So the whole idea of this series simply has been this that you and I have to be careful who or what we allow to define our lives.

So if it's the success of the world and they say you're, you know, this out of the other, you get this recognition, that recognition, you own the best business in town, you live in the best house in the neighborhood, you've got all the money stacked away for the rest of your life and everybody says, oh man, there's such a successful whatever.

They've accomplished so much whatever they've, you know, earned and achieved whatever you got to be careful that you don't let that be the major label that defines your life. Why?

Because as great as all that can be on earth, all of that is a variable. What does that mean? It means business conditions can change.

The economy can be altered. Your ability to perform even can be changed and in a heartbeat, all of what was amazing can go away. And on the same, you know, in the same vein, you might be on the other end of the spectrum and you're like, I haven't accomplished as much as everybody expected me to or some of my dreams didn't turn in to what I hope they would be or there are a lot more deficits in the equation than there are credits in the occasion in the story today.

And for that reason, I'm labeled as someone who didn't do X or can't do X or failed at X and you can't let that label you either. The only one who genuinely can label you and me is the one who created us.

And every one of us has an origination. In other words, it wasn't just your mom and dad that decided that you were going to come to life on planet earth.

The scripture says, God, knitted you together inside your mother's womb. So thank you to all the moms for providing your womb, which was an amazing sacrifice as an incubator for the miraculous work of God to do what only God could do.

But you're not here by happenstance. You're not here by accident. You're not here, you know, just incidentally, but everyone is in this room on purpose. You were woven together with a purpose. You were created for a purpose. You were made miraculously for a purpose on planet earth.

Every one of us was in that God who wove us together knitted us together. He gets to decide who we are and what we are. And he hasn't had the final word in your self identity and self worth today. Then you haven't heard the last word yet because nobody can label us other than more powerfully than the one who formed us.

And so for these few weeks together, we've been just asking what does God say about us and not us in general, but really if I can say it, us specifically who have put our faith in Jesus.

Because what we're talking about in this series is coming into a brand new relationship with God in Christ. And that's where all of the beauty of the new identity is. It's in that relationship with Jesus.

We're not talking about some minor religious adjustment here. We're talking about a major redefining of our lives. So it doesn't matter. And I hope I can say this, it doesn't matter if you got dunked or if you got sprinkled or if you got real baptized or if you got confirmed or if you went through whatever training or you got your certificate from whatever.

I'm not what we're talking about today. We're not talking about identifying myself as, oh, well, I did whatever or my parents, Christen me, or I got baptized here or there or the other. And that's kind of my spiritual orientation. God has a lot more to say about us in our relationship with Christ than just some perfunctory religious label that we cling to to think that's who I am in God.

I'm not saying that baptism isn't essential. I'm not saying raising your kids up in faith isn't essential. Those things are massively essential. I'm just saying that God has said about you if you're a person of faith, something far more extraordinary.

And if you ask the average believer, do you know who you are in Christ? I think the answer honestly is I really don't know. Especially if you watch the way we live and you watch how we live out what we perceive to be true about us in Christ.

And so we're redefining in this series. It's revolutionary what we're talking about. It gets down to the heart of who you think you are and who I think I am. And then from that heart, it reorders everything about us. We've taken a big swing so far. We've said that in Christ we are chosen and that is the label over our lives.

So none of us in this place by faith in Christ will say I'm abandoned or I'm rejected. No, all of us were chosen by God in Christ before the beginning of the world. And so we operate out of a chosen mentality. It doesn't make us cocky. It makes us humble, but it gives us an amazing confidence in life.

We talked about how we're errors. Amen. So we're not just poppers. Thank you very much. That whole idea that we're just beggars trying to help another beggar find some bread. We're just looking for crumbs that fall from the communion table. That's not who we are. We have been made heirs of the promises of God and of the kingdom of God. We are sons and daughters of the king of the universe. We're heirs to all of God's kingdom.

We're not. So we live differently. And we give differently when we know that we're billionaires in Christ. We said that we're holy. What a radical thought that was. That's God's label over you. We'll see it when we read the text in one second.

We're not just a bunch of sinners saved by grace. We were all sinners, but we were in fact saved by grace. And in that moment our identity changed in Christ. And God gave us the gift of the righteousness of God in Christ. Jesus. We are holy people. You're like, well, I'm not acting like it. Well, that might be because you don't know that's who you are.

Because we typically act out of what we believe to be true about ourselves. And so we got to begin with some work in the mind to understand who God is made us to be. And then the last label we talked about was the fact that we're alive. And man, all of this is not possible if we're not alive in Christ.

...