Back to School Sunday

The name of Jesus is why we're here at all. Jesus Christ our Lord, our King. That's why we gather it all. Wait a second. This is Nathan.

Everyone say hi, Nathan. This is Nathan Rogers. I'm introducing him to you today. He is one of our awesome student volunteers. He.

He and his wife Mandy have been attending Whitewater for about the last five years. After spending a stint in kids ministry for about six months, they shifted over to student ministry and have been there ever since. Nathan and Mandy were some of the first people that we met when we got here. Cause our kids were in student ministry and blessed to know them as friends. And Nathan's gonna be sharing some of his testimony today and how God has impacted his life, how he was looking for his identity and lots of other things throughout his life.

Just like all of us do and have and eventually found it in Jesus. Jesus Christ our Lord. The one that we sing of. The one that plain old normal guys like Nathan get to engage with. Plain old normal people like us get to engage with.

And so we're going to celebrate that today and learn from part of his story. But before we do, I would like to pray. Will you pray with me? God, I thank you for today. I thank you for Sundays.

Just the highlight of my week, that we get to come and gather together your people, some of us coming extra broken, some of us coming elated and joyful for the week, Some of us in between, some of us crawling in today, some of us riding high. And I pray that whatever we've come into this day with, that you'll meet us here in your grace and your kindness toward us. I pray for Nathan and I pray not only that he will get to share what's in his heart and share what's on the pages, but he ultimately will be sharing far more than words on a page. He'll be sharing the beautiful story of the way that you've worked in his life. And he'll be sharing words that Holy Spirit, I pray you would empower and embolden and weaponize against Satan today that these be words of eternal significance beyond these seats, beyond this hour together.

Words that would follow us into our week and words that would affect us today. So speak through him today. Your words, your grace upon him. I know it's intimidating to step up here, and so I pray your peace over him today too. Thank you for Nathan and Mandy, for their family.

Pray that you will bless them as they've been a blessing to so many of us. In Jesus name, amen.

Well, thank you for Reminding everybody here just how not special I am. I appreciate that. But in all reality, he is right. I am. I am not special.

I am a normal, everyday person that has just spent my life looking horizontally for everything instead of vertically. So, athlete, mid student, soldier, man, coach, dad, husband, anxiety, depression.

Just a short list of the words that I've used to identify myself since I was little.

What's included on your list? What have you used to identify yourself throughout your life? There's a quote from Paul David Tripp in a book I'm reading right now. He says, human beings are always assigning to themselves some kind of identity. There are two places to look.

Either you will be getting your identity vertically from who you are in Christ, or you will be shopping for it horizontally in the situations, experiences, and relationships of your daily life.

Anybody else? Does that resonate with anybody else in here? Yeah. Kind of hit me as I was preparing this message. Thank you, Micah Oder, for giving me the book to read.

Perfect timing. So let's do a deeper dive into my list. Right from the time I could remember I was an athlete. That's all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to play sports, basketball, baseball, football, swimming, soccer, ride BMX bikes with my friends, street hockey.

You name it, I wanted to do it. Ultimately, that led me to becoming a mid student. Right. Everybody over the age of 25 that doesn't have a teenager living in their house. Mid is the new word for mediocre, Right?

Okay. Thank you to my daughter and all of the other students in the union for teaching me that word. Okay? But in reality, it was true. I was a mid student because all I cared about was playing sports.

As long as I had the grades to be eligible to play sports, it's all I cared about. It's all that mattered to me.

9, 11 happened when I was a senior in high school.

So, you know, ultimately, I had this overwhelming feeling of patriotism for our country, sorrow for the people that were victims that day. So nine months after I graduated high school, I joined the United States Army. Besides being an athlete, I had always dreamed about being a soldier. You could have found me in the woods, throwing mud on my face just to hide by myself. Nobody was looking for me.

I was just hiding in the woods by myself. Okay? So when I tell you, like I was, bold letter, all caps, in love with this identity of being a soldier, I was. It's who I was. It's who I wanted to be.

I still am proud of that title, just way more humble about the title now that I'm not, you know, 20. So I deployed to Iraq twice in my five, five year, one month and nine day enlistment in Iraq is where I felt like I became a man. Right? For all the men in the room. I'm sure you've had those moments where you're like, I'm a man.

Like, this is who I am. That's where I found mine. In one calendar year of my first deployment, I was blown up by a suicide vehicle. Born ied. You'll see the picture on the screen.

My head was right behind the giant hole in the window and where the door was, right? That's where I was sitting when it went off. I was shot at by small arms fire regularly, RPGs. I bagged bodies that were burnt by fire and explosions.

I sat through 13 memorial services for my battle buddies who were killed in action.

Like everything else in the service that I went through, I just compartmentalized it all, just kind of shoved it away.

But in all reality, it just made me angry. Everything that I went through, it all broke me. And it led me to a lot of things that I used to numb that pain that I had went through.

I used alcohol and drugs to try to run away and mask all of the pain and hurt that I was going through every day of my life. This went on for months until I realized I was probably going to do serious damage to myself.

So as I started changing my coping mechanism, my method from drugs and alcohol, I took on other false identities. My next one was a coach. Started by coaching football, baseball, basketball, soccer. Pretty much if it had a ball, I thought I was smart enough to coach. It probably really wasn't at the time, but I coached for so long that I coached kids in high school who then graduated, got married, had kids, and I coached their kids.

It's just what I did, right? It's what I used to cover my pain and distract myself from the pain that I was dealing with. Another horizontal identity I took on was a dad. When I met my wife, Mandy, she had two boys, Jordan and Braden. I were 6, 8 when we met.

I engulfed myself into the dad boyfriend identity. You can ask her. I showed up one day and just refused to leave.

School. Sports, video games, you name it. I would have done anything they wanted me to do.

Five or six years later, right, we had JC and kind of completed our family. And then along the way, I became a husband. Sometimes I was a great husband, but I really wasn't, if I'm being honest. I was a train wreck. I was a mess more than I Was a great husband.

I was angry all the time. I couldn't even have told you what I was angry about or why I was angry. I just was. So things I never dealt with, they were just, like, growing inside of me, right?

They were just there, just getting bigger. So this is where my anxiety and my depression took over my identity in my life.

These two were like, you know, the kids on the playground that were just skipping around. That's what they were doing in my mind all the time. I hadn't even realized it until it became this giant mountain that was just on top of me. I was like six feet under.

Was just all my unresolved issues, all the things from the service that I just buried away.

There's a lot of older people. The young kids wouldn't get this. They're the science project that you did as a kid, right, where you took the piece of bread and you shoved it under the washer and you documented the mold as it grew, right? That was my anxiety and depression. It was growing stronger in that dark, damp space that I just shoved it in.

It was debilitating for me.

I didn't want to go to work. I didn't want to see people. I lied about where I was because I just wanted to be alone, not even with my family at times.

I had all of these competing horizontal identities trying to define who I was, and none of them could bring me any sort of healing to my past. I was so lost. I didn't even know who I was.

I spent my whole life shopping for my identity horizontally. My whole life, as you can tell, right? And all it gave me was this feeling of lost and anger.

So about three years ago, my wife shared this Facebook post with me, and it was this thing called the fight camp.

It was this place where men can go just to be men. You hike in with everything you need for the weekend. Sleep in the woods. Which was right up my alley, right? Except it had God at the center of the weekend.

Men worshiping together in the woods, talking about Jesus, the struggles that they were facing and they have faced.

And boy, was I facing struggles. The prior year for me was filled with anxiety, depression, flashbacks, nightmares, lack of sleep. So going into camp that week, I had slept six hours for the whole week, right? Not just the night before, the whole week. So when I tell you, I felt like the walking dead, right?

I felt like I was just zombie, just wandering around, unable to think.

So hiking a couple miles into camp through the woods with the crew that I got assigned with, I had about 80 to 90 pounds of gear on my back. And that pack was the lightest thing I carried into camp with me that week.

The first night, I slept for like 12 hours straight in my hammock in the woods. Like, I came out of the woods the next day and my crew decided they thought I had just packed up and left in the middle of the night. They were like, we thought you left for real.

So the next morning we did a worship session. And after the worship session that morning, I went to the group of men that were there to pray for us, to pray with us, to pray through our struggles.

Like I said, struggling doesn't describe how I was feeling. I was buried so far under this mountain of pain that it was in front of me that I felt like I couldn't even see the sun anymore. So these men prayed for me, and I prayed for myself.

All of my anxiety, all of my depression, that God would just wash over me, that he would give me a place to look for peace and comfort for like, the first time in my life. And I feel like this is what the Apostle Paul was telling us in 2nd Corinthians 5:17 through 21. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone, the new is here.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf.

Reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

See, I needed to reconcile my identity with God. It's what I needed. I needed to be looking vertically to get my identity instead of horizontally in what the world was telling me I was. See, what I received at the fight camp was this reconciliation with my Father in heaven, the type of reconciliation that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 11:28 30. Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble at heart, and you will find rest in your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. When I reconciled my identity with God, it. It allowed me to put on this yoke that Jesus spoke about. He gave me rest in my soul.

Coming out of my camp. He has allowed me to Rest in him and get peace from the torment that I carried around for so many years.

What horizontal identities have you used to mask your pain?

What identities have you used to cope with? Insert here whatever that is for you, right? This message is about me, but it's also, I think, something that resonates with all of us. Do you need to reconcile your identity before you bury yourself under a mountain of pain and anger the way I did? Do you need a reconciliation of your identity because you are already buried under the mountain?

My new identity is in him. See, I want to shine like the light in the dark. I want to be the light of the world that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 5, 13, 16, right? You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?

It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on a standard and it gives light to everyone in the house.

In the same way, let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. I can't become the light of the world by hiding my true identity in all of the horizontal and worldly identities that I tried to identify with.

As I was speaking to our students last Sunday night about community and being in the word of God regularly, right? I did a little calling them, me, us, to the table, right? About helping pull each other back when we fall or drift away, for whatever reason that is, I hear a lot of times when I talk about our students, that our students are the future. And as much as I would love to agree with that statement, because I don't feel like I'm as old as I am and they're still really young, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell all of you that our students are the here and the now, right? They're doing things that I struggled to do that I still struggle to do at times.

Okay? We have students who carry their Bibles to school with them every day. We have students talking to other students at their schools about Jesus.

They're bringing them to church with them so that the leaders here can love them and show them and introduce more of Jesus to them, right? We need more of this. I need to do more of this. They inspire me sometimes to be. To want to be better and do more of this, right?

We need to be this community that goes into the darkest place of the world and screams, we love Jesus and then love people the way Jesus does. That's the goal, right?

That's what Josh was talking about last week, being a gospel epicenter, right? To leave the church and be that epicenter outside of here and create another epicenter and on and on and on.

To do that, our identity has to be coming from Him. It can't be coming horizontally. So how do we get there? How do you get there?

I surrendered my horizontal identities to Him. I allowed him, my heavenly Father, to show me who I was in Him.

That's how I got here. On my knees, bawling my eyes out, surrendering everything I held as an identity to Him. It was the strongest thing I could ever do for myself.

My horizontal identities, they don't define me anymore. He does. He uses me in all of my mess to deliver his message of grace, love and salvation.

In a minute, we're going to do communion and then another worship song.

I'm going to encourage you to allow God into your heart and identify those things that you're holding onto. If you're holding onto a horizontal identity, surrender them to Him. Watch your Father in heaven change your identity into what he says you are. See, my surrender came at fight camp, but your surrender can come right here, right now.

Mine came in a field in the woods. Yours can be in this room. It can be in your living room, at home, wherever you're watching.

We will have a group of people that are willing to pray for you, willing to pray with you or just support you as you're surrendering to your Father in heaven.

He has made me a hungry student for his word instead of that mid student I always used to be. I'm a soldier of God, not just of the United States Army. I'm a man of God. I'm a better father and husband now because of his grace, love, and his mercy. Anxiety and depression aren't welcome here anymore.

I will always be a coach. But I was finally called to coach for his team.