Being a Christian
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What does Sinclair Ferguson say a Christian’s identity is in today’s culture?
You notice that's a great characteristic of the 21st century: an obsession with the self and the project of the self. Бнау Трус Христ, покали А. We are set free from that obsession to live for Him who has loved us. and to serve others that they may love him too.
Self-obsession is indeed a feature of our modern world. And yet, as you just heard from Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, to be a Christian is to be set free from our sinful love of self and to find true satisfaction in loving Jesus. Hello and welcome to this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Josh Mann, and it's so good to have you with us today. Well, we'll be continuing our series with Dr. Ferguson exploring the basics of the Christian life. Each message in this teaching series seeks to help us understand both what it means to be a Christian and how we can live for the glory of God. Stick around until the end of today's program to find out how you can receive all 12 messages from this series. But first, let's listen to Dr.
Ferguson as he considers the two characteristics that mark all true believers.
I want us now to think just a little about what does it actually mean to be a Christian? You will have noticed that one of the great crises that there is in the Western world is the crisis of identity. They say that over the last fifty years, the most common title for poetry written by high school students is the title, Who Am I? And in a way that shouldn't really surprise us. The Bible tells us who we are, right at the very beginning, Genesis chapter one, verses twenty-six through twenty-eight. That God our Creator has made us, male and female, as his image. And one of the things that has happened in secular humanism, although secular humanism has not normally understood it, is that when we get rid of that concept that we are made as and to live as the image of God, then we actually lose our fundamental identity.
And we will therefore inevitably engage in projects to try to establish identity. And that project has so failed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that nowadays governments national and local pour in millions, if not billions, of dollars to trying to help young people establish their identity. And the whole program has become so bankrupt that now in certain parts of the Western world, as a seven-year-old, you can simply declare your identity, who you are. And one has this tremendous sense that having sown the wind of denying that we are made as the image of God, it is inevitable that we reap the whirlwind. And as Christians, I'm sure, we pray that that whirlwind may come quickly and disappear quickly.
and a kind of renewed sanity may return to the world in which we live. Now we could become very disheartened by this phenomenon, and we could become moaning and groaning Christians. The thing you notice about New Testament Christians who lived in a pre Christian world is that they do not spend their lives moaning and groaning about how difficult it is to be a Christian. They seize the day, they redeem the time. And they understand against that dark backcloth of first century pagan religion that the gospel shines with a glorious clarity. And it's been to me one of the great blessings, I think, in my life since I became a teenaged Christian, that right from the very beginning I found in Scripture that God tells us as his people.
Who we really are. And this is a wonderful thing for us as we get older, isn't it, to know who we really are.
How does the Bible define who we are according to Genesis 1?
But what a wonderful thing it is also to pass on in the gospel to those who are younger. That this is something that makes a young Christian stand out in the world in which they are being reared, in the society that is so discouraging to them. They actually may be in their class, in high school or in college. one of the few young men or young women who actually know what their identity is. They know who they are. It makes for, I would imagine, a series length, if not a multi-series length, to underscore and explore all the different ways in which the New Testament helps us to understand our identity as those who have come to faith in Jesus Christ.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does Sinclair Ferguson say a Christian’s identity is in today’s culture?
0:00–4:44
2
How does the Bible define who we are according to Genesis 1?
4:44–7:57
3
Why does modern society’s “who am I?” crisis stem from losing the image‑of‑God truth?
7:57–10:44
4
What is the biblical picture of God adopting us as His children?
10:44–13:57
5
How does the New Testament describe believers as servants of Jesus Christ?
13:57–18:23
6
What does it mean to be both a child of God and a servant of Christ in everyday life?
18:23–22:40
7
How does the gospel free us from sin, self‑obsession, and bondage?
22:40–25:54