Who Does God Say You Are

On of my favorite speakers named Mike Yaconelli, once talk about Robert Fulgham’s book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and how fascinating little kids are when it comes to their identity, self worth and who they are. He said, “You can see this just by asking questions to a kindergarten class.” You ask them, how many of you guys can sing? Almost all the hands go up. What can you sing? ANYTHING! What if you don’t know the words? We’ll make ‘em up! Ask them how many of you can draw? Again, almost all the hands go up. What can you draw? ANYTHING! How about a dinosaur, riding a skateboard, down the Hover Dam? YES, how big do you want it! Ask how many can dance? Again, hands everywhere. What music can you dance to? ANY!!! Can you act in plays? YES! Can you play a musical instrument? YES! YES! YES, is the continual answer. Kids have this sense, that they can do anything.
Beyond that, you ask a group of kindergarten kids what they want to be up and there are no limits there either. They tell you they want to be astronauts, professional baseball players, doctors, ballerinas and then, even fictitious characters, like Batman. In there eyes, they can be anything. Yaconelli says this about kindergarteners, “They are confident in spirit, infinite in resources, eager to learn. Everything is still possible.”
Yet, as we grow up and we are hit by all of the messages that we talked about last week, our possibilities go away and our self worth begins to get more and more critical. This results in the need to ask the question, “Who am I?” Which includes purpose, worth, where life began and more. If I asked these same questions to you all or to a group of adults, there would probably be a handful of people raise their hands for each group. And then, the ones who do raise their hands will probably have qualifications to what they can do. “Well, um, I only sing in the shower,” “I only draw landscapes”, or “I only swing dance.”
Now, there is a small part of this process that I think is healthy, especially for the kid who wants to be Batman when they grow up, because everyone is different and there is a reality and a certain gifting for each individual person. But where it’s bad is that our culture basically has stripped everything away except for a handful of specific expectations, the list we made last week, where many of us get left in the dust.
So, what does God think of us? We’re going to do a couple of different things this week to help us answer that question. First, we’re going to take a quick look at creation and determine what we can learn there. Second, we’re going to break into groups and explore 10 different people or groups of people in the Bible who are well known and talked about by most people in a very positive way. And then third, we’ll explore what all this means for us by checking out a video clip and then a big cube…SO, lot’s of stuff to do. Here we go…
Let’s open our Bibles to Genesis 1:26-31. (vs. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Over and over again throughout the creation of the word according to Genesis 1 we see this phrase repeated. “God saw that it was good.” There are two really interesting twists though in this phrase. The first is a quick side step to our discussion but I had never noticed this before Friday so I’ll throw it out. When God separates the heavens and the earth it is the only aspect of creation