FIRST QUARTER ~ Who Am I
Lesson 1 – Who Do I Say That I Am?
Scripture: once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “God’s Messiah.” Luke 9:18-20 NIV
THE LOOKING GLASS
Denise sat glaring in the mirror. She had been sitting there for a long time; in fact, she wasn’t even aware of how much time had passed. Her mind kept going to the thought of who would be her friends in this new school. “What will people think about me?” Denise had been popular in her former school; but, now she wasn’t sure with moving to a new city and meeting new friends if she would still be popular.
Denise wondered if people would accept her values or would they make fun of her. That hadn’t mattered in the previous school because people wanted to be like her; so, no one made fun of what she believed. But what would they expect in this new place? Denise looked at her somber reflection again in the mirror and sighed. “I wonder when people meet me what they will say about me,” Denise said out loud as she gathered her things to go for her first day at her new school.
~Examine the Word~
Denise wanted to know what people would say about her. We all often wonder what people think about us. Will they like us? Will they think we are strange? This is a natural tendency. Even Jesus asked the question of what others thought about him. The difference however was it did not affect Jesus the way it affects us.
Jesus asks the question of his disciples to see if they knew the right answer. They answered that some thought he was one of the prophets that had been before and had come back. Some thought he was John the Baptist that had been beheaded. Finally, he asks, who do you think I am? Peter gave the right response; he said Jesus was the Messiah. There are some important points we can learn about ourselves from this scripture.
Jesus asked the question about what others thought about him. The first two responses were wrong. The final response was correct, He is the Messiah. This leads us to the fact that when we ask this question about ourselves, the first two responses are most likely wrong, the third one is correct. What are those three responses to the question of who am I that we give:
We often take the answer from three perspectives:
1. Who do I say that I am?
2. Who do people say that I am?
3. Who does God say that I am?
~Discovering the Truth~
Jesus knew the truth about who he was, and he wanted his disciples to also know the truth about who He was. Jesus also wants us to know the correct response about who He is. However, God knows that sometimes we can’t understand the truth about God until He helps us understand the truth about ourselves. The way that people respond to God often has to do with how they answer the three questions we listed above.
~Conclusion~
We often have many thoughts about ourselves. However, what we think about ourselves is not always in line with what God thinks about us. We can think things about ourselves because of how people mistreat us. If we have mean friends, we might even think God can be mean because he lets those things happen to us. We found out today that we sometimes can’t use our thoughts about ourselves to help us learn who we are from God’s perspective. In our next lesson, we will look at what others think about us to see if this is a good way to determine what God thinks about us.
Some areas that keep people from seeing themselves as God does are:
• Being abandoned by family/parents
• Loss of family or other loved ones
• Having been hurt or abused
• Feeling dumb, ugly, fat, or different
• Feeling like they can never be loved because others did not show them love
What other reasons can you think of?
~Additional Scriptures~
A person may think their own ways are right, but the LORD weighs the heart. – Proverbs 21:2
If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. – Galatians 6:3
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: - Proverbs 23:7a
Prayer: Lord, we do not always have the right thoughts about ourselves. Help us to have better thoughts about ourselves and who we are based on what you say that we are, in Jesus name, Amen.
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