Well, how do I find my identity, my self identity?

Directly or indirectly, we give that essential question all the time in the inbox.

Take for example this email from Nick, a listener and a former collegiate volleyball player.

He gave his life to competitive sports in college, and he discovered as every athlete eventually

does that his career would end.

He had ended sooner than Nick expected.

And when it did, he fell into a season of darkness.

He had failed to achieve his athletic goals, and he hadn't prepared himself for the abrupt

end unprepared to be separated from the competition, from his school, and from his teammates.

So how does a serious athlete like Nick find his self identity now?

While self identity was a theme in John Peppers' very first message in his famous sermon

series on the book of Romans, many of you know about that sermon series.

Pastor John preached through all of Romans in 225 sermons over the course of eight years

and eight months spanning from the spring of 1998 to the end of 2006, all 225 of those

rich messages are collected under the series title, the greatest letter ever written.

As we recently heard, Romans is a key to his own self identity, and in sermon number

one of his series, number one, he started with verse one of Romans as holy covered in

verse the first sermon to cover the Apostle Paul's identity and from it, our identity.

Here he is in 1998 reading that first verse.

Paul, a bond servant of Christ Jesus, Paul as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of

God.

Now, there are three phrases there.

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