Isaiah 40:1-2 Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins.

1. ___________ is the belief that we define ourselves by how we ____________.

2. We don't need to hear another message about how our ______________ is based on our ____________. We need to hear that someone ____________ us.

3. Since you are not judged by God based on your performance but based on __________ __________, you are no longer ____________ by your performance!

Scripture Readings
Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-14
John 1:6-8,19-28

Take It With You!

Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.

But I had other issues too, I realized. I was worried about my reputation because of all the inaccurate things being said about me. After all, I'd worked hard to gain the good reputation I had, and now it was being questioned and maligned. I was afraid that people I respected (and those I wanted to respect me) were going to think badly of me. I'd come to believe my identity was directly tied to what I could achieve, to who I could become, and to how well people thought of me. It was slavery.

Again, Colossians 1:12 opened my eyes: "The Father... has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints of light."

Tullian, you're one of the saints in light. You've been united to him; you'll always have his name, his presence, his personality, his reputation overshadowing and filling all that you are in your inmost being. Because Jesus was someone, you're free to be no one.

Here was my identity. It's true I didn't deserve it; it's true it happened only by God's amazing grace to me in Christ; yet it was more deeply and lastingly accurate about me than anything I had accomplished on my own, for myself. It was so freeing to finally realize that, because of Christ's work for me, I didn't have anything to prove or a reputation to protect.

Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything, pgs. 74-75