self-help author.
[00:22:56] And yet all of it, all of it gets lost in this swirl and we try to struggle and find our way through. What I want us to see is that God's word has a better answer. You know what? You might not
[00:23:12] think about me. I might not think about you. I hope that I love you and can be a blessing and help you as you walk with God. And I hope you can encourage and help me as we live life together.
[00:23:24] But I want you to see in Psalm 139 that the infinite creator God didn't just accidentally knock over a bottle and you poured out onto this earth somewhere. Oops, I don't know how that happened. Whatever. Don't worry about it. Rather, infinite creator God has you in his thoughts
[00:23:48] infinitely. He loves you. He cares about you. And he created you exactly the way you are on purpose for a purpose. Let's start to pull this together. You're not meaninglessly evolved. I know that's the common narrative, but I want to see what God's word says. And from eternity past, God himself
[00:24:18] says that you were not an accident. You were not survival of the fittest. Because honestly, if we look around, none of us are the fittest. If you are the fittest, come let me know. I want to
[00:24:30] exercise with you so I can get more fit. It's not survival of the fittest. The links are broken.
[00:24:39] The chain doesn't make sense. No one's there to say where it came from. What happened before the big bang? Rather, scripture steps in. God speaks and he says, I made you. And I made you to be my
[00:24:57] living, breathing representative. Not to live for yourself, not to find out who you are, but rather to represent me, to work good and enjoy good for all eternity. This is the key. Whether you have struggled, whether you are struggling, or whether you know people that are searching and
[00:25:24] asking this question, this is the key. As we go forward, we're going to spend several weeks here kind of laying a foundation. And then we're going to take five weeks. We're going to have some guest
[00:25:36] speakers come in, and we're going to flesh this out in different arenas of life. What does it mean that who I am was given to me by God? And we're going to talk about that in our relationships
[00:25:49] and our marriages. We're going to talk about that for our career, our work. We're going to talk about that for our sexuality. We're going to talk about it for gender. We're going to talk about it
[00:26:02] ethnically are our forebearers, are our family of origin. What does this mean? What does Scripture have to say about this? For people that are struggling, perhaps you're sitting here this morning and you're still trying to figure out, who am I? Where am I going? What is life all about?
[00:26:23] What does the Bible have to say about it? Could it be that part of the struggle is you don't understand purpose. And God's word steps in and answers that for us. So who are you?
[00:26:44] Who did God create you to be? Manufacturing your own meaning is exhausting. You're not worthless because you're a failure. You're not unlovable. You're not defined by your looks, your financial success, or your failure. You're not more valuable because you're taller or slimmer or stronger or
[00:27:03] feel smarter than someone else. You're not special because of a degree or your looks or a title.
[00:27:10] You're not forgotten. You're not defined or doomed because of your family of origin or some significant trauma you faced. You are who God says you are. So let's pull it all together.
[00:27:27] Let's make it clear. Who are you according to God's word? Ephesians 2 verse 10. It says, for we are his workmanships created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. You were not created to fight and struggle. You were created to worship
[00:27:47] and to enjoy relationship with eternal God. You were created to be a living, breathing representative, an ambassador of God. You were created on purpose for purpose.
[00:28:05] You were created uniquely by God.
[00:28:07] You were created by God to be a beautiful representative, to be an image bearer of God, to work for good, and to rejoice in our experience of good.
[00:28:21] But that last slide, we know.
[00:28:31] We're all alive.
[00:28:34] Every single person in here knows that the beautiful picture, the beautiful story that we just saw in Scripture, is not our every moment existence so i want to call you back next sunday as we see that scripture
[00:29:00] explains and addresses and guides us in that as well where where do those dark urgings come from the crazy thoughts that flit through your head the the horrible actions that you've experienced, where does the brokenness come from?
[00:29:27] If we were created to be living, breathing representatives of God, if we were created to be working good and experiencing good, next Sunday, I want to encourage you to come join us again as we see Scripture's description of the tragedy.
[00:29:47] And then we see God's incredible gift as He is restoring.
[00:29:54] We're going to pray.
[00:29:55] but I want us to understand, I want you to walk from here knowing that you don't have to believe what everyone else tells you and you don't have to manufacture who you are, but rather God's word
[00:30:07] shows us exactly who we are created to be. Perfectly, beautifully, wonderfully, you are created in the image of God that brings freedom, that brings life. And as we continue, join us and we will see how that flows out into every area of our existence. Let's pray together.