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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

Brian Hindman

Our Prophetic Identity

Alright, well good morning again brothers and sisters.

Have you come to hear a message from the Word of God?

Our subject this morning is, I've entitled it, Our Prophetic Identity.

The message is actually found in your Bible.

I hope you brought your Bible because we'll be looking at that quite a bit this morning.

Before we begin, though, I just would like to invite the Lord to especially bless our time together as we study His Word.

So if you'll just bow your heads with me, let's pray.

Father in heaven, Lord, your people have come to hear a message from you, not from me.

And I pray, Lord, that you would bless them, you would give us the gift of the Holy Spirit to quicken and revive our hearts and minds, that we might perceive more clearly and more distinctly the message in the Word of God for each of us living today in 2018.

Identification, driver's license, Social Security card, passport, there's lots of forms of identification but I believe that it's the Bible that gives us the clearest picture of who we are, what our true identity is.

But to begin with, there's a story that came out several years ago about 2 sets of twins that were born at the same time and they were, both sets were taken to the hospital because they were premature.

This is in Colombia, the country of Colombia in South America.

Well somehow, nobody knows for sure, at the hospital there was a mix-up after just a day or 2 of the babies being there 2 of the babies were switched the mothers took home a different baby of their own they took 1 of their own and 1 that was not their own.

Both of the mothers thought that they had given birth to fraternal twins, but they had not realized because they were so young and I guess premature that they had given birth to identical twins.

Both mothers had done this at the same time, the same hospital.

This is a very interesting story as it turns out because of the 2 on the right, William and Wilbur, were raised together out by a family in the rural countryside, much poorer than were Carlos and Jorge.

Grew up in the city of Colombia, I'm sorry, Bogota, the capital of Colombia, and had much more educational opportunities and privileges.

Fast forward 25 years, and 1 day a friend of Jorge who worked as a business person at some firm, office, office firm, went to a butcher shop in Bogota.

Now, mind you, Bogota has over 8 million people.

This colleague of Jorge's went to the butcher shop and she saw what she thought was Jorge behind the counter chopping meat.

And she was surprised when she waved and tried to say hi to him and he just kind of casually said hello and just didn't act like he knew her.

And she was sure that it was him, certain that it was Jorge, that he was just having a second job or playing a game or something.

And so she took a picture of him and then took it back to her, back to work where she worked with Jorge as a colleague of his, showed it to him.

Now, both Jorge and William knew that they were twins, but like I said, they thought they were fraternal twins, not identical twins.

And so, at first he just kind of brushed it off, Jorge, and then finally they convinced him to go down to the butcher shop and see for himself.

And you can imagine his surprise and William's surprise as they saw each other and began to talk to each other and Realized a little by little as story unfolded that something and something had happened a mistake had been made They had actually been switched at birth and were actually grew up with someone that was not technically biologically their brother.

It's interesting because many scientists are actually all clamoring and psychologists to try and analyze these brothers and figure out this is a unique situation where you have genetic similarities from identical twins growing up in different places.

What is the impact of their genetics, their nature, and what is the impact of their environment?

And it's interesting because, yes, as they got together, William and Jorge had a lot of things similar that they liked to do, the way they talked, the way they acted, and the way they, just very similar, and then also Carlos and Wilbur, when they eventually came into the equation, they were also very similar in their likes and dislikes.

It's interesting how this kind of came about.

My question though for you this morning, what determines your identity?

Is it your genetics, your nature, the genes that you were given when you were born?

Is it your environment, the culture that you find yourself around, the impact and shape, the influence that has on you, is that what determines your identity?

I'm going to submit to you this morning that your true identity is found in the pages of the Word of God.

God is the 1 that identifies his people and his truth.

We're going to look at that in just a second, but I just threw in 1 other short story as we're talking about the need for identification.

This was this summer, in fact, while I was in British Columbia when I went up for my son's graduation, there was a jogger who was jogging along the beach in British Columbia, Canada.

And she wasn't paying attention where she was jogging and accidentally jogged across the border into the United States, Washington State.

Before she realized her mistake, there were some border patrol agents that came out and kind of met her and said, what are you doing here?

And so as you can see from the title of this story here, she was detained for 2 weeks for just accidentally jogging across the border into the United States before they finally were able to get everything squared away and she was able to go back to, I think she was visiting her grandmother who lived in British Columbia.

Yes, sometimes identification really, really matters more than others.

So that's what we're going to look at this morning from the pages of the Word of God, the identification that God has given to us as a people.

And we're going to begin by looking at a statement where Jesus is talking to some Jews that are there before Him in John 8, verses 31-33.

John 8, verses 31-33, notice the words of Jesus, "...then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, "'If ye continue in my word, '' what does the word continue mean?

"'If you continue in my word, "'then are ye my disciples indeed.'" I love that verse, and that's not my focus this morning, but I just had to, you continue, you start to follow and believe in the word of God.

That's what identifies you as a follower of God because you begin and continue on in his word.

And he says, and then the verse we all know in verse 32, and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." But then notice the response here of the listeners, the Jews said, They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man.

Now the Jews claimed to be descendants, and they were descendants of Abraham.

It meant something to be a child of Abraham.

A claim of Abrahamic descent meant something.

They were a descendant of the lineage of Abraham.

Notice this point also in Luke 19 in the famous story of Zacchaeus.

We all know probably the story of the wee little man that climbed up in a tree.

And Jesus met him there, went to his house.

We'll pick up the story it's actually verses 1-10, but we'll pick up the story in verse 8 it says, >>[music and reading on screen text in Hebrew and English.] He is a descendant of Abraham.

Jesus recognized he is a child, a descendant, a son of Abraham.

And then the famous verse, for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.

Jesus noticed, He recognized that He had a descent from Abraham who was considered to be the father of the Jewish nation when He was called out of the Ur of the Chaldees to start, and God started and founded a nation from him through his seed and gave him the promise through his seed.

Notice this other story also in Luke chapter 13, a few verses earlier, chapters earlier rather, of a woman who has been hunched over for 18 years." The Jews there are criticizing Jesus because He healed her on the Sabbath day.

That He gave her the healing that she had sought for so desperately for 18 years.

Notice what it says here, "...the Lord then answered him and said, speaking to those that were accusing him of breaking the Sabbath, "'Thou hypocrite, doth not each 1 of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?

Being a daughter of Abraham, She herself was a descendant of Abraham just like Zacchaeus.

Shouldn't she be released from this infirmity being a daughter of Abraham whom Satan hath bound lo these 18 years be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day.

The Jews took pride in being descendants of Abraham.

It meant something to be a Jew in that regard.

Well, I'm gonna ask the question, what was it that made the Jews so special?

Is it just their DNA, their heritage, their lineage?

What was it that really made them special to God?

And we're going to begin by discovering what did not make them special to God.

We'll first find some things that did not make them special, and then we'll identify what did make them special as we find out today our prophetic identity.

This is from Deuteronomy 7 this is the words of Moses speaking before the Israelite nation.

The book of Deuteronomy was written about a month before Moses died.

The whole book that is his farewell exhortation and admonition to God's people just before he died.

And he repeats and reviews a lot of the experiences and the history of the Israelites and how God had led them out of slavery and now on the borders of the promised land where they are.

Deuteronomy 7, it says, For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God.

The Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself above all people that are upon the face of the earth." Now watch this, the Lord did not set his love upon you nor choose you because ye were more in number than any people.

It's not because of your popularity, because you're more numerous and plentiful.

It's not because you're the largest nation on earth.

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Our Prophetic Identity

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