Shall we open in prayer? Father in heaven, we marvel at our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who indeed is our rescuer, our Redeemer, the one who has set us free. We pray that this morning as we meditate upon freedom and our own situations and our own persons, that your spirit would guide our meditation. In Jesus' name, amen.
My granddaughter ripped off the little phone thing. It doesn't seem to be making any difference. This morning, the title of my message is, What is My Name? And it is more in the spirit of a devotional on an individual aspect of Christian living.
And we know that a person's name can mean something, especially in the biblical Judaic tradition. It can be a very intentional meaning. For example, at the beginning of 1 Samuel, when the ark is captured, the mother of the newborn baby names the child Ichabod. Ichabod, the glory of God has departed.
At the beginning of the book of Hosea, you have Hosea, his wife, Gomer. She has two children, Lo, Rahama, and Lo, Ami. Lo, Rahama, pitiless. And Lo, Ami, not My people.
In Hosea chapter 1. And so the Bible will sometimes juxtapose the situation or circumstance along with the choice of name. My message this morning is, of course, not merely what do people call me, whether it's Larry or whatever. The sense of my title is, Who Am I?
Maybe even what am I? I think it's appropriate in this day and age because we have so much emphasis on identity. The left and the progressives put a great deal of emphasis on identity politics. And that is not good.
That is not a good thing. However, there are good approaches, shall I say, to thinking about your own identity. And there are bad approaches. The Bible, as I say, sometimes puts side by side a person's name beside their life circumstances.
And this morning we're going to consider three such people. Onesimas, and Naomi, and Peter. Peter the disciple, the apostle. Perhaps as I say, my thinking is affected by postmodernism.
Postmodernism has the general approach to, in fact, history, to our present societal circumstances of a model known as a victim-oppressor model. And I would argue that that is also not a good thing. To look at history and to look at ourselves and to look at society from the point of view of simply victim, rather victim and oppressor. Thinking of yourself as a victim.
Do you think that that is a good way of looking at yourself 24-7. Thinking of yourself as a victim in all of your interactions with other people. You don't need a degree in psychology to say it can't be. It isn't.
It isn't a good thing to go around imagining yourself to be a victim. I believe that it is self-destructive. And yet it is what we are served up every day in the media. We seem to be in a situation wherein we either adore ourselves or we loathe ourselves.
We seem to be in a situation wherein we either live in the past or we deny the past. And none of these things are good. None of these things are biblical. Especially for the Christian.
I'm reminded of a professor in this province who suggested in a particular context that a victim mentality was not healthy in that particular context. And he was fired after teaching psychology in this province for 15 years. That is an amazing thing to me. And in my interactions with that individual by email to three emails, I really felt bad for him.
And to me it is very much a condemnation of the agenda and the approach to things that we are now faced with day by day. The Christian is a person I hope that takes a very, very different view of things. It seems to me that when you look at this victim oppressor narrative, the Christian is well aware that what you have is a sinful situation between sinners and sinners. So the Christian says, why don't we get to the root of the problem?
And that's what God says. Why don't we get to the root of the problem? Sin has many, many manifestations in society, in individuals, in people groups and so on. Many manifestations.
Rather than trying to play political games at a surficial level, the Bible says, you know what we really need to address? The problem of sin. That's what we really need to address. And that seems to me to be pretty obvious as a Christian.
As I mentioned, the first person that I wanted us to think about is from the book of Philemon. And you have the account in Philemon. We won't read the whole book, which consists of one chapter. Of a man.
And although the scriptures do not say this, it appears that this man, not only, it may be that he not only fled his master, well that part is certain, he did run from his master Philemon. In this Roman world, it appears that this happened in Colossa. But that he robbed his master at the same time. And the reason that that inference seems to be valid is that the apostle Paul, in writing, Onessimus' master, former master Philemon, he says, well, if there is anything to be settled monetarily, put it on my account, he says Paul.
It will be good for you this morning to take away these thoughts, but also to go back, read the book of Philemon, read the book of Ruth, and maybe read some passages from Matthew pertaining to Peter. So we won't take the time to read up the whole of Philemon or the whole of the book of Ruth, or chapters of the Gospels pertaining to Peter. It will be good for you to do that, having yourself armed with these, perhaps, observations this morning that the Lord I believe has given me to share with you. I felt quite strongly that I should not deviate from what was given to my heart some one or two weeks ago, and I felt quite strongly that I should pursue these, pursue this avenue this morning.
So what happened to Onessimus? Well, he, as I say, he became a fugitive. We don't know the exact circumstances of, say, Philemon at the time, but Onessimus was not a believer, and he ends up in contact with Rome, and Rome is a long way from Colossa. So it is a reasonable speculation to suggest that whatever he stole from Philemon, he turned it into cash to pay for passage to Italy from Turkey, modern day Turkey.
That is a reasonable supposition. And he comes to know the Lord. We don't know exactly how he ended up in contact with Paul in prison. Perhaps he was incarcerated for a time himself.
We don't know exactly the circumstances. But the great news is, is that he came to the Lord. One might wonder, as he was traveling down the road with stolen goods, this man, whose name means profitable or useful, one might wonder what was in his heart and mind as he was fleeing. Maybe a combination of anger and guilt as he fled.
That's not a very good place to be, not a good place at all. But he became God's servant. His nominal position as a duolon in the house of Philemon became moot. There's a good word, it became moot.
How might we define usefulness? Is he going to live up to his name? Or is he going to continue to wander as a fugitive and try to find a way in this big world without the Lord? This man whose name is useful.
That was what he was faced with. And as we see in scripture, this man came in contact with Paul. And it seems that he said to himself, I cannot leave this situation as it is. I would like to go back to the big household of Philemon, where a church, a whole church met there.
I would like to go back there. I now know the Lord myself. I now know the Lord. I now know that I am really not a slave at all.
I belong to God. And I would like to make things right. I would like to restore my relationship with Philemon, all other political considerations aside, you might say. And he gets the help of Paul.
And so Paul writes this letter to Philemon. And it says there in verse 10. But now is useful to both you and to me. So it's a play on the name, the play on Onesim's own name.
And we can see that it says there, I have sent him back to you in person that is sending my very heart, who might want to keep with me so that in your behalf you might be at my service in my imprisonment, the gospel that I did not want to do anything without your consent. Paul is a man as we thought about briefly this morning, chained to a wall and is a prisoner. But he doesn't think of himself that way. He thinks of his imprisonment in higher terms, that makes those metal links irrelevant.
He thinks of himself as a prisoner of Jesus Christ. And here you have a man who was nominally a slave, who wants to be reconciled with the man the head of the house where he used to live. And so he goes back. And according to Church tradition, he eventually became the Bishop of Berea.
You may remember that in the book of Acts, the Bereans checked out the Bible and studied it. They were noble people and they studied the Bible to see if those things were true that were being preached. So it's a remarkable thing that this man went from being a fugitive carrying stuff down the road that he was going upon to try to make his way as far as he possibly could from that household. He went from that to becoming a slave of Christ, a prisoner of Christ, just like Paul really, more importantly, just like Paul in the higher sense of prisoner of Christ.
And I think it's a lovely picture for us of how higher things, the things of God really take precedent. And we should not allow the immediate circumstances to define what we are. Paul says, accept him as you would me, a lovely reconciliation between believers. So let's move to the second person for whom identity was quite a thing.
And this was actually the central person in my thoughts over the past couple of weeks. The person of Naomi, and we won't read the previous 18 verses. But by way of review, Naomi was married to Alimelek, and there was a famine in Israel in the land of Judah. And they contrary to scripture, in fact, fled.
They fled. And they brought their sons, Maelon and Kiliyong with them. And they went to the Highlands of Moab. And the Highlands of Moab have barley and wheat, and they lived there and thus escaped the famine in the land of Judah.
However, Alimelek died. And the loss of a spouse, I am sure, is something that in some sense, one never gets over. I cannot enter into it. I have, as many people here have, suffered the loss of say, a father or an uncle or a brother.
And it is a painful thing. But you know death is a reality, isn't it? We know that our lives are finite, and the lives of our loved ones are finite. And that is just the nature of life on this planet, under God.
He gives us a time. And Naomi lost her spouse. Painful thing, painful thing. But wait, she then lost her two sons.
Her two sons had married Moabite women. Oprah, or by rather, and Ruth. And Naomi said, you know, there's nothing left for me here. I'm going back.
I'm going back to Bethlehem where I'm from. I may have a connection there that I will be able to look into. So I'm going back. And with tears, Orpa decided not to go with her.
But also with tears, Ruth said, I mean, yes, Ruth said, don't ask me to leave you. And she cloned to her mother-in-law. Don't ask me to leave you. Wherever you go, I'm going to go.
My mother-in-law, I'm staying with you. And so Naomi and her daughter-in-law, Ruth, she made the journey from Moab, which is in modern-day Jordan, just the other side of the Dead Sea, near the river Arnan, which you can still find in Google Maps. And traveled back to Bethlehem. And when they saw her, they saw that her face, I guess, was different.
What has happened? Very often, a person who is overcome with grief just doesn't look the same. They don't look like they used to look. I can well believe that when they saw her, they looked at her appearance.
And they said, Naomi, what's happened to you? And she said, don't call me Naomi. Call me Mara. Call me Mara.
It means bitterness. Call me bitterness. She had lost her husband and her sons, and was overcome with a double grief. And when she saw the people of her hometown, she said, don't call me by my name, that you know me by.
Call me bitterness. That is very scary. The instruction I think for us is, it's possible for these things to happen. We know that these things can happen.
But are you going to let it define you? Naomi came right up to that place of saying, this is what I am now. This is who I am now. I am bitterness.
We may well understand the grief and the pain that she suffered. But I have good news for you. The word Mara as bitterness occurs four times in your Bible. Once in Exodus 15, and a couple of times in Numbers during the wanderings, and the fourth time is right here in verse 20 of Ruth chapter 1.
You never see it again. I have good news for you that in the book of Ruth, in those four chapters of that lovely love story, Naomi is called Naomi. All four chapters. She came up to the threshold of that kind of decision, but it does not seem that it followed through.
She was not called bitterness. She was not called Mara for the rest of her time there. She is called Naomi. And you would know if you know the book of Ruth, that Naomi perceived, she had perceived a faint light.
She had, first of all, gotten news. The things were good in Bethlehem. Proverbs 25, 25 says, like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land. And she got this little bit of refreshment of news from her hometown.
The things were good there. And so she came back to Bethlehem. And she continued to look into what the possibilities were for her daughter-in-law, Ruth. And as you know the story, the historical account, Ruth became the wife of Boaz.
Ruth and Boaz married, had a child named Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of King David. I find that to be amazing, that God in his sovereignty would turn around this kind of situation. That itself should be very instructive to us.
We may have grief. Will you let the grief turn into the bitterness that defines you? I think we would all agree that that's not a good idea. Easier said than done, when you have the actual bereavement in your life, three bereavments in your life, your husband and your two sons.
But she knew that Boaz was related to her husband, Alimelik. And she began to pursue this and give Ruth instructions as to how Ruth might make herself known to Boaz. And Boaz, as you know, became her kinsman, Redeemer. And so there is the sort of three level aspect to this account.
The first is, there is this immediate experience that Naomi could see a bit of and take some steps and take some more steps. And the result of it is a very good, immediate outcome, a very good result from entering into a situation which seemed to have a possibility. I submit to you that if she had literally said and bought into and hardwired this concept of bitterness into her soul and into her life, that she would have been blind to these possibilities. I believe that that is the way we tend to operate.
When we are governed by fear, we don't think very clearly. When we are governed by bitterness, we don't see what God might have for us to do. We don't see small opportunities that can become big opportunities. And so there is that immediacy to the return and the beginning of the realization that things can change.
And at the next level, you have the love and care that Ruth witnessed. That that kinsman Redeemer, that powerful wealthy man, in that community of Bethlehem named Boaz, took that lovely young lady under his wing and married her. So you have love. Naomi had known love.
She had certainly known love. And now there is love again. There is love in the life of her daughter-in-law. And she will have a grandson named Obed.
I find that grandchildren have been rather revolutionary in my life. The joy that a grandchild can bring, and the love that it can engender in the heart, remarkable. But that's what happened. Wonderful.
Wonderful. Wonderful that Naomi could have that. Wonderful that she had love again, that she had family again. And at the third level, do you think that Naomi's wildest, wildest imaginations she ever would have thought that Obed would be in the line of the Messiah himself?
11 or 1200 years down the road. This union produced Obed, Jesse, David. And David, of course, is the composer and writer of the Psalms and the great king and who was an ancestor of Jesus, who actually prefigured Jesus. Would Naomi ever have remotely imagined that these events, however painful, would eventually result in being used by God to bring the Messiah?
That's the highest level. But you know, in order to see that level of things, you have to have the millennial, the thousand, thousand year perspective. God has that perspective. God has the perspective of thousands, thousands of years.
We in our small lives, we naturally tend to focus on the details and the griefs and the problems and the things that can indeed, sometimes maybe even make us bitter. Well, don't let that define you. I think part of the message here is to be very, very careful about letting circumstances make you into something that God does not want you to be. And one of the remedies, or one of the antidotes, I guess antidote is the better word, to that is to remember that God really has the big picture.
It is outside of our imagination. It is completely outside of our imagination. To know all that God is going to do through our circumstances and through our lives and even through our griefs. Now we come to Peter and we're at 10 after 12 and I'll try to be efficient in my delivery of Peter and my closing thoughts this morning.
This too is an account. These are things that are known very, very well. You have in Matthew 16 the confession of Peter, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus knew that God had revealed that to Peter, to Peter's heart.
It is a wonderful confession. And upon that confession and that kind of confession, the Lord Jesus said that the church would be built. And Peter in fact was mightily used as you can read in the initial chapters of Acts. Peter has identified, I had mentioned the word identity.
Peter, rock like, rock like. Good. Sounds very encouraging, doesn't it? But we know that Peter denied the Lord, denied the Lord three times.
And what did he do? He went out and he wept bitterly, bitterly. I'm sure he did. How could he digest what he had just done?
How could he get his head around what he had just done? He knew who the Messiah was. It was the Lord Jesus himself that he had been following for three years. And he just denied knowing him.
And he went out and wept bitterly. It's a good thing the story doesn't end there. As you know, I never like using the word story when I'm referring to biblical passages. The historical account does not end there.
The eyewitness accounts do not end there. In John 21, we read of the restoration of Peter, Do you love me? Lord, you know that I love you. Feed my lambs.
Lord, do you love me? Hurts. Lord, you know that I love you. Feed my sheep.
What's behind is behind. Time to get to work. Excellent. You know, the Lord is doing something that's really, you know, revolutionary for this man.
What if the Lord had not restored Peter? I would submit to you that he would be totally useless. That he would be stricken with guilt and the bitterness of soul. That comes from failing God completely.
He wasn't left there in that place. Isn't it a good thing that he was not? And so, you know, I understand that on the computer and maybe in modern technology that it's possible for the person that's using that technology or watching that movie or something or other to pick an alternate ending. You want to see this movie with a different ending?
Just pick it. That's interesting. I've never done that. So let's talk about alternate endings.
Onesimus sells the stolen goods and keeps on wandering as a fugitive. How does that sound? Alternate ending number two, Naomi becomes Mara and never sees the opportunities and never sees love again. Number three, Peter refuses to be restored and lives in guilt for the rest of his life.
None of those are good at all. They're terrible alternate endings. So whether it is a man fleeing with some goods that you can remember or the daughter-in-law leaning from the field owned by Boaz or whether it is Peter in agony over what he has done, we can say, don't let your experiences and failures define you. Don't let them define you.
You must remember how God values you. No one values you as much as God does. God values you more than you value you and in ways that you cannot enter into. And no matter what happens, whether it is grief, whether it is failure, whether it's not your fault or is your fault, to leave things behind and let God love you and love God back.
I trust that you as a believer know what it means to have the joy of loving God. It is true that God loves you. It is perhaps an abstract idea, but it isn't. One of the ways of turning this abstract idea into a personal reality in your own heart and life is to love God back.
We sang this morning many songs about being free, about being chainless, about not being a slave anymore. Why? What's the purpose of all of that? Sounds very good.
Well, the believer knows full well, I hope, that the benefit, if you will, is the ability to worship God, to enter into the worship of God, to have the joy and privilege and pleasure, a transcendent kind of joy of worshiping God, even if you're chained to a wall. It is good to know that God loves you. It is even better to have that kind of interactive love where you know and experience loving God back. That is your second birthright.
You're born again, privileged, that you can love God back, regardless of bereavement or regardless of failure, regardless of circumstances. So I trust this morning that these few thoughts this morning will strengthen and instruct you in your Christian life, and that you will be able to think of biblical examples like these to encourage you to go on for the Lord, to serve the Lord, and to love the Lord. Shall we pray? Father, you know that we are weak and faulty people, and yet you value us.
We pray that as we worship you, that we would revel in that, that we would revel in the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, that we would exalt him, that we would exalt in him and thus be changed. Help us, Lord, in this coming week to know how to approach our lives. In a godly way, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank you for your attention.