The Identity of Jesus: Why Who He Is Comes Before What He Does
A few weeks ago, Kim's phone rang late in the evening. Their daughter Megan had taken the family's two French bulldogs for a walk, and the screen door had locked behind her. She was standing outside her own house, unable to get back in. Within minutes, Kim and Charles were in the car with a utility knife, on their way to cut the screen and let her inside.
Charles will tell you plainly: if anyone else called at that hour locked out of a house, he is not coming. But it is different when it is your own kid calling. Megan is thirty-seven years old, and she can still call her dad and know the answer will be yes.
That difference, what it means to belong to someone who will actually show up for you, turned out to be the whole point of this week's message from Luke. Because before Jesus preached a single sermon, healed a single person, or called a single disciple, the first thing scripture tells us about him is not what he came to do. It is whose he is.
A Story Worth Investigating
Luke opens his gospel by telling us exactly what he is doing and why. He has carefully investigated everything from the beginning, interviewing eyewitnesses, so he can write an orderly account of "the things that have been fulfilled among us." Not the things that happened. The things that were fulfilled. That word matters. Roughly three-quarters of the Bible is Old Testament: priests, prophets, sacrifices, promises, all of it pointing forward to something still to come. Luke is telling us the wait is over. The signposts have led somewhere, and that somewhere is a person.
He put it this way: you need the container and you need the content. It would be strange to hand someone an empty cup, and just as strange to hand them coffee with nothing to hold it in. The gospel is the container. Jesus is the content. Luke's job is to deliver him faithfully, and for the next several months, this series is going to follow Luke's lead by asking one central question: who is Jesus, and what does it mean to follow him.
My Father's Business
The first real answer shows up in an odd little story tucked at the end of Luke 2. Jesus is twelve. His family has traveled from Nazareth to Jerusalem for Passover, the way they did every year, and on the journey home, Mary and Joseph realize he is missing. They assume he is with the other parent, and it takes a full day before anyone notices he is not with either of them. They rush back to Jerusalem and, after three anxious days, find him in the temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening, asking questions, and correcting their understanding of scripture.
When Mary finds him, she says what any parent would say: "Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you." Jesus answers, "Why were you searching for me? Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house?"
Notice the shift. Mary says your father, meaning Joseph. Jesus says my father, meaning someone else entirely. In that culture, a boy his age was transitioning out of general schooling and into full-time training in the family trade. Joseph's trade was carpentry: tables, chairs, doors. Jesus was saying, in effect, that he already understood whose business he was actually in. Not carpentry. Redemption. That single word swap, from your father to my father, is the first recorded statement of Jesus knowing exactly who he was.
You Are My Son, Whom I Love
Luke fast-forwards again, this time to chapter 3. Jesus is thirty now, standing in the Jordan River being baptized by John. As he comes up out of the water, a voice speaks from heaven: "You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
That sentence is doing more work than it looks like at first. "You are my son" is a direct line from Psalm 2, a psalm about God sending a conquering king, a messiah who arrives to set a broken world right. But the second half of the sentence, "with you I am well pleased," comes from a completely different place: Isaiah 42, part of a set of passages known as the servant songs. Those songs describe a suffering servant who carries the guilt of others and absorbs the punishment it deserves.
On paper, those sound like two different figures: a victorious king and a suffering servant. Luke, and the voice from heaven, put them together in a single sentence about a single person. Not a king or a servant. Both, in one. The one who comes to make things right is the same one who pays for what is wrong. He has arrived, and he is both at once.
Identity Before Assignment
Here is the detail worth sitting with: this happens before Jesus does anything. He has not preached, healed, or performed a single miracle when heaven speaks over him. He is about to be driven into the desert to face temptation, to build a following that largely misunderstands him, and eventually to carry the weight of the cross. Before any of that, he needed one thing settled: he needed to know who he was.
That order matters for the rest of Luke's gospel too, and it matters for anyone who reads it. Identity comes before assignment. You do not become a son or daughter by doing enough for God. You do things for God because you already are one. And notice what Jesus never does with this. He does not spend his ministry telling people, "I am God's son and you are not." Instead, he opens the door: by trusting him, the same relationship becomes available to anyone.
Paul picks up this exact image later, writing to a church that needed to hear it as much as we do. "The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again. Rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption, and by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children." The words spoken over Jesus in the river are the same words available to anyone who trusts him. You are my son. You are my daughter, whom I love. With you I am well pleased.
What Actually Changes When You Know Whose You Are
This is not just a nice theological idea. It changes how you live, in at least three concrete ways.
It means intimacy. Remember Megan and the locked door. Kids can ask things of a parent that nobody else can, and they can count on an answer that nobody else gets. Through Jesus, that kind of access to God is not something you earn. It is already yours, day or night, whenever you need it.
It means safety. Two of Charles's grandsons played their first little league game recently, and like every six- and seven-year-old on that field, they were nervous wrecks until dad showed up behind the batting cage. Once he was there, everything changed. One of the boys started twirling the bat like he had just made the Hall of Fame. Having a father present changes what a kid believes he can handle. A human father cannot fix every hurt or make every problem disappear. But there is no situation beyond a heavenly father's ability, and no circumstance he is not already present in.
It means community. If God is our father through Jesus, then everyone else who trusts him is a brother or sister, whether we act like it or not. It is easy to imagine what a parent would say to kids fighting over whose shirt or whose shoes something is: none of it was ever really yours to begin with, it was given generously, and hoarding it while your siblings go without misses the point entirely. If that would please any parent, it has to please God as ours. The invitation is to stop guarding what we have and start sharing it.
Your Next Step
This week's challenge from Charles was not about doing more for God. It was about remembering, before anything else, who you already are to him. A few questions worth sitting with:
Where in your life have you been trying to earn an identity that Jesus already wants to give you for free?
If access to God is available around the clock, what would change if you actually reached out to him that way this week?
Is there a situation right now that feels bigger than your ability to handle? What would it look like to hand that to a father who is never out of his depth?
Who in your community are you currently holding out on, whether it is time, resources, or grace, that you could hold open-handed instead?
Continue This With Us This Sunday
Identity comes before mission, for Jesus and for us. If any part of this is stirring something in you, we would love for you to sit with it in person. Souderton meets Sundays at 9:00 and 10:30am at 820 Souderton Rd, and Quakertown meets Sundays at 9:30am at 50 E. Paletown Rd. Can't make it to a campus? The full message streams live on YouTube. We would love to continue this with you.