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Elements City Church

Sidetracked: Identity

Sidetracked: Identity

Welcome our guest speaker, Jonathan Cleveland, as he addresses how easily we can get sidetracked in our identity in Christ. We each have a choice before us to try to earn our identity through effort and achievement, or receive the Gospel and live in the knowledge that the Father gifts us our identity through Jesus -- one we don't have to work to achieve.

Locations & Times

Elements City Church

1825 N Alvernon Way, Tucson, AZ 85712, USA

Sunday 5:00 PM

Welcome to church!

Whether you're on-site or online, we are praying that tonight will be an encouragement to you! If you're new and want to get connected, we'd love to hep you do so! Click the link below to fill out our Connection Card.
https://connect-card.com/yr4Y0g8VLBSqzKXeubjb

How can we pray for you?

If you have a prayer request you'd like our Elders and Prayer Team to pray for, click the link below to share it with us.
https://share.fluro.io/form/6329f633da0feb00250cbd5f
Has this happened to you?

With the best of intentions, you got yourself sidetracked spiritually,
or with the best of intentions someone else got you sidetracked spiritually by the way they influenced you?
The most common approaches to spirituality don’t work.
The way of Jesus is not what humans would commonly expect it to be, and that is why we get sidetracked.
All of us, at times, get sidetracked about our
identity in Christ.
“Christianity is unlike anything else in that our identity is received,
not achieved.”
Tim Keller
The narrow path of the Gospel is intended to replace all other identities we carry with the greatest identity we could ever have, and it is an identity we didn’t do anything to get.
Jesus’s worth was not dependent on His performance of the mission.
God doesn’t love things because they earn his love.
The Gospel says that by grace, through faith, everything that Jesus had and was is given to us by his Heavenly Father – we just have to receive it.
We receive all that is true of Jesus with God so that we can live in right relationship with God.
The most common broad path that leads to destruction is the path of spiritual achievement.

It is the path of believing that our identity with God is related to how well we live our spiritual life.
On the spirituality ladder, obedience is about achieving something and becoming something you are not.
You are the beloved of God. With you, He is already well pleased, and He sees you as totally righteous today.
Obedience is about learning to be who you truly are in Christ, not about becoming something you aren’t.
Here’s the choice for us:
the broad and popular path of spiritual effort and achievement
- or -
the narrow and rarely traveled path of receiving our identity from God’s love

Thank you for your partnership!

Thank you for giving your tithes and offerings. They enable us to be the church, and they help fuel the mission of Elements City Church. Our capacity to function as a church on a daily basis is directly impacted by your support, and we are so grateful for it! You can give online at the link below, or through the Elements City Church app.
http://elementscitychurch.org/give
Aren't you glad you came to worship tonight?!

Thanks to our guest, Jonathan Cleveland, for bringing the word tonight.

Join us next Sunday as we jump back into our current series, Joy Full. See you then!