So there's a lot of things I'm looking forward to in 2016. We all have this list of stuff, every New Year's always the side of the resolution, and there's always the hopes of things that might happen. And if I'm completely honest, thank you, Enzi. Watch out for that guy.
If I'm completely honest, there's one thing I'm hoping is gonna happen in 2016. And some of you might roll your eyes, but I am really anticipating the discovery of the great North American primate more popularly known as Bigfoot. I believe in Bigfoot, people call me crazy, and some of you already rolling your eyes. I know for some of you, I went up a few steps in your book, and then some of you, I went down a few steps in your book right there, but I believe it's, I'm kinda crazy.
I think this is gonna be the year that it happens. There's some folks that are really hemming in on some stuff, but, and if some of you all are trying to figure out if he's being serious, I'm actually being dead serious right now. Just ask people who know me well, like there's a big foot line that I don't cross it. Trust me, don't cross it.
But I'm gonna show you something that is incredibly amazing, and also incredibly frustrating right now. Because the people who actually believe in this animal, I'm gonna show you the best bit of evidence there is out there, but there's a problem with it. But it's the 1967 footage known as a Patterson Gimlin' footage shot by two guys off of horseback on a 16 millimeter film camera, but they rented and did not know how to use. And this is gonna be pretty familiar to you in a real video.
This is gonna be pretty familiar to a lot of y'all. I've seen this footage before. And this is what's frustrating is, this is the best we have. Okay?
For people who try to point back to evidence, this is the best thing they can use, and you see what's going on right now. You see something moving, but there's a lot of problems with this footage, okay? Now first of all, that's, I searched the internet for a high quality version of this film, that's the best we could get. So we're looking off of like what chat, downloaded illegally off of YouTube two nights ago to put on the screen.
But there's problems with that footage, because it's shaky, right? It's blurry, I know Nick back there saying the problem chat is a kind of suit. But it's not a clear picture. This is what's incredibly frustrating about for people who believe in this animal and look for this footage is evidence.
It's because you only can't prove anything through it. You can't discern any truth through what's going on in that footage. We all have these things in our life that we wanna see happen, that we wanna see discovered. And some people right now are laughing at me because this is fantastical, this is laughable.
I get it, I'm talking about a forest creature. But think about this, what are the things that exist on the edges of our life? It might seem silly or unbelievable or untrue to other people, but at the pit of our stomach, we believe in this, that we're just waiting for this. And it's the very core of our being.
That's the thing that we hope to discover in 2016. There's two different things going on, like there's discovery, which is a personal thing. It's a personal validation. It's a truth that we find in our own lives.
It's a truth that we're hoping for. It's a truth that internally defines us, but it's private. When something is revealed, it's made public. There it's time for public gratifications, for people to say, oh man, okay, you weren't crazy after all.
Or wow, you really can do this. Or I didn't know this part about you. There's the private side of discovery, and there's the public side of revelation. And both those are things that we want in our lives.
So they're complicated. This image was going across Facebook this week. And I think about it a lot, when I come to terms with, what does it mean to discover something to reveal something but this is going across Facebook a bunch and it says this. You weren't born to just pay bills and I haven't even all saw this going across Facebook this week.
There's trending, okay? There's truth in that statement. It was trending as it resonated with people. Because we know that there's something that's different out there.
We know that there's something more than what we do for eight or 10 or 15 or 12 hours a day to keep a roof above our heads. Everyone is looking for something different. So I'm excited for the next five Sundays. We're in a series that's called I Am.
We're coming, I Am. And we are, and He is, about defining who we are and where's the right way to find it? Where does it mean for us to have a tremendous amount of clarity? What does it mean for us to live life with consistency?
And what does it mean for us to live life with great purpose? And so this morning we're gonna just define what purpose is. It's all we're gonna do. And we're gonna define purpose by going back to the very, very beginning.
And so we can discover more of who we are by discovering more of who God is. You'll turn your Bibles with me to Genesis chapter one. Like I said, we're going to the very beginning today. You'll be up on the screen.
You can use your phone, your tablet, if you brought a paper Bible, you can use that. But this is what this says. Then God said, let us make human beings an hour image to be like us. And they will rain over the fish and the sea, the birds and the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth.
And the small animals that scurry along the ground. So God created human beings in his own image. And the image of God he created them, male and female, he created them. So there's a tremendous amount of definition of purpose in this passage.
The first thing that's going on, if we're looking at Genesis one, we're familiar with just that basic narrative where God says, let there be light. And let there be this. And then let there be this. And let there be this.
But something very different happens on the last day where he's creating things. Instead of him saying, let there be. He instead says, let us make. It's as though a master craftsman is employing a crew of people.
And if there's a special project, he says, I'm going to give this one my direct focus and attention. Where God said that, he said, I'm going to give humans, my direct special focus attention. I'm going to make them an our own image, the image of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And God said this universally, but he also said this individually where God said, I'm going to make you in my own image.
I'm going to pay special attention to who you are. I'm going to be careful that I embody every single thing about myself inside of you. So we have a lot of questions. What does this mean to be made in the image of God?
What does it not mean to be made in the image of God? When I was a kid, people told me that God was loving and God was caring. And the best example of loving and caring I could think of was my great-grandmother, Granny. So for about three or four years, my concept of what God looked like, and I would think about this whole made image thing.
I thought God looked like my Granny. You know, to six-year-old, it kind of makes sense, loving and caring. Now look back on it now. I'm glad it's not the case.
Because Granny, I wore a Moo Moo, and I pulled chicken heads off in the backyard. Pretty sure God doesn't do that. Oh, no, it's not scary. But what does it mean to be made in the image of God then?
There's a couple of different things going on. First of all, this word for image, it means physical representation, like mirror image, example. So the things that are in God's heart, He put into our heart, the passions that He has, He put those passions into us, the abilities that He had, He chose to put them on us. He chose to create a representation Himself here on this earth.
And also, tied in with that, this is where He says, and let them have dominion, or let them have rain, depending on what translation you're reading. It's like, let me give them purpose. Let me give them something to do. And that is uniquely embodied in how He made us in His image.
Well, we can't really understand what does it mean to be made in the image of God without understanding, what does it mean for Him to give those first people a purpose and give them a job. We're gonna talk about that a bunch next week. But we can't forget that this purpose is uniquely tied into what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
And even when we fail, even when sin came into the world, God never said that things weren't good, that we weren't good. The mirror might have been, like sin might have punched that mirror and cracked that glass and distorted it. Made it blurry, made it shaky. But they're still truths to be discovered and they're still truths to be revealed inside of it.
And as God's people came together into the nation of Israel and they journeyed in the wilderness for 40 days and they came into the land that He gave them, He continued to give them an admonition where He said, be holy for I am holy. He's still asking them to look like Him, for the idea of holiness and His people being holy, He's saying continue to look and be made in my image, continue to behave in my image, continue to do the things I do, continue to care about the things I care about, continue to be in the place as I am. If you've ever read the Old Testament, you find that God has a pretty big beef with idolatry. And the issue with He has is not the fact that His people were continuing to turn away from Him and follow completely different gods.
If you really dig down into it, what He was upset about, frustrated about was the fact that they would see these other gods and they'd begin to take attributes of them and they'd begin to mix it with attributes of God and create a blurry image, shaky image. It's where the highest most beautiful thing in the world, the creator of this earth turns into a shaky video, you download off YouTube, you can't see what's going on. God's consistent call to His people was to continue to function in a way that I created you and to take advantage of the attributes and the holiness I have given you access to and continue on the purpose and the roles I give you to you. And that's kind of a hard thing to understand, it's kind of a hard thing to stomach, like what does it mean for us, that's kind of scary.
So the scariest parts in scripture to me are these places where God says, I want you to be like me, it's be holy for I am holy, that's scary to me. Paul says that four times in New Testament, he says, if you wanna follow Jesus, just follow me because I'm following Jesus. Now can you imagine telling that to someone, I think about that a lot. When someone says, I wanna follow Jesus and you're in response to me, well then just watch me and do what I do.
Like that takes some bravery, doesn't it? The good news is that God did not leave us stranded. He didn't ask us to do these things and not give us a way to see it and to envision it and to understand this purpose and understand what this looks like. That's why God came from the man named Jesus Christ, came to this earth to show us exactly what it meant to live and to dwell and to be an image of God.
So it's turned out, there were Bibles to Philippians, chapter two, they'll be up on the screen here. I didn't wanna scare you and bring two Bibles I'm using a different translation today. You've gotten worried if I had that many with me. But this is what Philippians two says, this is actually an early hymn of the church.
This is something that was corporately said or sung together. So we're starting verse five, it says this, your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the nature of a servant and being made in human likeness. And being found in appearances of man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.
But at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and heaven on earth and under the earth. And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Let's move back to the first slide on that. So we talk about this idea of image, regardless of what God says in Genesis.
We made an image of God, we are making you in our image. So Paul is talking here, we talked about Paul last week. He was a missionary, he started new churches. He wrote this letter to a church in Philippi while he was in jail.
And this way he tells him, so you look, you see right there, this word nature pops up twice. There's some interesting things you're going on here. We talked earlier about the definition, the difference between discovering and the private thing and revealing being a public thing. That's the, we see this word play right here, this first part, who be in the very nature of God, did not consider quality with God, it's gonna be grasped.
Jesus is talking about something extremely intimately. This is what his life looks like to be consistently pulling it at the Father, to be striving for clarity, to be striving for purpose. And it's a completely different word that's translated as nature again. And the word's more face, where we get our word morph from, taking the nature of a servant.
This is public revelation right here. This is not something private, this is public. It's taking on the very nature of a servant to the Greek word is slave, taking the very nature of a slave being transformed into a public revelation, to a public declaration, who the Father is. That Jesus came down from the highest of points to the lowest of where we will ever be in our life.
And we know we absolutely need him. And he did this because he wanted to show us a clear image of who his Father was. Because if we don't have a clear picture of who we were made to be, of who we were made to look like, a clear picture of who our Father is, we're gonna consistently struggle. We're gonna always be trying to define things wrong.
We're going in different directions. There's amazing things that happen when we're able to get a clear focus on God. Jesus can save us because he is God. He came to give us a clear and a consistent picture of who his Father is.
So I said this this morning, we're just gonna talk about defining purpose, defining this because we are only going to understand ourselves when we begin to understand who our God is, who our Father is. And Jesus is the person who came to show us what that looks like and the Holy Spirit was sent to us, to enable us to give us the power, to follow that admonition, to be holy for him, holy, to allow us to see God clear, to allow us to live consistent lives, that are defined by the purpose that we find inside of God. So just a couple of things for us to think about this morning is this, that our clearest understanding of ourselves will only be found when we are clearly looking into the face of God. And we can run around the bush, all we want, we can try to do that, we can try to do that.
I have so many stories, we have the time this morning, I can share of when I try to do what I thought God wanted me to do and how that did not give me a clear picture of who God was. But when I learned to trust and to deal with things and to keep focused on him, I found out who God actually made me to be and who he made me to be was a lot closer to who I thought I was than the years I spent trying to do something I was not made to do and not meant to be like. But our clearest understanding of ourselves will be when we clearly understand who Jesus is. Second thing is this, God individually made us in his own image, his giving us individual purpose.
I say for this all the time that you were the best person to reach the people that you know. God individually made us in his own image. If you want to think about God being beautiful and God being diverse and God being able to do anything, just look around the room and see how many different people were made in the image of God. God's not asking us to be his clone.
He's asking us to be his representative, his representation. And each of us will have a different way that we're able to represent that than the person who's sitting next to us. And that's all right because that's the way that he made us to be. So what unique abilities that God give you is asking you to fulfill by understanding who he is clearly.
It's awesome, I love it. And the last thing is this, it will discover the truth of Jesus. In our actions we will daily reveal that truth to other people. That what we forge in our private time with God and our struggle, what we forge inside relationships with people that we trust, what we allow to speak in our lives and we can speak into their lives.
The hard work that we do to be healthy, whole, consistent people is that private personal discovery and it's gonna play itself out in public, revealing as we show other people who God is. Saint Augustine is a very smart person who lived a long time ago. He said this and I've used this in sermons before here at Foundry. I think it's a word for us right now, but Augustine said that our hearts will be restless until we find our rest in him.
That we will be wondering that we will be listless, that we will struggle with procrastination, that we will struggle with fear. These are all elements of a broken world. And the answer's not to try harder or hustle more or be better, the answer's just to look at Jesus. The author of Hebrews said, "'To keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, "'the author and the initiator of our faith.'" As Sarah was singing earlier, the words of the old hymn turn your eyes upon Jesus came to me.
I thought the truth, they speak to this message. When turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face and the things of earth will go strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. That Jesus is big enough. To handle our problems, he's also big enough to take us along a journey of clarity and consistency.
And I'm excited about these next few weeks to continue, sharing these things with you. We're gonna have some amazing other folks I sharing with you. But this morning, just ask yourself this question. Am I seeing him clearly enough?
And if you're not satisfied with your answer, and I hope none of us are, to then ask ourselves the next question, what can I do about this? It's simple, we just look at Jesus, let's pray. God, we thank you for wanting to give us a clear picture of who you are. God, that you're consistent.
God, that your faithfulness, it's always here, that it doesn't change, that there are things that we just simply don't have to worry about, because of who you are. And God, it's our own brokenness, it's our own fears, it's in our own issues, that we have a hard time understanding that. And so what I ask this morning is for all of us just to see who you made us to be, how much you love us. God, for us to be filled with your Holy Spirit in a way that magnifies only you and decreases every single thing that distracts us, that blurs your image, that distorts your image, or that you will help us have eyes that are clearly fixed on you.
And they were sent Jesus, we pray, amen.