In this special Easter episode of the Denison Forum Podcast, Dr. Mark Turman joins Dr. Jim Denison and Dr. Ryan Denison to explore the powerful themes of identity, redemption, and the depth of God’s love.
Rooted in Colossians 4, their conversation weaves together biblical insight with historical reflection—from the stories of Mary and Pontius Pilate to the legacy of Winston Churchill. Together, they consider what Easter reveals about who God is and who we are in light of his grace.
They also introduce Denison Forum’s newest resource, Who Am I?, diving into how our true identity is found not in cultural affirmation, but in Christ alone. If you’ve ever wrestled with questions of self-worth or purpose, this conversation offers clarity, hope, and a call to live with courage and compassion.
Powered by RedCircle
Topics
- (01:59): Exploring identity through Easter
- (03:14): Winston Churchill and defining moments
- (04:15): The cultural buzzword: Identity
- (09:04): Geopolitical implications of identity
- (10:43): Historical perspectives on identity
- (15:11): Biblical insights on identity
- (21:43): The gift of God-given identity
- (26:36): Easter’s revelation of God’s identity
- (31:44): Easter’s message on human identity
- (34:04): Jesus’ sacrifice in the Garden of Gethsemane
- (36:18): The depth of human sinfulness and need for redemption
- (40:29): The Nicene Creed and its significance
- (46:17): Understanding God’s identity beyond ‘God is love’
- (54:37): Living out our Christian identity
Resources
- Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters
- What does the Bible say about identity? – Part 1
- What does the Bible say about identity? – Part 2
- Identity Simplified Resource from Christian Parenting
- A book review of Mark Turman and Ryan Denison’s “Who Am I?”
- Was the cross really necessary? What does the Bible say about Easter? • Denison Forum
- Easter Resource from Dr. Jim Denison
- https://www.denisonforum.org/testimony/
About Dr. Jim Denison
Jim Denison, PhD, is a cultural theologian and the founder and CEO of Denison Ministries. He speaks biblically into significant cultural issues at Denison Forum. He is the chief author of The Daily Article and has written more than 30 books, including The Coming Tsunami, the Biblical Insight to Tough Questions series, and The Fifth Great Awakening.
About Dr. Ryan Denison
Ryan Denison, PhD, is the Senior Editor for Theology at Denison Forum. Ryan writes The Daily Article every Friday and contributes writing and research to many of the ministry’s productions. He holds a PhD in church history from BH Carroll Theological Institute after having earned his MDiv at Truett Seminary. He’s authored The Path to Purpose, What Are My Spiritual Gifts?, How to Bless God by Blessing Others, 7 Deadly Sins, and coauthored Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters and has contributed writing or research to every Denison Forum book.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Denison Forum podcast. I’m Mark the host for today’s conversation. I get to serve as executive director of Denison Forum alongside the doctors Denison, and they’re joining us this morning, Jim, our founder, and CEO, and also most importantly, cultural apologist, as well as the other, Dr. Denison, Dr. Ryan Denison, senior editor for theology. As I was getting ready for this conversation, I was just kind of pushed back, I guess, maybe by the Holy Spirit. Back to Colossians four. A couple of verses that I’d like to share with you as we get started. Devote yourselves to prayer. It says, stay alert with Thanksgiving at the same time. Pray for us. Paul says that God may open a door for us for the word to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in change. We’re gonna talk some about the mystery of Christ in the context of Easter as it comes up so that Paul says, so that I can make it known as I should. And then he says, act wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time.
Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how to answer each person. Our joy and our privilege as well as our responsibility as Christians here on the planet today is that we get to serve as ambassadors, representatives, and witnesses to Jesus, to the story of Easter and to the whole ministry that is revealed to us in scripture.
And there’s just so many good words that Paul uses here, words of celebration. He says, give, pray that God will give me a chance, give you a chance. To talk to others about this amazing story with clarity, with compassion, and also with creativity. And that’s something that we try to do in these podcasts to try to equip and inspire you to live a life that is driven by faith instead of fear.
And to give you clarity in this confusing, sometimes difficult cultural moment. So we’re gonna do that today. And again, put it in the context of Easter. Our [00:02:00] topic is we wanna talk about how Easter both reveals and informs us about identity, both God’s identity and our identity. And that’s been a big topic that we’ve been focused on around here, especially Ryan and I.
For the last year or so, we just released a new, new resource called Who Am I? What The Bible says about identity and Why it matters. You can find [email protected]. We hope you’ll check it out and that it would be useful to you. And we’ve been thinking about a lot of that, so we wanna try to take that lens.
Identity and put it, you know, into the Easter story and kind of say, what does Easter tell us about identity and also what does identity have to say about Easter in some way? Anyway, guys, that’s a big setup to say good morning. How are y’all doing? Mark, good to be with you today and
Dr. Jim Denison: so glad to get to do this with Ryan as well.
I am so blessed and so grateful
Dr. Mark Turman: here.
Dr. Ryan Denison: Ryan, how are you? Excited for the conversation. Doing well, yeah, doing
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:03:00] well. We don’t know what you guys talk about when you get, get together for family gatherings or anything, but, you know, hopefully today’s conversation is something that’ll be useful to y’all and also useful to our audience.
And so let me set it up this way. I was watching a a presentation about Winston Churchill recently. Mm-hmm. And you can find it on Netflix. It’s called Churchill at War. Told me a lot more about Churchill than I previously knew. Big focus obviously in that, around the second World War and the launching of D-Day.
And one of the things I learned was just how. Anxious Churchill was about the whole idea of the invasion, the timing of it. He feared that it might become just an absolute disaster and possibly cost him the war. And so the, the documentary I was watching called D-Day, the Defining Moment of the 20th Century, and I thought, wow, that’s, that’s pretty big when you consider some other moments that happened.
Yeah. But they might be right. They might well [00:04:00] be right in many ways. But it also made me think about how Easter, which is coming up April 20th this year Easter is the defining moment of all history. And we wanna try to dive into that in a particular way. Jim, I wanted to kind of get things started today by bringing in this word identity, which is so pervasive.
It’s kind of a buzzword of the culture. You and I had a conversation going back two years now with our friend Chris Brooks. And he said in that conversation that we had with him, that people are asking in big ways, anthropological questions. Why do you think identity is such a big topic for our culture?
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s a great question, and I think Chris is right about the anthropological nature of the conversation that we’re having here. I think it really, at the end of the day, you’ve gotta make a binary decision. I’m going to understand the world through the prism and the lens of what I think about the world, or what God thinks about the world, what I in humans.
In other words, think about this creation [00:05:00] which we find ourselves, and I’m gonna live horizontally, or I’m gonna think about this in the context of what God says and what scripture reveals. And I’m gonna look at the world vertically. If I’m going to discount the vertical, which our secular culture does on so many levels, even those that go to church on Sunday, but divorce Sunday from Monday, and spiritual from secular and religion from the real world and kind of the cultural Christianity that we talk about a lot.
Not to mention those that don’t do any of that, that don’t pray, that don’t read scripture, that don’t worship. If we’re gonna come at the world that way, I’m purely a horizontal, natural versus supernatural sort of way of doing this. There’s no north on that compass. There’s no way to navigate that, that has some objective authority to it.
So we’re left to figure it out on our own. And at the end of the day, we kind of decide for ourselves who I am and therefore what my identity is. And once I get to make that decision, then that goes in every direction. I can make that decision about my sexuality and my gender. I can make that decision about marriage and who I marry, how many people I [00:06:00] marry, and what gender or sex of the individual with whom I marry.
I can make that decision about my own body, so to speak, in the context of abortion and euthanasia really at every level. The things that the culture’s debating and so embroiled around right now has to do with making that decision that there is no north on the compass but mine. That there is no definition of truth except mine, and therefore identity is what I determine it to be, which is fine for me until it collides with yours.
Hmm. And the day your identity is not my identity. What do we do? That’s the challenge and it goes every direction in society and I think it explains so much of what we see in the Daily news. That’s why I’m so glad you guys wrote the book. You did, because it is such a pervasive and fundamental issue in understanding the world in which we live.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. That, that kind of, as I’ve heard you say it before, that idea that history starts with me. Yeah. And and, and it just, it seems to be kind of a, a wild and crazy race in some [00:07:00] ways. Which kinda what you said there at the end, Jim, kind of relates to the thing I wanted to follow up with Ryan about, which is why does this whole conversation of identity become so controversial?
Hmm. Ryan, what, what’s your thought? How, what’s, what’s driving all of the controversy around this?
Dr. Ryan Denison: I think, like my dad said, so much of it goes back to the idea that we understand we need an identity and there’s something God created in us that strives for an identity. And so if we’re not gonna find it in God, then we have to find it in something else.
We can’t just give up on the concept. And when that happens, it does. I think that’s why you see toleration as such an important virtue in our culture today. Because if you can’t base your identity in something objective, then the, the best we can do as a culture is to simply say, we’re gonna tolerate everybody and we’re gonna tolerate everybody’s identities.
We’re gonna ignore the fact that there is, that arguments are gonna happen. We’re gonna ignore the fact that [00:08:00] these things are, these various self-perceptions are incompatible with each other. And we’re just gonna say, you do you and I’ll do me and we’ll just be at peace. And in some ways that’s admirable because if you.
Going to have the objective identity we can find in God if you’re gonna give up on that toleration, really is the best we can do. And so the culture, I think on some levels recognize that. But at the same time, one of, one of the things I’m excited about is that I think we’re also seeing in the culture growing recognition that it’s not enough.
And I, I don’t think it ever has been, but in the past there’s been so much social pressure on simply ignoring that fact and accepting other people’s definitions of who they are. That the culture by and large has been unwilling to have the conversation or unwilling to really stand up for something more.
And I think that’s what we’re starting to see, and that’s why identity is becoming increasingly controversial. Sort of subject is, I think in large part because more people are waking up to the fact that these are conversations we need to have [00:09:00] and the existing cultural perspective just isn’t good enough.
Hmm. Yes. And Mark,
Dr. Jim Denison: if I could add one thing to that very quickly, just to kind of explain why this is such a geopolitical issue as well as personal issue. The war Russia is engaged in right now is either with Ukraine or the Ukraine, if you call it the Ukraine, with a definite article, you’re describing Ukraine as a state as opposed to a nation, which Russia alleges has always historically been part of Russia.
If you refer to it as Ukraine, you’re identifying it as a standalone geopolitical entity, a nation which deserves independence from Russia. Those are two completely different understandings of the identity of that geopolitical reality. And the whole reason the war is happening right now is because Putin claims it is the Ukraine, the Ukrainians claim.
It is. Ukraine and this whole idea that Ryan’s talking about, if tolerance you do you I do me breaks down. When the zero sum game comes to war, when it comes to conflict, [00:10:00] when you literally can’t have two people that own the same rock under the dome of the rock in Jerusalem, you can’t have two people that own the same geopolitical entity called Ukraine.
And when we see this, because there’s no north on the compass by which to make these decisions, we’re left to fight it out or vote it out or whatever we’re gonna do to try to resolve the conflict. ’cause tolerance isn’t enough. And that’s what we’re seeing on a daily basis.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And we, and history just keeps repeating this lesson to us, right?
That we’re not, we’re not even really good at tolerance. As much as we might hold it up as a value, we’re history and current experience would tell us that we’re pretty lousy at, at this. And lemme go back to where I started relative to Churchill in the second World War. Jim, I know you’re. Very much a student of the Second World War.
Your dad fought in that conflict, and that’s a part of your testimony. Here’s
Dr. Jim Denison: my bust of Churchill that sits on my belt. There you go. Now that purchased Iham Palace, which is the birth place of Winston Churchill, sits right here on my belt. Okay. That’s,
Dr. Mark Turman: it’s, it’s not exactly [00:11:00] a bobblehead, but we could get you a spring to help it be a bobblehead if you needed to be.
Some might call it an idol. I hope not.
Dr. Jim Denison: And I didn’t know you were gonna bring that up. Bring it from home. Probably. There, it always sits there. Yeah,
Dr. Mark Turman: this is providential moment. I hadn’t, that’s, this is, I mean, we talk about things coming from the desk of Jim Denison that is literally from the, the desk.
That’s exactly from the desk of Jim Denison. So let’s go back to that. And one of the things again had no idea I was gonna say this. Something that came out of, of that documentary as well is that the awareness that Churchill and the Allies had of what was happening to the Jews in Germany.
Was a slow rollout. They started to learn different things and then they had great and difficult conversations about what they could do about it in the context of the war and what priority it should have. It was interesting to me, they even, they thought about bombing the camps, but they couldn’t figure out a way to be [00:12:00] precise enough that they could take out, you know, the gas chambers or the oven chambers.
They couldn’t figure out how to destroy those things without also harming the Jews. And there’s historical criticism of Churchill for not doing more sooner to bring deliverance to the Jews. But ultimately the calculation apparently became. The fastest and best thing we can do is win the war.
Mm-hmm. And then that in turn will precipitate or allow the, the, the delivery of the Jews. It’s exactly right. But Jim, talk about the Nazis. Talk about,
Dr. Jim Denison: yeah. Just very quick. The Nazis did to the Jews what the Hamas is doing to the Palestinians.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: They made them civilian shields. I mean, human shields.
I mean, they knew they were gonna be found out. They knew these camps were too massive to be kept secret forever. And so they did exactly what you just said. They made it impossible for aerial bombing to kill the Nazis without killing the Jews, which is just another calculus of how horrendous the Nazis were.
But nonetheless, yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Anyway, that, that, that leads me to this idea of how Hitler and [00:13:00] Germany’s perspective at this point about identity. Yeah. They, this was all driven by an identity thought process, no doubt that Hitler had around. Arian as the superior race. Mm-hmm. Am am I, am I ideologically, theologically chasing this out the right way?
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s exactly right. When you go through Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the whole point of it is to explain antisemitism so that it won’t happen again. They take every student through Yad vm, they take all their soldiers through Yad Vhe. I’ve been there oh, 30 times, and every time I go through there are soldiers around in classes around that sort of thing.
And they’re trying to make the exact point that you just made. They explain where Arianism comes from, the master race, from Nietzche and all of that. They shall how they came to decide that the Jews were the enemy of, and the ones subjugating, that there was this global conspiracy of the Jewish people to oppress the Germans, and that’s why they lost World War I.
And that was what was behind the Weimar Republic and all of that. And what Hitler was going [00:14:00] to do was to come along and liberate this super race, this area, and super race by defeating and, and eventually exterminating the Jews because they were a virus. Inhumanity. I mean, they use language like that.
They were a cancer. They were a virus. The Jews as a race had to be exterminated. You see that in Yam very, very clearly as they demonstrate all of that. Hitler really was very straightforward about all that. Historians are still arguing about the origins of some of that, the origins of antisemitism and Hitler’s own life, but a lot of trying to trace some of that out.
No one’s act actually convinced that they understand all of that, apart from the political purpose of it, that it gave them someone to argue against. As I’ve said over the years, someone taught me years ago to win elections. You convince people they have an enemy they can’t defeat. But if they elect you, you’ll defeat them.
Hmm, that’s what Hitler did with the Jews. This enemy or the Jews, if you’ll elect me or stand behind me, I’ll defeat your enemy for you. So at the very least, he needed an enemy, and the Jews were ready to hand, and there may have been more to it. We don’t know the ultimate purpose behind Hitler’s [00:15:00] motivation, but nonetheless, what you said is exactly how they executed the war and how the final solution came to be with all the tragedy of that.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, Jim, just let me take that one step further. From a biblical theological standpoint, not just Hitler, but many have tried to eliminate is Israel and the Jews Kamas today doing the same thing? Yeah. And so, and so this whole big topic that we’ve seen in continue to see around antisemitism and even as you have written the last few days, that Israel as a nation state is not perfect by any means, but but if we look at it in the perspective of biblical understanding, biblical revelation what do we need to remember about these seemingly relentless attacks upon the Jews?
What do we as Christians need to remember about that?
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah, several things. Thank you. And I’ll try to do this briefly. The first is to understand that they are as loved by God as the rest of us. That [00:16:00] God made all of us in his image, in his likeness. As Augustine said, God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
So whatever you think about Jews as the Jewish state is fulfilling prophecy today, 1948. Whatever you do with dispensational, eschatology and all of that, whatever you think about what’s happening to the Palestinians and the and the right of the Palestinians to self-expression and self-determination.
At the very least, you start with the idea that God loves the Jews, loves the Palestinians, loves the Arabs, loves the Muslims, loves each of us, as if there were only one of us. That’s the foundation place. That’s where we begin. Then on a second level, I think we come forward to understand that God did choose to use the Jewish people as a special conduit by which he would reveal himself through his word, through his laws, through his prophets.
Ultimately, his son, Jesus was a Jew. We sometimes forget that. Yeah, the disciples were Jews. The early Christians, with some exceptions were Jews. Christianity was a Jewish movement before it [00:17:00] obviously moved into the Gentile world. And so we need to understand the significance of the Jewish people in Revelation history and redemptive history.
Then the third level that would be very complex and we’ve talked about together in the past has to do with whether, how we see this prophetic context today. Some who say the state of Israel fulfills prophecy 1948 forward. Others that would say that’s not true. Some that would say God’s purpose to the Jewish nation was completed with the bringing of Messiah, and now the church is Israel, kind of a replacement theology.
Others like me that would say God is still uniquely using the Jewish people in the world, whether they’re, whether the nation of Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy or not. God is using them, I think, in a unique way as individuals and as a race. So there’s a lot inside the prophetic piece of all of that.
But number one, God loves them as he loves us. Number two, he’s used them uniquely, and I think he still does in the world today.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Thank you for that. Let, let me go down this rabbit hole one step further and that is now Mark, where is
Dr. Jim Denison: this on the outline that you set out for us to have [00:18:00] a yeah.
We’ve gone off exactly, we’ve gone
Dr. Mark Turman: off the rail
Dr. Jim Denison: here,
Dr. Mark Turman: which is what’s the point of these
Dr. Jim Denison: outlines anyway, yeah,
Dr. Mark Turman: just, just so everybody listening knows, this is actually the best part is when you get off the rail and Exactly. Into the unplanned territory. Okay. So Jim, just go one more word with this, which is that we should dispel all idea that God chose to use the Jews and Israel this way because of merit.
Dr. Jim Denison: Hmm. So glad you said that. There’s two ways to see the Jewish people in this context. One is as a container, a blessing. The other is as a conduit of blessing and we wanna see them as a conduit. We wanna not understand that God worked through them, not because they are less sinful than the rest of us, not because Romans 3 23 doesn’t apply to them, not because they had some unique intrinsic merit that made them better on the merits.
That’s just not true. One of the things I so admire about the way scripture treats history is that it does so honestly. You can’t look at Abraham just to go back to Abraham as the father of the Jewish people and see him as anything other than a commendable but highly [00:19:00] flawed individual, lying about his wife and calling her his sister for his own protection.
Numerous places where Abraham and Abraham acts in very deceitful ways where they make the decision to have children through Hagar rather than Sarah. We could go on, couldn’t we? We could talk about Moses the murderer. We could talk about David, the adulterer and the murderer. We could have long conversation about some of the most exemplary figures in Jewish history who were just as flawed as the rest of us.
And we have to keep coming back to say, God chooses to use us by his grace, not our merit. He chose to use the Jewish people to bring Messiah, to bring his word, his prophets, and ultimately the Messiah. And I think he’s still using them today, but he uses us too. There’s neither June nor Greek slave, nor free male nor female.
We’re all Abraham seed and heirs according to the covenant. God has a unique purpose for each of us, just as he does for the Jewish people.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It’s so important to remember, especially if any temptation toward anti-Semitism or, or bias or prejudice in any [00:20:00] direction mm-hmm. Has to do with the idea that one people are, are supposedly better than another people.
That’s simply not true. And you know, as, as, as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, how in some ways does this apply to America? That we have big conversations going on around nationalism versus patriotism and that type of thing. Mm-hmm. And we have to apply some principle here, I think to ourselves, that America’s a great country.
It’s a great nation, but it is not perfect. And God, we believe, and we hope has raised up America over the last 250 years or so, for particular things and for many blessings, but not because we’re better than any other part of the world or any other group of people. We are just as flawed, just as sinful as any other people and in desperate need of God and of his leadership now perhaps as much as any time in our history.
And that while we celebrate and recognize the good and godly things that have happened and have risen from our country, we’re [00:21:00] still not privileged or, or esteemed or loved more by God than any other group or people around the world. And so Mark, what
Dr. Jim Denison: you’re saying is God doesn’t see America the way I see my grandkids.
Is that what you’re saying? That’s right. Because everything you said is true of everybody but my grandkids.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: I mean, when you have, and one way or another grandchildren, you know, you know
Dr. Mark Turman: you are Jim, you are batting a thousand here because every time we have a conversation, you find a way to get them into the conversation as I should.
Yeah, and I’m sure there’s gonna come a day when we do a podcast and there’re gonna be, you know, like huge portraits of the grandchildren behind you. I’ve got my granddaughter right
Dr. Jim Denison: over my shoulder here. Let me just turn the camera.
Dr. Mark Turman: So Ryan, let’s see if we can save this conversation by coming back to you for a minute.
And let’s go back to I, yeah, let’s go back to identity for a second. Part of what we were motivated when we wrote this recent resource who am I, has to do with just the pressure of identity, the pressure of creating identity. So as we worked on this and [00:22:00] basically from understanding of the Bible as, as well as other areas like psychology, are human beings really equipped to create their own identity.
What’s, what’s flawed with that ideal idea of what we hear? We hear this term all the time of I self-identify. Are we even capable of that? And isn’t there a lot of pressure behind that?
Dr. Ryan Denison: I think there is. But on some level, I think we’re kind of, the sin nature in us is wired to prefer that pressure to simply accepting the easier path of what God offers.
And I think going back to kind of what the conversation y’all were just having about Israel, I, I think that’s so much of what we see in the Bible is that when Israel was doing it well, when they were a conduit for God’s grace, it’s because they accepted the idea that being God’s people was more about God choosing them than anything inherently great about themselves.
It’s when they started to lose sight of that, that they started to pursue an identity of their own making. And invariably that tended to [00:23:00] make them look a lot more like the nations around them. And that was one of God’s greatest warnings throughout. They’re wandering in the wilderness. That was like, if you read basically Exodus through Deuteronomy, it comes up over and over and over again, and then again in Joshua Judges, the prophets.
That’s, in some ways that’s kind of Israel’s greatest sin in the biblical times, was wanting to be like everybody else instead of the special people that God called them out to be. And I think as Christians today, that’s something for us to remember too, is that we are called by God to be. To identify ourselves through our relationship with Jesus and to let that be the foundation of how we see ourselves.
But that means fundamentally recognizing that our identity is something given to us rather than something we created for ourselves, and we want to reject that. I think all people, on some level, that’s kind of why identity gets so hard, is that on some level, people want to take so much ownership of the fact that I am who I am, that I wanna reject what anybody else se speaks into me.
It’s [00:24:00] why it’s so hard to change identity once you have one set. And I think that’s one of the biggest issues we’re seeing in our culture today, and why so many people just, especially if they’ve built their lives on these kind of unbiblical identities, or they built their lives really on anything but their relationship with God.
That’s why it gets so hard to change, is because it means essentially starting over with how they see themselves. ’cause nothing other than our relationship with God works as a foundation.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And it, it just reminds me even as you were talking that it, that this whole conversation about identity goes really back to our sinful, fallen nature and our desire to replace God with ourselves.
You see it in so many, you, you can take this idea of identity and the pursuit of self identity and lay it across many of the biblical stories. I was, as you were talking, I was thinking about the building of the Tower of Babel in that line that comes out that says they wanted to make a name for themselves.
That is, they wanted to create an identity for themselves that [00:25:00] was separate from and, and divorced of. Their connection to God. And you see, echoes of that, expressions of that even in the conversation in the Garden of Eden that it is about trying to build an identity that has God excluded from it.
And that’s just where so much of the pressure and so much of the problem comes from because the more I’ve thought about it as we worked on this book together that wow, what a great gift God gives to us by saying, Hey, you don’t have to matter of fact, you’re not even capable of creating your own identity and you’re going to be, you know, in many ways stressed out in ways that you can’t even imagine by trying to figure out who you are on your own.
Because then it becomes just the imaginations of your own mind and heart, and also a very exhausting experience of comparison and competition with the other people around you. And you see so many expressions of that [00:26:00] in our culture today in so much anxiety that is driven by that because that’s, you know, that’s where a lot of fear can come from.
Oh, what if, what if I can’t figure it out? What becomes of me if I can’t create a meaningful identity, identity of my own? What if I fail at it, then where do I go? And hopefully in many ways, that brings people back to the invitation that God has for all of us of something much more. Much more real the essence of being real and that which brings us peace and joy because we find that in him.
Jim, I wanna try to bring this conversation into the context of Easter. And, and I gotta, I’m just gonna tell you, you just, you can free, feel free to just say yes, that’s, that question makes no sense at all. But here’s, here’s the question I’m trying to ask, which is, does this incredible, wonderful story of Easter that we’re about to celebrate, tell us anything about God’s [00:27:00] identity?
And if so, what does it tell us?
Dr. Jim Denison: Isn’t that a wonderful question and a very broad question as well. I’m trying to figure out how to bring my grandchildren into that, into my answer, and I’ll think about, I’ll, I’ll think of something. I promise you I’ll get there, here, here in just a bit. The thing above all things that I think about is actually a subject that I’ve been in recent days kind of working on in my own kind of in my own spirit, my own thinking a little bit.
We focus so much at Easter and should on the obvious demonstration of God’s incredible omnipotence in raising Jesus from the dead and defeating the tomb and defeating Satan and, and taking our sin on himself and, and paying that debt and purchasing our salvation, and then rising from the grave. It’s the greatest story of triumph.
There is, it’s an incredible story of God’s incredible power. And that’s one answer to your question is that the Easter demonstrates as Billy Graham writes, the only time in human history somebody rose from the dead, never to die again. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, but he died again. Mm-hmm. He raised the widow son, but he died [00:28:00] again.
This is the only time in history anyone was ever raised from the dead, never to die again. And so that tells us something about God, that he has that power, that God can uniquely do that once we die, we obviously lose all agency. We have no ability to do anything for ourselves, obviously in the moment after our death.
And that’s what God did through his son and demonstrates that absolute prayer. But the other side of it is, I think also the passion story up through Easter demonstrates the humanity of Jesus in a way that makes him accessible and relevant to us as no other person can be. Jesus was born in a position of abject poverty that would be hard to rival today.
Born to peasant parents in a cow stall, in a cave, laid in a feed trough. He was raised in a town so small as not mentioned once in the Old Testament by Josephus, the first injury historian. He was tempted in every manner, like as we are. Nobody is tempted in every manner like as we are except Jesus. In fact, Jesus faced [00:29:00] temptation we don’t know anything about.
See, as Lewis says that a bad man doesn’t understand badness because he yields to it so quickly, doesn’t understand temptation. It’s the person that withstands temptation, that Satan takes further and further and further and further and deeper into temptation. And Jesus experienced every kind of temptation, something no human could ever say.
Jesus died the worst, most tortured death ever devised in human history. That’s what crucifixion was. Jesus uniquely obviously took the sins of all of humanity on his sinless soul. So I can come along to somebody hurting and say, I know how you feel, but it’s not true. Jesus can say that because it’s true.
That says to me that Easter shows us not just the incredible omnipotence of God, but also the relevance of God’s compassion, the absolute solidarity of God with us in a way that no one in history has even tried to claim. Buddha would never have claimed that, or Muhammad or [00:30:00] Confucius or any religious leader, no one in history has ever had the audacity even to try to claim what we claim and what we know to be true about Jesus, both by virtue of his humanity and his divinity.
And both of those are on stark display in triumphant ways in Easter.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. I go back to the beginning of Lent, I think it was about that time a number of weeks ago where you were, or someone, I can’t remember who I was reading or listening to. Pulled out a, a line I think came from Oz Guinness who said, only this God has wounds.
Dr. Jim Denison: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Mark Turman: And has I’ve, I’ve pondered in the last couple of years if. When we are all renewed into this new life in heaven with God through Christ, if the only person in heaven who will have any scars will be Jesus. And that’s good question. And just, just this idea of that not only would God enable himself to become [00:31:00] one of us, which is just mind blowing in its own right.
I had a, a Jewish friend years ago who said that’s the very reason he is not a Christian is because he can’t, he could not comprehend that the perfect almighty and eternal pure God would get that close to us, and that that was hindering him from having a saving faith. But that really is the essence of the rescue mission of Jesus and the uniqueness of Christianity that this, this God entered in and and was wounded as Isaiah says, for our transgression.
Yeah. That there is no other faith that makes such an audacious claim. Now let’s turn it, Ryan, let’s, I’m gonna ask you to turn that question around on its head. If that’s some of what Easter reveals and informs us about in terms of God’s identity, what does Easter say about human identity?
Dr. Ryan Denison: I think one of the things that Easter says is that.
Regardless of how awesome God [00:32:00] is, regardless of all that God does for us, there’s still gonna be something in us that doesn’t wanna believe it or that wants to find alternative explanations for it because, I mean, if people truly understood what Easter represents, we should never again doubt if God loves us or if God has our best interest in mind.
I mean, Easter 100% proves that not only is it that God did suffer, it’s why he suffered. He suffered so that he could be close to us. I mean, there is no greater compliment we could be paid and for that to still not be enough to get us on a day by day basis to fall down at his feet and worship and in and in humility.
And to say, look, if this is you who you say I am God, then I accept it. The fact that we still struggle for that despite Easter, and despite all it reveals, I think is a reminder that this side of heaven, we’re never gonna get this right. A hundred percent. And so this will always be a struggle. And I think that should give us, with, that should fill us with the level of humility necessary.
So when we start to see ourselves creep away or when those doubts start to creep in, [00:33:00] it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize them. It doesn’t mean that there’s not bad things that happen in this life that make us legitimately question why God would allow it to happen. I think that those are also undeniable facts.
But I think God has proven, if nothing else, through Easter, God has proven that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. And I think elsewhere in scripture, it talks about how we’re free to go to God with those questions. We’re free to go to God with our doubts, with our angers, and he can take it. But I think on a fundamental level, we’re meant to always come back to the idea that who we are at our court.
Is a being loved by God so much that he died for us, for no other reason than Sue enabled us to have a relationship with him and at. If we understand that is the core of who we are, then it makes it a lot easier to, to grapple with the rest of the doubts, with the fears, with the anxieties, with all the other things that try and pull us away from that identity to focus on something else.
If we can understand who, what Jesus did for us at [00:34:00] Easter, it should make it easier for us to accept who he says that we are.
Dr. Jim Denison: Hmm. Mark, if I could illustrate that real quickly, if you don’t mind. Yeah. When we take people to the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the points we try to make there is to show them how close in proximity this area is to the actual place through which the soldiers came on Monday, Thursday night to arrest Jesus, and he saw them coming.
You know, as you know, mark having been there and Ryan having been there, you’re staring at the Eastern gate. I mean, it’s the 16th century eastern gate, but it’s in the same spot where it was in the first century. And from there where Jesus was at the Mount of Olives on the slope there, the Garden of Gethsemane, he watches.
Those soldiers by torchlight at night as they file through that gate down the Kidron Valley, up the side of the Mount of Olives to come and arrest him. He has 30 or 45 minutes he could flee back up the slope, up to Galilee, get out of Jerusalem, get out of the the reach of the Sanhedrin, and live a natural life.
He chooses to wait there. He chooses to watch the soldiers come. Knowing all that’s about to happen, knowing the horrific [00:35:00] torture, knowing that the sin of humanity is gonna be placed on a sinless soul, knowing that he’s going to have to cry out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Knowing all that’s going to happen?
He stands there and he waits for it, and he chooses it. So after we try to describe that they’re in the Garden of Gethsemane, I try to make the exact same point to those that are there that Ryan just made. After we do that, I turn to them and I said, please never again wonder if God loves you now that you’ve been here where he proved it, where the Father let his son do that.
I would never. Let my children or grandchildren do that where the father let chose for his son and his son chose to do that for us. Never again wonder if God loves you.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It’s just, it’s so profound. And to, you know, one of the things that we love about going to Israel, taking people to Israel is that you could actually possibly be standing on the very spot where Jesus was watching that happen.
And if you weren’t on the exact spot, you’re certainly in the [00:36:00] proximity. You’re within 50 yards of it. Yeah. You’re within 50 yards of where that could have happened. And that it, it just so profound in terms of the love of God, but it, it also sits, as Ryan was talking about, just made me think it, it sits on this backdrop of the depth and the significance of our sinfulness.
Dr. Jim Denison: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Mark Turman: The cross, you know, you, the cross teaches you a lot of things. It teaches you, as you both have been talking about, of, of the profound and. Unbelievable love of God to, to come and to rescue us in this way, but it also reveals the depth of our need, the, the prof. You know, as Ryan was saying, how could you hear this story and not be captured by it?
And it’s, it’s something that has troubled me ever since I felt like I called into ministry, which is, if, if you get a reasonable explanation of the story of Jesus, the story of Easter, the story of the good news of Christ, how, how is [00:37:00] it that everybody is not a Christian? Because it’s the greatest thing that you could ever possibly know.
And yet the fact that there are so many people that ignore it, so many people that reject it it, it just is, is a testimony to how significant our rebellious, depraved spirit is. And that is something we we don’t want to contemplate that we, we don’t want to think about the significant I’m I was telling somebody yesterday when I first got into ministry in my twenties, I, I heard a quote I’ve never forgotten and I can’t remember the citation, but the quote was simply, this modern man is not worried about it about his sins or its consequences.
We want, we want to try to glorify it. We want to try to rationalize it. We wanna popularize it. But we don’t want to confront it. We, we don’t want to come to this place where we admit that we need Jesus [00:38:00] on the cross because of who we
Dr. Jim Denison: are. And Mark, that goes back to the identity question with which you started.
I think it’s because I see myself the way I want to see myself rather than as God sees myself. No one wants to believe that they’re a sinner. We wanna believe we’re good people who do bad things, not bad people who occasionally do good things. Yes. No one wants to believe that about themselves. I certainly would like to believe about myself, what I believe about my grandchildren.
There we go. I got there.
Dr. Ryan Denison: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: You know, I certainly want to be able to do that, but I know at the end of the day there’s this dissonance inside me and so I just ignore it. Yeah. You know, and at the end of the day, I just choose. ’cause everybody else is doing it. I mean, Carl Menninger’s book, whatever became a sin, you know?
Yeah. Is is still, it could be written today, couldn’t it? Back to your point. And it’s because we’ve chosen to find identity in ourselves rather than what God says about us. Yeah. And at the end of the day, that’s the binary decision that, that determines everything.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And like I said, this, that, that, that fundamental idea, am I, am I a good person who occasionally just kind of stumbles or or is there something really, really wrong at the core of my identity?[00:39:00]
And I do occasionally do good things, hopefully. Mm-hmm. But there is, there is a core, core issue that I can’t solve. And that is that I am a sinner in, I I am a sinner in need of grace. Yeah. So lemme, lemme give you guys,
Dr. Ryan Denison: if I could say one thing real quick. I mean, yeah. I also think it’s worth noting that what the Bible teaches is that neither of those options is good enough to get into heaven.
And so whether you’re a good person who occasionally does bad things or a bad person who occasionally does good things, none of us are perfect. Mm-hmm. And I think there is something in us that recognizes that as well. And that’s kind of what makes it hard, is that as much as the Bible talks about grace and our, the love that God has for us, it’s also very, very clear that nothing short of perfection can be in the presence of a perfect God.
And so that’s why we need Jesus to do that for us. That’s what Easter shows is that we need Jesus to do that for us because we could never be good enough. And I think there is something in us that kind of, because we, we [00:40:00] want to believe that we’re good people who occasionally do bad things, we want that to be enough.
And so it is really hard to, I think. Come to terms with the biblical reality that it, even if that was true of us, it wouldn’t be good enough.
Dr. Mark Turman: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, such a, yeah. Yeah. So now you, now you’ve cheated Ryan, you’ve jumped ahead. Okay. He does that. You, you, you read ahead and you jumped ahead and stole my thunder.
Alright. I’m sorry. And this probably happened to you a number of times with him, Jim, I’m sure it’s a challenge. Yeah. But, so Jim, I had a, I told you by email that I had this conversation with a California pastor named Glen Ham, who just did a great dive into what is called the ENE Creed, which was written 1700 years ago this year, 3 25 AD 3 25 by a bunch of Christians.
Trying to clarify in a concise way what the essence of the Christian message is and has so much to say, not only about our identity, but more importantly about God’s identity. Beautiful [00:41:00] poetic lines, such as talking about Jesus. He, for, he came for us. And for our salvation. That’s what Easter is all about.
Okay. But as I was talking to, to Pastor Glenn about this in a recent podcast he takes note that in the ENE creed, there are only two human beings other than Jesus. Are referenced. One of them is Mary, one of them is Pilate.
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s right.
Dr. Mark Turman: Jim. Why 1700 years ago when a bunch of Christians got together to try to clarify the message of Easter in the gospel?
Why did they include Mary and Pilate and how do they illustrate what Ryan was just talking about that neither. Of those options is good enough.
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s a great question, and Ryan, the historian I would trust with this more than I would myself, but I’ll get us started a little bit. Having actually been to the spot where the council and I see a met, not clo, not far from Ephesus over in Western Turkey today.
It’s just an amazing thing to imagine it. Constantine, having called that council together and [00:42:00] all that came out of it, all the good and the bad that came out of it and all of that. But at even this point in the fourth century, we’re wanting to understand, I think in a concise way that people that may not have access to literacy as we think of it, that don’t have the ability to download theological documents and podcasts on their iPhones and want something that’s gonna be memorable in short and gonna be able to be conveyed easily.
They wanna be able to tell the story of Jesus as quickly as possible, and you can’t tell the story of Jesus without those two people if you’re going to reduce it to the most essential, most bare facts. One of the facts is that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
Pontius Pilatus, as they would’ve said left. You have to put those there. You can leave Peter and Pentecost out. You can leave Peter’s denials out. You can leave Joseph out of the story. You can leave a lot of people out of the story, but you can’t leave Mary and Pontius Pilate out. And they wanted the story to be something everybody could understand and take with them.
It’s a little like the stained glass that you see in the ancient and medieval churches [00:43:00] that are telling the stories of scripture in a visual way, in a PowerPoint way for people that didn’t have access to printed Bibles, obviously, and couldn’t have in that culture, been able to do literacy the way we do it today.
But they wanted the story to be captured and be memorable, and you can’t tell the story without those two people, which makes a remarkable point that on the one side of the spectrum, there’s Mary. Who was a virgin at that point in time, which is notable. That’s not just notable because it means that Jesus therefore is born of a virgin and therefore has God as his father.
That also says something about a teenage girl living in Nazareth adjacent to the Via. The, the main pathway, that’s the Villa Maris. It’s the main pathway of that day with the soldiers going by, with the merchants going by when the fastest way to get out of the tiny village of Nazareth would be to be sexually accessible to people, to be married, to somebody, to at least be on a level of prostitute or on some level be, make herself available.
It would’ve been unusual in that day for her to be able to say that, for her to [00:44:00] protect her purity as she does. Look how Mary responds to the Annunciation look. Go back to Luke one and look at that incredible declaration of poetic praise to God. That comes extemporaneously from this teenage girl. And so you get Mary on the one side, the mother of the Lord on the other side, you get Poncho’s Pilate, perhaps the most heinous, the most hated person in Christian history.
And they’re both in the story. If those are the bookends, the rest of us are someplace in the middle.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: And we get to be in the story too. Mm-hmm. If they get to be in the story, we get to be in the story. And that’s one way I think of applying the fact that those two figures are in one of the most significant, not the oldest, the Apostles Creed would be the earliest, perhaps but certainly one of the earliest creedle statements in all of Christian history.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And it just, you know, as, as we look for, we look for clues, right? To understand our identity as well as God’s. And whether you see yourself as Ryan was saying, [00:45:00] as quote unquote, a good person who occasionally stumbles and do, does bad things and that kind of moves you maybe more in the direction of Mary, or you see yourself more like Pilate as a bad person to the core and you don’t think you ever do even thing, any, even a small thing that might be good.
What’s, what’s beautiful about those two names is, is both of them needed a savior. Mm-hmm. As, as good as Mary was from the very first time that we meet her. And virtually every time that Mary speaks in the story of the gospel. She speaks something profound and something that leads you to be a stronger, better follower of Christ.
Her last words in scripture are from the wedding in Cana of Galilee where she says, whatever he says, do it. Mm-hmm. Which is basically the simple direction of what it means to follow Jesus. What a life motto. What a life motto, whatever he says. Just do that. Mm-hmm. And, and or if you see yourself on the other end, you know, I’ve [00:46:00] met people who you know and you say God could never, God could never forgive me of this.
God could never use me because of this.
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Pilot is an example of, you know, what God’s God can reach anybody. Mm-hmm. If they’re willing to be reached. So let me pivot this. We got a few more minutes. I I’m gonna pivot this back to to God’s identity for a minute in the Easter story, and I’m gonna share with you a pet peeve.
Now, it took me a long time to spell that word correctly. I spelled it p for a long time, a pet peeve. And that is, it seems like the bailout phrase among both Christians, non-Christians and all those people in between, you get intover various conversations about all kinds of things, including identity.
And it just comes back to God is love. God is love, God is love. Nobody ever qualifies that statement, but that’s what everybody just says. And it’s like it for me. It’s almost become the way to stop all conversation. [00:47:00] I don’t like this conversation anymore. It’s too difficult a conversation.
It’s too controversial. Let’s just all land and agree. God is love. And God certainly is love. But I got to thinking about this a couple of days ago and I just sat down and started trying to remember every way that I could think of that. The Bible actually answers the question. God is, and in short order I had more than 10 legitimate biblical answers to this.
Mm-hmm. You can start with God is, which is what he says to Moses. I, I am. I am. That I am. When we come to Christmas, it says that God is present. He is Emmanuel. And you hear it in church, and you hear it in prayer circles all the time, God be with us. We really don’t have to pray that prayer because he is already with us.
But the Bible also says God is loved in the story of Jesus’s teaching, he says to two grieving sisters, I am the resurrection in the [00:48:00] life. Which prefigures what the Easter story is all about. It also says, God is holy. What do we need to understand about God’s identity that we, how do, how do we get to a more holistic view of the identity of God, I guess is what I’m asking?
Anybody wanna take that on,
Dr. Ryan Denison: Ryan? Yeah. I mean, I would say just to start with, it helps to remember, I mean, going back to the idea of God is love. What? Love, the biblical love doesn’t mean what cultural love means today. I mean, biblical love at its. At the basis of it is wanting what’s best for somebody and pursuing what’s best for somebody.
And that means confronting sin. That means not accepting anything less than God’s standards for them. And I think that’s where so much of what else God, why it’s so important to understand the rest of who God is, is that we can’t understand what God means by love and what God means when he says, when it says that God is love, unless we [00:49:00] understand the rest of who God is and what he wants for us.
And so I think that’s kind of, that’s why all of this is so important and why it is so important to understand God’s identity and how God identifies himself. ’cause he really is the only person that gets to identify themselves. The rest of us have to go go with his identity. But one of the cool things in scripture is that God tells us who he is and makes that abundantly clear.
And I think one of the reasons it’s so important to understand that is that we can’t love him or love others well, unless we first understand who God is.
Dr. Jim Denison: Anything you wanna add to that Dad? Yeah, a couple things real, real quick. First of all, mark, when the culture kind of does the veto hard stop, God is love, you know, so that solves everything.
What really I think they’re saying is love is God. Hmm. I think what they’re really saying is in love, but whatever they mean by love, certainly not love as God sees it the way Ryan pointed out. But love is this kind of feeling, this emotion. I have this kind of general sense of wellbeing and kind of wanting other people to have that is God is really what I think they’re trying to say.
And what you’re saying isn’t loving by my standard, so it must be wrong. [00:50:00] So what I have to understand, it says God is love, not love is God. We’re not gonna do pantheism here in that, in that sort of a sense. But the other thing to say is, of all the attributes of God that are God, that say God love is, all of them are various dimensions of the same person.
These are not disparate parts. This is not the kitchen over there and the garage over there and the bedroom over here. All of them describe the same thing and therefore they have to be able to describe each other. To Ryan’s point, the Bible says twice in Isaiah six, in Revelation four, God is holy, holy, holy.
It’s the only one of God’s attributes raised to the third level. Then Hebrew literature, as you know, you emphasis is by repetition. We would say, holy, holy or holy est, to get to the superlative level, they would say, holy, holy, holy, to get to that level. And we get that twice that God is wholly asked.
But at the same time, God is love. At the same time, God is a consuming fire. And all the others all of those have to express the same person. So they have to be dimensions of each other. To Ryan’s point, it’s because God [00:51:00] is love, that he is holy. It’s because he is holy, that he is love. It’s because he is holy, that he is a consuming fire.
It’s because he is love, that he is the resurrection in life. And so what we have to do is measure these attributes by each other as various dimensions of the one person, various facets of the same diamond, various walls of the same house, as it were, various pieces of the same puzzle as opposed to disparate, as though contradictory aspects of a disjointed personality.
And when we see God that way, then we understand his identity in a way that motivates us to wish to worship him, to love him, to serve him out of gratitude for such grace. It’s because he is love that he loves us. He loves it. A bad way to say that is God loves us because he can’t help it. His character makes him do it because he is love.
What that means is there’s nothing I can do to earn his love and there’s nothing I can do to lose his love because he is love. In our first 15, which is our, as you know, our daily devotional resource that we’ve [00:52:00] been publishing for years, some years ago, Craig made a point out of John 17 verses 23 and 26, where Jesus in his high priestly prayer makes it clear that the Father loves us as much as he loves his son.
I never thought about that till I read that in that devotional all those years ago, and I’ve repeated it many times since. That’s certainly not because I am worthy of love on the same level as God sinless son. It has to be because God is love and therefore has to love me the same way He loves his son.
His character can’t not do that. We understand that then we understand that we are free to to love him, not so he’ll love us, but because he loves us, we serve him, not so he’ll bless us, but because he’s blessed us and that changes everything. Now, I can love you guys whether you love me or not. I can love my neighbor whether they love me or not.
I. I can love people that don’t love me, just as I can love people who do, because I’m not seeking their love to validate my identity. I’m not seeing myself [00:53:00] through their eyes, but through God’s eyes. And I’m therefore free to love myself and love my neighbor as myself. And doesn’t that change the world?
Imagine how different the world would be if we grasped that and live that out on a daily basis. Every day would be Easter, every day would be Resurrection Day.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And you’re, you’re reading ahead too, because now we’re, you know, now we’re talking about having, having an identity so clear and so profound as a gift from God that you’re secure enough.
To love well that you’re secure enough to not need, we all need to be loved, but to, to not base your identity on how other people might love you or treat you, but to be able to do that because of how God loves you and treats you. And who wouldn’t love Jim? I mean, really what neighbor would not love you of course.
Goes without saying the way your granddaughter does.
Dr. Jim Denison: It obviously doesn’t go without saying or you wouldn’t have just said it. You know
Dr. Mark Turman: Yes. Goes without saying Yes. Anyway, we had a minute or two to finish up. Easter is coming and we know [00:54:00] you know, we, we all as pastors, we have mixed emotions about how Easter attendance is higher than any other time of the year.
Yeah. And then the Sunday after Easter is often the lowest of it any time in the year, but it reveals I think some kind of a hunger some kind of a thirst for all of us to understand and. Hopefully connect to the true identity of God and also to understand our own identity. I think you know, there’s a reason why Easter is what it is still for us, and hopefully that will be a hunger and a thirst that people will have meaningful connection with.
But Ryan, one of the questions that you raise, and we’ll, we’ll put this hard question in front of your dad and he’s answered, answered some of it already, but two Corinthians five 17 says that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. So this question of Easter as it represents so much of the power of God to give us a new or a restored identity in Christ, Jim what is it about [00:55:00] our identity as Christians that should be setting us apart from those who are.
Made in God’s image but have not yet accepted Christ and this new identity that he offers us, how should we be different?
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. Wonderful question. And so many times, scripture obviously encourages us to be different, to be salt and light, to let your good works so shine that people will glorify your Father in heaven and to be different from others.
And so often we see that in the Book of Acts, how people saw them as different they, how the Sanhedrin was so impressed with them and knew they had been with Jesus. You know, they’re just this qualitative and quantitative difference that you see that Jesus makes in the lives of his followers. I think it at the end of the day goes back to this whole identity question that we’re describing right now.
If I see myself as the son of a king, then I’m gonna relate to the world a little differently than if I see myself as the servant of that king. If I see myself as a prodigal son who has to earn the right back to the father, who has to come back on his knees pleading to be accepted and making all [00:56:00] sorts of promises I probably can’t keep so as to hope to be received back by a wrathful judge, that’s a completely different lifestyle.
Who wants that? Who wants to live in that way? Who wants to be attracted to that as opposed to a person who’s been liberated by the fact that his father loves him? And now I get to live as the heir of the king. Now I get to be a son who invites others into the family. That’s a, that’s a, that’s working out of, out of abundance versus scarcity and, and necessity.
That’s offering grace versus law. That’s giving people the privilege of joining a family that’s changed my life if I’ve been changed by that as well. And the only way I know to live that out every day is to every single day, start there every single day, get alone with the Lord, ask the Holy Spirit to fill me, to control me, to empower me, dethrone myself, and enthone him and ask the spirit to help me.
Understand what it is to live as a child, loved by God in my relationship with God and others. ’cause I can’t do it by myself. The rest of the [00:57:00] culture, mark doesn’t understand this, doesn’t appreciate this, doesn’t reward this. Every other dimension of our lives is transactional. Where you work to get paid and you go to school to get grades.
And in every other place of our lives, we are what we do. We are what people think of what we do. That’s how capitalism works. That’s how our economy works. That’s how our society functions. So for me to come along on a podcast and say, just stop thinking like that. Just stop seeing yourself that way. Just trust us when we tell you that you are loved by God.
Unconditionally love yourself the same way. Love your neighbor the same way. Go that one. Do likewise and assume that those words are gonna make all the difference we wish they would, is a bit naive every single day. I need the Holy Spirit to help me do that all through the day. I need to keep, when I’m being tempted, when I’m both by good and by bad, when I’m being tempted to try to impress you right now.
And those listening to these words, rather than try to listen to the spirit and just be faithful to God’s word in and through me at every moment of the day, it’s having the [00:58:00] Holy Spirit help me live the life as God’s child by grace that allows me to love myself and therefore love my neighbor as myself.
My worst days are when I love my neighbor as myself because I don’t love myself and I can’t love my neighbor. Hmm. My best days are when I love myself as God loves me and therefore can love my neighbor as God loves me. And the Holy Spirit has to help me do that every single day. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Day by day and just, yeah.
As you were talking, I, I re, I, I just was thinking of, of the miracle of Easter as described by Max Lucado in a, in a short devotional that just the phenomenal truth that when, when you come to trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior. You immediately go from orphan to air. Yeah, you’re adopted and you go from orphan with no identity to the greatest identity as an heir with Christ and through Christ that you could ever have.
And that’s Easter. And that’s what we hope every person will experience this [00:59:00] Easter season and every Easter season. So many more things I would like to, you know, throw as curve balls at y’all. But we have run out of time. Dr. Denison, thank you. And we hope that both of you and all of your family have a fabulous Easter celebration.
And we pray that God will give all of us and all of you chances. To represent and to speak for Christ in the days to come, both leading up to and after this celebration of Easter as we get to be his ambassadors and witnesses. If you want to check out our new resource, it’s called Who Am I? You can find that on the Denison forum website, denison forum.org, and we’d love for you to pick that up and hope it would be helpful to you.
Thank you for following us and following our podcast, and you can find more information and news to discern [email protected] as well. Thank you for your time and attention today. We look forward to hearing or being with you next on the Denison Forum Podcast. God bless you and [01:00:00] happy Easter.
Search
