Let's pray together.

Father in heaven, I ask now that you would make plain

the deep and wonderful connections between identity and desire.

I pray that you would awaken desires where they are missing and where they're misdirected would you put them back on yourself.

And I pray that Christ would be exalted and that we would all be strengthened, that our

ministries would be purified and refined, that the mission of our lives would be advanced as we gather in more and more people

into the joy that we have in you. Make plain, oh God, the connection between your glory and our joy in it.

I ask this in Jesus name, amen. The biblical answer to the question of human identity that has had the greatest impact on me and has had the greatest influence on my ministry is the one that goes like this.

A human being, John John Piper put your name in there just the way I'm thinking

about myself right now the way I'm thinking about you there are other answers

that are true this is a one. I believe a human being is a creature of

God with a nature designed by God to consciously display God's

greatness and his beauty and his worth.

That's what I think our fundamental identity is. We are creatures of God with a

nature designed by God for conscious, putting conscious to distinguish us from spiders and beavers who most definitely glorify God,

conscious displays of God's greatness and his beauty and his worth.

This was our essential nature in our first creation in Adam. This is our

essential nature in our second creation in Christ. What we lost is being restored, but it's the same nature

with the same design to make much of God. That's fundamentally who we are. In other words, my

fundamental identity is that I'm designed by God to display God's identity.

My fundamental nature is that I was created and recreated to display God's nature.

That's who I am. That's who you are.

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