Hello again, this is Dave Sherrer, and this is Kingdom Offerings. This is the podcast environment of One Hundred-Fold Ministries. So I’m grateful. I’ve heard from a few of you these past couple of weeks regarding my story that I posted here on Kingdom Offerings called The Vase. Thanks for connecting with me on that. I appreciate it.

I actually wrote that story about ten years ago when I was just in the dreaming stage about starting this ministry and hoping to come up with some fresh new ideas to communicate the ancient, deep, rich Kingdom truths that I think we sometimes lose sight of. I think sometimes the eyes of our hearts have trouble seeing what is right in front of us.

If you missed the story that I posted, The Vase, I’d invite you to go back a couple of podcasts in our archive and that’s found at 100foldministries.org. That’s 100 fold ministries, no spaces.org. And listen to both parts of that story, part one and part two. Our thoughts today will make more sense if you have that story in mind while we chat.

The Kingdom principle that’s in my mind that is embedded in this story is what some people are calling today our identity. What we put our identity or what we cloak ourselves with by way of our self-construct is how we see ourselves, how we know ourselves to be. It defines us in some ways. And weirdly, in the world today, how we see ourselves seems to determine our values.

The world uses identity politics to stereotype us, to divide us and isolate us and label us. The world uses the self-concepts that we’ve been fed by the world and by the Liar, for that matter, in hopes of gaining a market share or a polling advantage. The world wants to make you a set of self-images.

The phone, by the use of logarithms that I do not come close to understanding, your phone reads or tracks our most common interests and proclivities that we’ve punched into our phone and then feeds us back similar marketing probes. Have you seen that to be true? I imagine that the phone says to itself, “Oh, you were looking at tennis shoes.  You’ll probably need some socks to go with those shoes and maybe a new racket.” That part I mostly get, not that I like it. But then it starts feeding me new ideas, new potential self-constructs hoping to snag another purchase. I think the phone says to itself, “Well, this person seems athletic. Maybe they love the outdoors. I’m gonna send them some passes to a fitness place and some ads for fishing rods. And you know, now that I think about it, maybe this person will hit on a convertible Jeep, or perhaps I should send them a teaser on a new hot tub.”

And all of a sudden I get all these new images on my phone that are just bouncing at me. And all of these images and temptations start to become a kind of reality, most likely a slightly false reality. No, I didn’t really need a new convertible, but now that I’m thinking about it, I probably look pretty good in that new convertible.

You know, the logarithm is careful. It wants to make sure that it doesn’t present too false a reality because the phone doesn’t want me to catch on to what it’s doing to my self-construct. It wants to be just a little bit false to start with. And then it can build on that over time and eventually feed me some boldfaced lies.

So now I buy a new Jeep and a hot tub and maybe some of that spray suntan lotion so my skin darkens up a little bit and I don’t get cancer. And now I say to myself, “Well, I’m starting to look like I feel.”

So careful here! That’s as though how I look somehow establishes my value to the world. Look out here because that is a boldfaced lie from the evil one. It’s been using your innocent little phone to drop seeds of discontent and jealousy.

See, let me contrast that now with our story, The Vase. Let me offer that the Kingdom of God treats you differently, differently than the world. Rather than seeing us divided and different and independent of each other, the God of creation sees us as image bearers. All of us.

Do you remember that we, humanity, were, according to the Genesis account, made from the dust of the earth, from clay. And God gathered us into form. He breathed life into us. And we are, on that sixth day, the apex of all creation. God saying to Himself as the triune God, “This is good. This is very good”.

The triune God speaking to itself, “Let us make man, make mankind, make humankind in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the livestock and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So let me stop there. Can you see the image-bearing piece of that? God has authority over all things. And when He creates humanity, He invests in humanity that same authority over the things of the world. It’s a little God-like expression that He bestows to us as image-bearers to have dominion and authority according to the Word of God.

That passage goes on to say, “So God created man, humankind, in His own image. In the image of God, He created him, male and female. He created them.” So that’s not a small thing. He made us to be image-bearers, special, different than the rest of every other created thing. What God is saying is that we are specifically designed by God for Himself. Our identity is now in this reality.

So let me be personal. I am a 70-year-old, married, white male, and I’m an evangelical to boot. And depending on who you hang out with, that collection is either honorable or dishonorable in today’s identity marketplace.

But, because I know myself to be primarily designed by God and for God to bear His image, all those attributes take a distant second place in how I see myself. Like the vase in the story, I know that I am a priceless work of art. I am handcrafted by a master artist himself, but it’s not the size of the clay pot that defines its worth, or its form, or its color, or its usage. No, it is what fills this vessel that gives it its ultimate worth, and gives permanence.

There’s a passage in Scripture that I want to lead us to, 2 Corinthians chapter 4. It says, “For God, who let light shine out of darkness, made His light shine in our hearts, designed us to be image-bearers, to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” So that verse kind of inspired me. This living, shining water fills us, and it gives us a special kind of light. It changes us from the inside. That passage goes on to say, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us.” Again, that’s like this vase. There is a treasure of surpassing value that is inside this vase that transforms it and gives it value that is priceless in the universe.

So He’s not talking about jars of clay. He’s talking about us, human beings that were formed from the clay that now hold a treasure of surpassing value. I am that vase. Maybe you are too.

It is the treasure in us, the very Spirit of God, what the Bible calls His resurrection power, this treasure abides in us. It transforms us from something amazing, good, like that first clay pot that was created by Enoch, to something even more priceless than anything else in the universe. And that would be the vase that Enoch saw transformed when he pulled the vase out of those living waters, into that beautiful, glazed, bejeweled vase.

You see, when that living water fills us, we become the temple of the living God. He indwells us and lives in us and transforms us. Now that is something to get excited about! That kind of self-identity sustains us in times of trouble. As I’ve heard it said before, that dog will hunt.

When I was 16 years old, having never really attended church for any length of time, I learned for the first time that God loved me, not because of how I self-identified, or because of my appearance or performance. He loved me because I was made for Him and by Him for Himself. That was new information for me. Up until that point, I saw myself as one just like everyone else, kind of disposable, kind of special. But one more person among many, one more clay pot.

But when I was filled with His spirit, I became new. That Kingdom principle is stated directly in the Scriptures, where Paul is writing to the new small home churches in the city of Corinth. It’s in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. He says this, “So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view.”

We don’t look at other people, we don’t look at ourselves based on their set of self-identifying constructs. We look at them as though they were made in God’s image, that they are designed to glorify Him, and that they have amazing value.  That’s how we’re supposed to see the world.

And so that passage goes on to say, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ” (or said another way, if Christ is in anyone – that living water) “the new creation has come”.

The old is gone. The new is here,” Paul says. And he says, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us a ministry of reconciliation… and therefore we are ambassadors as though God were making His appeal through us.”

That’s Paul talking. Now me talking. Here’s an amazing thing about this. We’ve been given a new title, a new task. We’re now ambassadors. We are representatives of a foreign king who live here among a group of people who have been lied to and deceived by an evil one. And we come to bring that light that abides inside of us, that singing water, that truth that transcends all these self-identity constructs and gives us a sustaining Kingdom value.

We’ve been given a new task, and that task is to face the lies of the world’s false values, these vain promises, and instead live our lives according to this new set of values, these Kingdom values and principles. You see, the treasure of surpassing value that is in us, that gives us our value and our identity comes from a reality that gives us a contentedness the world cannot know.

There is a victorious outcome of this new identity. We become stronger than the difficult and relentless circumstances of the world because we have this sustaining strength, presence, person, abiding in us. We have a concrete hope that anchors us in the storm of life.

That 2 Corinthians passage goes on to say, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed.” Wow! Wouldn’t that be a great way of seeing ourselves? Wouldn’t that be a great way that others see us? All because we have a treasure of sustaining value that lives inside of us.

This is Dave Sherrer. We’re going to spend one more week talking about these identity issues on our next podcast. I invite you to get back to me at dave@100foldministries.org. Drop me an email and see if any of this is making sense to you and let me know what you think.

Peace to you.