51 - Who Am I

For a human being to live in such a way that life has purpose, in order for someone to come to the end of their life and feel satisfied that they lived it well, he or she must have discovered the answer to these two questions: 1) Who is God? and 2) Who am I? Without knowing the answer to the first question it is impossible to answer the second, but just knowing the answer to the first does not mean a person automatically knows the answer to the second. In fact many people spend most or all of their life with far too little understanding about themselves. Historically the church has provided little help except to say that people are sinners and possibly some statements about being members of the Body of Christ. 

One of the most outstanding qualities about Jesus is that He really knew who He was. There was no doubt in His mind, and when He preached He typically answered both questions. He would tell people who God is, but He would also tell them who He was. And it was the information He revealed about Himself that became the center of the controversy which surrounded Him. Some of His listeners believed what He said about Himself; others didn't and wanted to kill Him. 

From chapter one onward the apostle John has been telling us who Jesus is. In fact clarifying the identity of Jesus is the main goal of this gospel. John said he wrote it, 
“So that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (Jn 20:31). 

John wrote to remove all doubt about the unique nature of Jesus. He wanted us to believe that He is both God's eternal Son, and the human son promised to David whom God said would sit on David's throne and rule forever. 

Our purpose for this study today is not to revisit the facts of who Jesus is but to try to understand how He learned those facts about Himself. We want to answer the question: How did Jesus know who He was? One possible answer is that He brought all that knowledge with Him from heaven, but John, along with all the other gospels, shows us Jesus' humanity as well as His divinity. Jesus truly and completely became a man, and Paul tells us that in the process He laid aside His divine privileges in order to become one of us (Php 2:6-7). No one knows how much of His divine knowledge He laid aside, or at least refused to use, but it appears that to some degree Jesus had to re-learn who He was after He was born. That means He too, like us, had to walk in faith; He too, like us, had to refuse to doubt; He too, like us, had to choose to believe the amazing things God said about Him. If so, then His example shows us how to answer that question for ourselves. As we watch the man, Jesus, discover who He is, we discover where to turn for information about who we are. 

Before we start on this journey we should note that there was one avenue of discovery available to Jesus that will never be available to us, and that was His memory of heaven. He existed before He was born. We don't. We begin at conception in our mother's womb. But the other avenues of discovery are available to us, so let's let Jesus teach us how to answer the second question: Who am I? It may be the hardest question for us to answer.