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Who Are You? | David Fisher
Y’all ready to study the scripture together today? I heard somebody, I won’t mention his name, but Bubba Arlen, oh Arlen, he’s a whole desk in front of him now with all the stuff I make him bring. I make him bring his Bible, and he’s gotta look up verses, and now we got notebooks, he’s got a notebook, he’s gotta take notes, and he doesn’t have enough legs. He’s trying to do all that.
So I know it keeps you busy. So it’s a, y’all learning to juggle books and pieces of paper, and I’ll tell you, I appreciate it. I hope that the taking notes has been helpful for you.
I really do. I hope you’re able to start writing some things down and use it during the week, and I think when we start learning, we start learning to listen so that we can reproduce the things that we learn, we become better disciple makers. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be? Our whole theme is changing lives and making disciples through the power of the Holy Spirit.
That’s a good mission, isn’t it? It’s a good mission for the church. So that’s what we’re trying to do here, and we so thank you for being here. If you’ve got your Bible, and you’ve got it on one leg, turn it to John, first chapter of John.
First chapter of John, you might have a Bible app. We’re gonna be primarily looking at the first chapter of John, then I’m gonna have you looking at the first chapter of Luke here in just a few minutes. So in the first chapter of John, it’s all about a different John.
There’s John the Apostle, and there’s another one we know as John the Baptist. John the Baptist was the son of a priest, which makes him a priest. He’s in the priestly line.
His mama was of a descendant of Aaron, the very first high priest. So both of them, through both mama and daddy, he had priestly lines. He was a son of a priest.
He’s around 30 years old, and he’s wearing some clothes that were a little strange even for that time. He’s wearing a camel hair cloak, and he’s got a leather belt tied around him. That’s the same kind of garb that you would see with the Old Testament prophets, but there hadn’t been an Old Testament prophet for 400 years.
But he’s now out in the wilderness, and he’s crying out, and he’s preaching, and he’s baptizing people in the Jordan River, and he’s preaching a baptism of repentance that people would come and repent of their sins for the remission of those sins. And he’s doing this about 20 miles away from Jerusalem, completely separate from the temple, completely separated from all the other priests. And John the Baptist has been called, and now he’s speaking to these people.
John 1, starting in verse 19. Now this is the testimony of John when the Jews sent priests and Levites, that would be the religious people, the people who took care of the temple. When the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem, that’s 20 miles away, they’ve come to ask him a question.
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Because you’re not doing the things that we’re accustomed to seeing being done. Who are you, John? John confessed, and he didn’t deny it. He says, but I’m not the Christ.
Now they said, well, who are you? He said, are you Elijah? He says, no, I’m not Elijah. Are you the prophet? And you’re the prophet that Moses said would eventually come? He says, no, I’m not. Now, verse 22, he says, and then they said to him, who are you that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself? Verse 23, John says, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, making straight the way of the Lord, as the prophet Isaiah said.
John knew who he was. Man, it’s important for us to know who we are, to know who we are in God and who we are in Christ. How is it that he knew? Well, let’s flip back now over to Luke.
If you have your Bible, turn to the first chapter of Luke, because he didn’t just wake up when he was 30 years old and say, I wonder who I am, and he reads a Bible verse out of Isaiah and says, ah, this is me. I want you to look here in the first chapter of Luke, and we’re gonna start here with verse 15. This is where an angel has come to Zacharias, his father, who was a priest in the temple while he was serving in the temple, and the angel came to him and told him about this son that he would have, that you’re gonna bear us a son, and he’s gonna call his name John.
Verse 15, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and he’s not gonna drink wine or strong drink. It makes him the vial of a Nazarite, and he will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will also go before him, meaning the deliverer, in the spirit and the power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
This is a word of an angel, a messenger from God coming to Zacharias, the father of John, to tell him exactly who this child was gonna be, and the father didn’t quite believe it all yet. Now, how am I supposed to know it? And so the angel said, well, you’re not gonna be able to speak for the next nine months, and he didn’t. Couldn’t speak a word, and then the baby was born.
Let’s flip now over to around Luke 1, verse 76. So they brought the child now on the eighth day after he’s been born, and ask him what his name is, and he writes down on a tablet his name is John. He got that name from the angel, even though that wasn’t a family name.
He says it’s John, and as soon as he said that, his tongue was loosened, his mouth opened up, and he began to prophesy through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that was already in the child that was just born. And he gives his prophecy starting in verse 67. He’s filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied.
And I’m gonna skip down to verse 76, and he’s prophesying now about this eight-day-old child, and he says, and you, child, will be called the prophet of the highest, for you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge and salvation to his people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, with which the day spring from on high has visited us, to give light to those who sit in darkness in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of life. And the scriptures say the child grew, and he grew strong in spirit, and he was in the deserts till the day of his manifestation. He spent the next 30 years in the deserts, not in the temple places.
He spent the 30 years learning the things that the Holy Spirit wanted to teach him. And then he was finally prepared. Can you imagine what it was like to be the child named John with a mother and a father who spoke prophecies over you all of your life? I’ll tell you, I’m thankful for a mama who spoke scriptures over me.
You wanna influence your child and make them a man or a woman for God? God, you speak scriptures over your children. And it soaks in. And it soaks in.
And eventually they’ll accept those scriptures for their own. I do, if you have your Bible, you got a Bible app, it’s not too hard there, Bubba, to flip over here too. To Isaiah 40, because this is the prophecy.
This is the prophecy that was given hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before John was even born. It’s a prophecy that Isaiah gave. And we’re going, I think you’re gonna find that this sounds real familiar.
It says, comfort, yes, comfort my people. It’s Isaiah 40, verse one. Speak comfort to Jerusalem and cry out to her.
Verse down, verse three of chapter 40 says, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God and every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be brought low and the crooked places will be made straight and the rough places smooth and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Can you imagine the times that John the Baptist read this prophecy and says, God, am I in this person? And God eventually revealed to him and says, you are that voice.
You are the one. Who are you, John? You are the voice of the one crying in the wilderness. Make ready the way of the Lord.
And when he became around 30 years old, but at the same time, right before Jesus became, was baptized by him in the River Jordan, he knew exactly who he was. And all gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, all reference this prophecy from Isaiah of who John the Baptist was. He knew who he was.
And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that eventually when you see the Holy Spirit descending on someone in the shape and the form of a dove, in the form of a dove, that is the one who will be the chosen one. And when Jesus was baptized, lo and behold, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove. And he says, this is the man.
I know who I am. I’m the voice of one crying in the wilderness for this guy right here. John had become a famous, pretty famous.
And you got priests and Levites sending folks 20 miles to come see him and to come check him out. And he was gathering disciples to himself. He had disciples who were following him.
And after Jesus was baptized, he began to go out baptizing other people in the River Jordan. And these other priests and these other leaders came to him and said, hey, do you know Jesus? I mean, Jesus is doing what you’ve been doing. You know, sometimes people who preach get competitive.
Churches get competitive with each other. They shouldn’t be, but they do. And just in their natural feeling, well, they’ve got more people following.
They’ve got more people in their place. I’m gonna tell you, it’s a trap of the devil to start looking at the body of Christ like that. But they came to John the Baptist and says, he’s baptizing folks up on the Jordan River.
And you know what John says? He says, well, I think I need to go check that out and see what he’s doing. No, he didn’t say anything like that. You know what he said? He said, I must decrease.
And he must increase. Because he knew who he was. He knew who he was.
Disciples were coming to him and he saw Jesus walking up over in the book of John around chapter one, verse 29. He sees Jesus and he points to him and he says, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And you know what John’s disciples started doing? They left him and followed Jesus.
Of course, that’s what he was born to do. That was God’s mission. Just point him to Jesus.
We have people who come and visit. Let’s not gather them to ourselves. Let’s point them to Jesus.
It’s a great place to be, but I don’t want us just trying to gather people to us. I want us to start pointing them to Jesus every time. Every time.
Point them to Jesus. And when you’re confident in knowing who you are, you don’t have a problem doing that. Bless you, bless you.
Point them to Jesus. Point them to Jesus every single time. And John, very soon after that, was actually imprisoned by the leader, by the King Herod.
And circumstances weren’t really going in the way that I imagine John always imagined they would have gone. I imagine he thought he would be right there with really one of his relatives, Jesus, to be part of the ministry, to be part of the kingdom, to be part of his work. But God had other plans and had him imprisoned and eventually was beheaded.
As part of his ministry. But I’m confident John did it with a smile on his face, knowing that I fulfilled my father’s will. I have been the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way, the way of the Lord.
The truth is, when we start hitting circumstances that are unnerving to us, we have an identity problem. We forget who we are. We don’t always know who we are.
And the sad truth is that for many of us, our Christian walk is, I’m not throwing stones, because I’m speaking the same thing about myself, is that we just get aimless sometimes. We just kind of wander. We just kind of want Jesus to do some things for us and we go about our way.
We want Jesus to kind of bless our life. We try Jesus and we try religion and we try church and it kind of grafted and ask God, God kind of bless what I’m doing. And we just lose ourselves.
We just lose ourselves in relation to who he called us to be. We go through a lot of roles in life. Mothers particularly, you start off as a little girl and maybe later get to be a teenager.
You go, you’re a student, you go to school, you’re a daughter, you’re a girlfriend, you’re a fiance, then next year a wife. And before you know it, you’re a mother. And once you’re a mother, you’re a nurse.
Well, I guess after you got married, you become a nursemaid and you start helping and you’re doing all these things for other people and taking care of the home and taking care of the house. And you have children and you’ve got daycare and now you’re really taking care of children. You’re the nursemaid and your husband’s cold is a whole lot worse than your broken leg.
And you’re doing all of these things. You have all of these roles and you can look up and say, what am I doing with my life? Who am I? Same thing’s true with men. We have a job and we start thinking of ourselves in a certain profession, in a certain job.
And then the job doesn’t go well. And you get all unsettled. You don’t know who you are.
And you just kind of just start losing your way and you’re just aimless. And you’re just kind of drifting through life. And before you know it, you’re 60 years old and you’re thinking, what on earth have I been doing all my life? Anybody understand kind of what I’m talking about? We just get aimless.
Who am I? What am I? I don’t know. Depends on what day you ask me. Well, today I’m dad.
Well, tomorrow I’m grandpa. And the next day I’m going, I’m working. And somebody’s got to take care of the yard.
And so I’m the yard man. Somebody’s taking out the trash. Well, they’re supposed to take out the trash.
You know, we have all these roles and these responsibilities. And then the ones that we seem to hold onto the most get taken away from us, or they get pulled away from us, or there comes crisis in those roles. And I’m telling you, it’s unsettling for our identity because the very thing that we felt so strongly about or the thing that we put our identity in, I’m this role, I’m this position, and it’s taken away from us or moved or changed, and it just completely discombobulates us.
Maybe I’m just talking to myself this morning. I don’t know. Any of y’all ever been there? And we start losing our way because we don’t know who we are.
And I think what God wants us to understand through John the Baptist is who are you? Let’s quit looking at our natural roles. Let’s start looking at our spiritual roles. Who am I in Christ? Who am I in God’s purpose? I’m gonna tell you, that’s exactly what John did.
John could have said, well, I’m the baptizer. That’s what I do. When they came and said, who are you? He could have said, I’m Elizabeth’s son.
He could have said, I’m Zacharias’ son. You know, I was born a priest just like you. He could have said, I’m a leader of all of these disciples.
He could have said, I’m the kind of guy who wears a camel skin robe and I’ll wear a leather belt around me, so leave me alone, I’m a prophet. Did he say any of that stuff? No. He could have said, I love to eat locust and wild honey.
Would you like some? He didn’t say any of that. What did he say? He knew exactly who he was and what he was. He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Prepare the way of the Lord, make it straight. Man, he stayed on focus, he stayed on purpose. And this is what I wanna speak to you today is we need to start making sure we understand our identity in Christ of exactly who he is.
Who are you? You’re called. Who are you? You’re chosen. You are chosen.
Now understand where these phrases are coming from? They’re coming from the Scriptures. We start looking at the Scriptures in a new way. It says, how does this define me? How does this identify who I am in relation to you, God? I am called, I am a follower of Jesus Christ.
I am chosen, I trust him. I am a new creation in Christ. Who are you? I am an ambassador of Christ.
I speak his words, I speak his messages. Who are you? I’m a servant of the most high God. Who are you? I’m just a servant filled with the Holy Spirit.
Who are you? I’m just a believer being led by the Holy Spirit in every circumstance, every time. So what are you gonna do tomorrow? I don’t know. I’ll wait until the Holy Spirit leads me.
Well, don’t you have big plans? What are you gonna do to achieve? What are you gonna do to be successful in life? I wanna be led by the Holy Spirit and to be available to serve his purposes and to bring honor and glory to his name. And people in the world say, what kind of plan is that? I mean, I wanna know, what does your 401k say? How are you gonna take care of yourself when you get old? How are you gonna prepare for you and yours? You say, well, I know who I am. I’m led by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit will take care of me. Scriptures say he’s never seen those who have faith ever go hungry. I put my faith and I put my trust in Jesus Christ.
That is who I am. And I am available to serve him and to please him and to bring honor and glory to his name. That’s who I am.
And when I realize what I’m supposed to be, it humbles me because I think of all the times that I’ve wasted in doing all the things that I thought that I needed to do for my welfare and for myself and for my family and for my achievement and for my ambitions and for my plans for the future when all that God wanted me to do was to say, I want to be filled with you. I want to be led by you, Holy Spirit. That’s all he wanted.
And I say, but I’m not clean enough. He says, I’ll lead you. Well, I’ve made mistakes.
You know what? I will lead you. But I’m in a miry pit in a miry clay. He says, I can get you out of it and I’ll lead you out if you’ll just follow me.
My hope and my prayer to you here on this Mother’s Day is that God will burn in your heart who you are. I hope you’ll write that down in your notebook. Who am I? Or who are you, meaning yourself? Who am I, God? Who am I? And I pray as you start studying the scriptures and you start reading the scriptures, you will seize upon those verses that give answers to that question.
There’s a whole lot more than the ones that I’ve mentioned of who you are in Christ. But if we’re gonna be successful in the spiritual realm, if we’re gonna be successful in the ways of God, if we’re gonna be successful in accomplishing the goals for which God gave us new birth, he gave us new birth, he gave us birth so that we would serve him, we’ve been saved to serve, he’s given us life so that we would be his people to bring honor and glory to his name. And when all the earthly roles that we have come up against hardship and struggles and attacks from the devil and sometimes just attacks from our own stupid decisions, you know, the devil doesn’t do everything that we fall into.
I seem to find my way into holes all by myself. But when we do that, when we fall in the ditch, you start, my goodness, who am I? What am I doing? I hope that those scriptures, that people speak over you and the verses that you speak over yourself, that the prophecy of the Holy Spirit, the scriptures are prophecies, they’re words of the Holy Spirit for you to use to sink into your heart. We don’t read the verses, we don’t read these just so that we can be legalistic and have a check box on every verse that we’ve learned and memorized.
It’s not the purpose of it. It’s so that the Holy Spirit’s words will sink into our hearts because that’s what the whole new covenant is. That’s what the whole new promise is.
He will give us a new heart and he’ll give us a new mind and he’ll place his laws in our minds and our hearts, not just so that we will know them and we can speak them, but so that we will do them. And I’ll tell you, if we will as a body of Christ know who we are in him, we will bring him honor and glory. Isn’t that what we’re here to do? Amen.
Y’all stand with me. If this message is foreign to you in the sense that you go, I don’t know who I am, and you know that you need to put your faith and trust in Jesus, now’s a great time to do that. Say, I want to put my faith and trust in Jesus.
And we have water for baptism for those who say, I’ve messed up, I want a clean conscience. That’s what baptism is. It’s an appeal for a clean conscience so that we’ll be purified and that God will use us and make us part of his body.
Now’s a great time if you’d like to do that. But Dallas, if you’ll come up, I guess you don’t have your guitar with you, so you’re gonna hum a few bars? But I would like the elders to pray for people. I know there are people who have physical needs and we believe that God brings healing and we’re gonna pray for healing.
We’ve seen people healed and we’re gonna continue seeing people healed, not because of us, but because of the power of God in us. And if you’re one of the prayer partners, I would ask you to go over there and I’d like you to spend some time if you wanna just have, sometimes we just need God with skin on it. Somebody we can touch and somebody we can speak to and somebody we can hold and somebody who can hold us.
And so it’s a wonderful time to do that if you would like to go to one of the prayer partners. And the rest of you, I’d like you just to pray. I’d like you to spend time praying.
I’d like for you to fill these altars and if you’ll turn the lights down a little bit, please. I just want us to spend some time praying and I want you to search your soul and I want you to listen for God to speak to you. And this week, as you start making notes and continue making notes, that you start writing down, who am I? God, show me who I am because I truly wanna be your child.
Amen. Amen.