We’ve finally reached the eleventh and final episode of Wonderful You! Today we are going to sum up all of the important aspects of our identity and talk about how God uses them to show Creation who He is and what He is like. But an accurate picture of God takes more than just a handful of people, it takes us all and it is only by working together in love that we can be God’s mirror.
(Parents, this is the eleventh in a series designed to help kids deal with identity and gender confusion by showing them that no matter what they like or what they look like or what they are good at, they are still boys and girls. When we try to push kids into filling stereotypical roles, we’re often the ones creating the confusion that they are forced to find a way to live with. I do this without making any mention of sexuality whatsoever.)
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the Miss Tyler Bible, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it a bit clearer for kids.
For the past ten weeks, I’ve been teaching you about all the different parts of your identity, who you are in ways that are special and different from everyone else in the world. Although we all have things in common, no one has everything in common. There is only one you in the whole world, and there has never been anyone exactly like you and there never will be—even if you are an identical twin! That makes you very important because it means God can use you in ways that He can’t use anyone else. You have talents that many people don’t have, and experiences that other people haven’t shared. You know things that other people never will. You like things that other people hate and hate things that other people love. You know people that I will never meet. Even if we were both in the same room looking at the same thing, or watched the same movie, or saw a crime being committed, we wouldn’t see what happened the exact same way. Maybe you would catch a detail that I couldn’t see because you are taller or shorter or were standing in a different part of the room where you could see better. Maybe because you read certain kinds of books or have certain talents, you might understand something about what we are both looking at better than I do. I might make a mistake about what I think I am seeing because I don’t know as much as you do about it. And everyone in the world is like that—God didn’t get a printer or a photocopier so that He could make us all exactly the same. Even people who grow up in the same house are entirely different—and that’s a wonderful thing.
Have you ever heard the idiom, “the whole enchilada?” It means “everything.” Like, if someone is offering you a baked potato from the potato bar at a restaurant and they ask what you want on it and you want every topping they have so you would say, “I want the whole enchilada!” They won’t come back with an enchilada for you, but your potato will be loaded with butter and sour cream and cheddar cheese and chives and all that. Dang, now I am hungry. I need an enchilada, and a baked potato.
When God looks at you, He doesn’t just see who you are now. He sees who you can be if you follow Him. He sees everything that you have ever experienced, your talents and abilities, what you do and do not like, where you go, what you do, how you treat people, who you know and who you don’t know. And He knows just how to get you from who you are right now, to who He knows you can be and who He wants you to be. When He sees you, no matter what you have done or how you feel about yourself, He doesn’t see you as a total failure but as someone who will be incredibly spectacular as you keep working to become more and more like Jesus every day. God sees you as special right now, someone He loves. Someone Jesus loved enough to die to protect from sin and death. When Jesus died, He was investing in your life. Do you know what that means? Investing in something?
An investment is when we take whatever we have, usually time or money, and spend it so that we can be a part of something. People might invest in a house to live in, but even after they have paid for the house they still have to pay attention to it and fix what is broken, which takes time too. Sometimes, they will need to do work on the house so that it is what their family needs. They might need to add on extra rooms if their family gets big enough, or fix the roof if a tree falls on their house, so many possibilities—we just never know all that we will have to invest or our time and money when we buy a house to live in! Some people invest in the stock market, hoping that the money they put in will make more money but sometimes they lose money. Maybe they invest in a new car, so that they can get to work more easily. Some invest in silver and gold coins, hoping that they will be worth more someday. But when we invest, we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know if we will make money or lose money. We don’t know if our really nice neighbors will move away and some awful people will live near us instead. We can try to invest wisely so that we don’t waste our money, but we never know for sure if we have made a mistake until it is too late to fix it. But with Jesus, it isn’t like that at all.
When Jesus gave His life to save you, He knew just what he was getting in to. He knew that you were going to have good days and bad days but He didn’t care. You see, Jesus really does know who you can be if you follow Him and so, everything He went through was worth it. And He won’t give up on you either, no matter what. What you do might not make Him happy all the time, but not everything I do makes Him happy either. God saved you from the power of sin and death for a good purpose. It wasn’t so that you could just do whatever you want without any consequences, without bad things happening if you do bad things to cause them. God made you so that the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Kingdom here in earth with his followers doing what He wants and loving people—He wanted the Kingdom to be better than it is right now and so He made you to help Him make it even bigger and better. He created you so that the world would be a better place and not a worse place. And it is the responsibility of everyone who loves Jesus to do that.
Of course, the first way we work on it is to learn to stop doing the things that we know are just awful. Bullying, teasing, name-calling, fighting, stealing, lying, cheating, all the things that show the world that we don’t really love other people and we are no different from people who don’t know about Jesus at all. When we come to know Jesus, He changes us from the inside out and we want different things, and we grow to want to treat people with kindness and love. I am not saying it is easy because there are still people who will be really mean to us (even people who say they love Jesus) and sin against us and we will not want to be loving toward them all the time, but God can change our minds about that too. In fact, whenever we do anything to be more like Jesus, God will help us—even if we don’t know it. But when we are being mean—it isn’t God helping us to do that way. Satan wants us back in his Kingdom and he will always be helping to make that happen. But he can’t do it unless we follow him back there! We have to make that choice—and some days that’s exactly what we do before God turns us around and says, “Um, no, you need to turn your butt around and pronto.” Isn’t that what God did with Cain? “Dude, if you don’t get a grip on your attitude and quick, bad things are going to happen.” Cain made the wrong choice but we can make the right choice.
Imagine the things you will do and the places you will go and the people you will meet—just because you are you. Your interests will take you to places many others won’t bother going. Your talents will put you in situations and jobs in companies that most people have never even heard of. You will live in certain places, towns, and neighborhoods that most people will only ever see on a map. And when you are in those places, you will have opportunities that no one else will have. You will talk to people about things that no one else can talk to them about. You will see ways to be kind, helpful, and loving that no one else will see. And the reason why is because, when God was making you, He said something like, “This kid is the whole enchilada. They are exactly who they need to be so that the world can be a better place. All I have to do now is wait for them to grow so that I can teach them how to be the amazing person I know they can be. My Kingdom needs this kid!”
Of course, God could snap His fingers and make the world better but that is never how He has chosen to do things. Instead, He made people in His image. But that doesn’t mean that God is a human, or a man or a woman, because the Bible tells us that God is spirit and has no body. So, he has no DNA or anything like that. He created DNA! It means that we are supposed to look like Him in how we act, how we treat the world around us and one another. It means that He wants us to learn to be wise like He is, and good. God is generous with the people who love Him and the people who don’t. Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if it only rained on the land of the people who worship God? Or if the gardens of cruel people wouldn’t grow any food? People would be forced to worship God just to survive, and so it would be a choice between eating and dying! They wouldn’t really love God, they would just be trying to stay alive. God wants people to love Him because He deserves love, not because He has to force them to do it. He isn’t buying our love or bribing us with stuff. We love Him because He is wonderful and good. And when people see us, God wants it to be like they are looking at Him in a mirror.
God has chosen you (and me too) to make the world better. But He won’t snap His fingers and force us to do it. He wants you to see that what He is doing in the world is good so that you will want everyone to know Him. Your identity, who you are, is a big part of how He gets that done. You may be a boy who loves to dance ballet and paint beautiful pictures, and so you might end up in an art gallery in a city in India where someone comes up to you and asks about your painting and while talking you find out that they don’t know about Jesus, and you teach them about the Gospel and that God’s Kingdom is already here with us because of what Jesus did. No one else will have that opportunity but because you are the exact person you are, God can use you to teach someone He loves but who doesn’t know Him yet. Maybe that person doesn’t think that women should be listened to, so it is a good thing you are a man! Or maybe, you are a girl who likes to catch frogs and climb trees, and maybe someday you will be climbing a mountain and you hear someone calling for help. And down in a deep crevasse (which is a crack in the ice, like a small canyon) you see that another woman has fallen in there. You use your ropes to haul her out of there, put up your tent, place her in your sleeping bag and make a fire to keep her warm and alive, and you feed her before taking her back down the mountain. If you were a man, she might be scared to trust you, but because you are a woman, she feels safe with you and when she finds out you are a Christian, she wants to know all about it. But if you weren’t exactly you, you wouldn’t be there and you wouldn’t meet her and maybe she would have died. If you aren’t you, then all sorts of things that are supposed to happen just might not happen.
Who you are is a combination of all the things we have been talking about for all these weeks. Your talents, abilities, and interests and the choices you make about what you do with them is a huge part of who you are. Whether you are a girl or a boy is also very important because people will react to men and women differently. Sometimes God has something that needs to be done by a man and sometimes He has something that needs to be done by a woman. It’s like my cats—they will not let my husband clip their claws, at all. They don’t trust him to do it and we aren’t sure why, but they will lay nicely on their backs while I do it. Maybe it’s because they find my voice more comforting or I am more gentle about it or maybe because my hands are more delicate and my fingers are thinner so I don’t accidentally hurt them as much. When that job needs to be done, it goes to me and not him. In some cultures, women aren’t permitted to talk to men who aren’t family members, and so God would send a man for that job. Women and children who have been abused sometimes can’t talk to a man and feel safe, so God sends women to help them out. It isn’t about boys or girls being better than one another but about God loving a person enough to send the exact right person for the job He wants done.
What about if you are in a wheelchair? You see the world from a very different angle and you have different experiences and another person who is in a wheelchair or maybe has leg braces is going to feel a lot more comfortable around you than with me because they will feel understood. There are things that you will understand that I wont, and you won’t say the things that I don’t know are really dumb. Or how about if you are from another country so you know how to speak more than one language? If someone needs help, and I can’t understand them, then I can’t help. But if you are there and you understand, even if you can’t help, maybe you can tell me what they need and maybe I can help! The Kingdom of God is all about working as a team according to our gifts.
Your memories are also very important, they will help you to talk to and understand people who have been through things that are similar or the same. I can talk about being a refugee all I want but because I have never lost my home or had to leave my country, I don’t understand. So, my help won’t be as good as the help of someone who has also lived through that—but they can teach me to be a better helper! And then I can help! But I wouldn’t know how to help if someone hadn’t taught me how. Your memories can help others out in so many ways! You just never know until it happens and then you say, “Oh wow, I have been through that before and I know just what they need to do!” When someone is in trouble, it is the best thing in the world when someone knows how to fix it. In fact, whenever something is broken and I don’t want to buy a new one, I go onto YouTube and search for a video where someone is fixing it. When they make a video, they are giving me one of their memories about how to fix it! Your memories help you and they can also help others. Isn’t that just amazing? Can you think of times that you have helped people by remembering things?
All of these things I have been talking about—your talents, gifts, abilities, knowledge, memories, and experiences, and even what you look like—are exactly why you are needed. Only you can be you. No one else will ever be able to replace you or be you. They have different talents, gifts, abilities, knowledge, memories, and experiences than you—even if you have lived in the same house and even if you are twins. They aren’t helpful in the unique ways that you are helpful. It doesn’t mean that you can’t both do chores around the house, but it does mean that your puzzle pieces won’t fill in the same places of the puzzle. They are going to be needed and more helpful in certain ways and you will be needed and more helpful in others. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that everyone else is needed for the really important stuff but that what we can do isn’t important at all! I have a story to help you understand why that isn’t true.
So, what if the greatest Bible teacher in the world (who would not be me) is walking down the street and she meets a man who needs to know about Jesus, but he is also really hungry. The problem is that she has no money and nothing in her pockets for the man to eat. She would love to tell him about Jesus, and it is important for him to know about Jesus but he is so hungry that he won’t even be able to listen to her and he might even get angry. She looks around, very upset, wishing that she lived closer, but then she saw a corner store down the street. She walked in and explained the situation, but the store owner wouldn’t give her even a moldy apple because he figured that they would never leave him alone if he fed even one of them. So, he turned her away. She went back to the man and he looked so weak and she was starting to cry when she saw a teenage boy who looked really tough. He was eating a huge sandwich as he walked down the street. Feeling very desperate, she walked up to the young man and explained the situation to him. He nodded and smiled and reached up to scratch his neck—and when he did it, his jacket moved and she saw he was wearing a cross around his neck. He tore his sandwich in half and told her to take it. And then he thought about it again and just gave her the whole sandwich. The teacher thanked him and then took the sandwich back to the man, who ate it, and then she told him about Jesus and they prayed together. He was strong enough after the sandwich to go with her to the men’s shelter that her friends ran and they worked with him so that he could get healthy, and get a job with a company run by a woman who could always be counted on to help people in need and a place to live in a house run by a man who really cared about giving people a second chance, and the teacher would come back to check on him and invite him to Bible study.
Now, in this story we have a lot of different people—men and women working together to make the world more like the Kingdom of God. And we might make the mistake of trying to say that what some people did was really important and what others did was less important. But if even one person hadn’t done their job (like the grocer), then none of the story would have happened. Everyone was every bit as important as everyone else. Take just one person away and the man would still be in big trouble. Each one of those people, because of their lives and where they were and what they could give, played a role that no one else could play in the life of that man that Jesus died for too. That’s what it means to be a community. It takes us all to do God’s work, and it is wrong to think that what we have to offer isn’t worth much. When the man received the sandwich, that was exactly what he needed because without that sandwich, none of the rest would have happened. And the teenager who gave up his lunch probably didn’t even think it was a big deal. What you can do is important too, even when it seems like nothing.
Our lives are about what we do when we have the opportunity. Will we be kind or cruel? Generous or greedy? Will we think we are better than everyone else or will we know that people deserve to be helped when bad things happen to them? What we do tells people who we are, and when we tell them we are Christians, what we do tells them what they should think about God. The teenager with the sandwich told the world that God is generous. The teacher told the world the good news that God came to us through His Son Jesus to rescue the world from evil and death. The people who ran the men’s shelter tell us that God is looking out for us and has a place for us even when we don’t think He even cares. The woman who hired Him tells us that we have a purpose, we are useful, and needed to get the job done. The family who run the boarding house where he lived tell us that God is very concerned about the things we need. And when the teacher came back to check on him, she tells us that we are not abandoned and are worth remembering. You see, it takes every single one of us working together to show the world God’s identity—to be His mirror. Our identities work together to give the world an image of what God is like. When Jesus was here on earth, He did that perfectly and He never let God down. We make mistakes and sometimes we make God look bad by doing things we shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean we give up. The most important part of your identity comes down to how you use it to show the world what God is like. That’s what being an image-bearer means. That’s why you were created and why you are different from everyone else who has ever lived. We need you to show us something about God that we can’t see without you. I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to really think about how you help the world to see God.