The First Phrase: I Am
Issue 026
AUGUST 8, 2018
WRITTEN BY CHAD TURNBULL
Coke, Chevy, Apple, independent, real estate, Kentucky Wildcats - these are my answers to what are apparently defining questions presented to us. Coke vs Pepsi? Ford vs Chevy? Microsoft vs. Apple? Political party? Career? Sports team? The answer to the important question - who am I? - is, so we’re told, an amalgam of our answers to these questions. Day after day we’re told we wear, drive, compute, vote, and cheer our identities.
Don’t like who you are? Buy better stuff. Jump on the bandwagon. Back a winner.
We don’t choose that consciously, of course, but it is easy to slip into it. We’re daily asked to define ourselves by our brands and our allegiances. Move into the categories, embrace the way.
But is that it really? Or, is there a deeper way to define who we are than the combination of what we do for a living, the sports teams we root for, and our political party?
We’re going to look at that question over the next few weeks. (Spoiler alert: we think there is something more and we think it is great.)
For many of us, the way we get at the answer to our identity is through a quirky little phrase:
I Am Us For Them There.
We think this phrase starts to capture who God is based on what He has told us in the Bible. We believe it is His nature.
I Am - One God, The God; Us - God’s nature is a relationship: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; For Them, There - Incarnation and Love: God so loved the world that he came to us when we could not go to him.
What does this have to do with our identity?
The first book of the Bible says that mankind was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26). So we believe we can find our deeper identity from His identity.
“When we embrace I Am as our identity, we’re saying whatever else we do - waking up, eating, working, talking, playing, resting - we do all of it in the name of Jesus. Jesus decides the way we do that. Jesus decides who we are. ”
THE FIRST PHRASE: I AM
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” - Exodus 3:13-14
Jesus echoed this phrase - and it nearly got him stoned - when he told a group of Jews, “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am!” - John 8:58
You don’t have to know Hebrew and Greek to know that a key part of what is communicated in “I Am” here is the idea is that God is declaring that he is, well, God.
This is helpful for our identity because it means we’re not. Most of us have tried that already and it didn’t work, so this is good news.
If we’re not God, then it makes sense that God decides who we are and what our purpose and defining values are. In making that statement God declared not only that He was God, but also that He was the one from whom all creation derived its identity. We were created in His image, so if we track backward to the source for our identity we eventually end at I Am. This means we don’t have to be the curator of our own identities. The maintainers of our personal brand. We can refer to the Source for this.
Now that we’ve cleared up that we’re not God (you’re welcome), Jesus becomes extremely helpful to us. A major idea of the new testament of the Bible is that we are being transformed into the image of Jesus. God is, we hope, making us more like Jesus. And the Bible says that we can understand Jesus as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15).
This shapes the first piece of our identity, from which everything else will flow. By identifying with I Am, understood through Jesus, we can say we agree to have our identity defined above all else as disciples of Jesus.
When we embrace I Am as our identity, we’re saying whatever else we do - waking up, eating, working, talking, playing, resting - we do all of it in the name of Jesus. Jesus decides the way we do that. Jesus decides who we are.
So whether you’re an Apple or PC, vote Republican or Democrat, and cheer for the Kentucky Wildcats or the teams they always beat, you can remember that those things don’t define you. Jesus defines you. And good news, he loves you like crazy!