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Protecting Your Spiritual Identity

A Sermon by Danny André Dixon

June 12, 2010

©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries

Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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Protecting Your Spiritual Identity

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. The first thing I
want to do is to give glory and thanks to God for the opportunity to be here today
to be able to have the strength, ability, and willingness to speak to you on behalf of
our Almighty God and his Son Jesus Christ. There are many circumstances in this
world that do not make that a guarantee. And if we fail to take into consideration
that it is God who gives us every breath that we take, every mile that we drive,
every step that we take in this world, then do we not demonstrate the most
ungrateful of attitudes? I began my greeting this afternoon by addressing some of
you as simply “ladies and gentlemen.” I do so with respect, but also knowing that
not everyone listening to my voice this afternoon has made that most important
decision to be recognized as a spiritual son or daughter of God. I am hoping that
even you today will perhaps hear something that will encourage you to want to be in
the family of God, and that you will be able to walk arm and arm and hand in hand
with those who call themselves children of God today.
I am particularly aware this morning of my identity as a son or a child of God
this afternoon, and I am happy that I can claim that identity today. As many of my
listeners know, I am a school teacher here in the Fort Stockton Independent
School District. What many of you do not know is that I originally went to college,
Abilene Christian University for almost eight years to study and to train to be a
minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Only along the way have I obtained the
credentials to make my living as a school teacher. My first love is a study of the
word of God. And I make it my practice, as often as I can, to identify people, often
students at school, who are willing to sit down and receive informal instruction as
disciples of Jesus Christ. On any given day or evening you will find me at Kentucky
Fried Chicken or IHOP or Pepito‟s or KBob‟s, maybe at a park bench, or some other
public place with a group of kids. We will have our Bibles open, and we will be
studying the word of God.
I should say, however, that this is not what you would usually see by the
second week of June of any given year. For the last three years, by this time, I
have left Fort Stockton for the summer and I have traveled to receive a week or
two of visiting friends in California before receiving an additional week of training
at a special school in Pasadena. From there, I have spent summers in Russia and in
Kazakhstan—on the other side of the world—spending my mornings teaching
English to speakers of other languages, usually in the mornings for two or three
hours, or in the evenings for the same amount of time. For the rest of the day,
©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries
Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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that is, for 20 hours of my day, I have to privilege of meeting with the people I
teach on an informal basis, looking for individuals who are not Christians in these
countries, and trying to give them the opportunity to become members of the
family of God. Again, I meet with them in restaurants, in parks, walking from place
to place on the streets, while waiting for busses to come by, or in special
invitations to my apartment as a small group of interested individuals whom I invite
to sit down, usually with a translator, to hear instruction in the gospel, and to
discuss with them what it means to be a son or daughter in the family of God, to be
a Christian disciple.
This year I did not go because of a couple of unfortunate circumstances.
First of all, even though as a school teacher my salary is divided up so that I
receive it during the summer months, it is usually very expensive to make these
trips. Almost a $5000 trip to buy the airplane ticket to and from these countries,
living expenses there, and to continue to pay rent and bills here in the United
States while I am gone. Fortunately, I have had a few very wealthy friends, who
who are interested in using their ability to make money to finance these trips. But
as all of us know, economic times are difficult. And while some of these friends are
still very wealthy, their assets are in buildings and in properties, and they do not
have a lot of cash flowing to be able to write a large check as they have done in the
past to send Danny André Dixon to cities in Europe and the Eastern Oriental
countries as they have before. I will have to wait a while.
In addition, I have decided not even to depend upon asking other individuals,
friends that I have across the country, to finance the trip. Some of you who know
me know how this past March, with great disappointment, I sat down at my
computer and the Internet to discover that my identity had been stolen. An expert
in the Internet had somehow discovered my email address and my Facebook
account and had found all the addresses of many of my friends across the country.
This person then sent letters to many of my friends and told them that I had
taken a trip to England, that I had been attacked and beaten, that my wallet and
debit cards had been stolen, and that I was stranded in England with no ability to
return to the United States until I paid all of my bills and could purchase another
airplane ticket to return home. This person begged my friends from everywhere it
seemed to send me large sums of money. One of my friends who is a show producer
from Las Vegas, Nevada sent to this person nearly $1000 without asking any
questions out of loyalty to me. It was only with the individual wrote him another
email letter and asked him to send another thousand dollars that he became
suspicious and called me on the telephone to find that I was very safe, that I was
©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries
Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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teaching school every day here in Fort Stockton, and that I had not been out of
the country. This whole situation is called stealing someone‟s identity, or Identity
Theft. You hear advertisements all the time about how it is important to protect
your identity, to make sure that no one is able to steal the information from your
bank account, your credit cards, and your mail and email. As a matter of fact, if
they have enough access to this private information long enough, they can ruin your
reputation and you will have a difficult time replacing money they can steal; they
can send letters in your name; they can destroy your ability to buy a house or a car
or some appliance that you would normally buy on credit; and you can suffer the
embarrassment of not being able to pay for the things that you normally are
responsible for from day to day. It is a very important thing in this day and time to
protect your identity.
The apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter five
and verse five these words: “You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We
do not belong to the night or to the darkness.” He says these words in a context of
what it means to wait for the Second Coming of the Lord to judge the world,
including Christians, for the deeds they have done on this earth. Now I know there
are those who believe that once you become a Christian, you can never lose your
salvation. I also know that the Scriptures are very clear about Christian
responsibility in this world. Let me read a careful warning, in Spanish from Hebreos
10:26-31. It is a lengthy passage, so I want you to mark it and to return and read it
again carefully when you have time to sit and meditate on the words I am speaking
to you today. Read with me if you have your bibles open:

Si después de recibir el conocimientimonio de la verdad pecamos

obstinadamente, ya no hay sacrificio por los pecasdos. Soló queda una
terrible expectative de juicio, el fuego ardiente que ha de devorar a lost
enemigos de Dios. Cualqueiera que rechazaba la ley de Moisés moría
irremediablemente por el testimonio de dos o tres testigos. ¿Cuántos mayor
castigo piensan ustedes que merece el que ha pisoteado al Hijo de Dios, que
ha profanado la sangre del pacto por la cual había sido santificado, y que ha
insultado al Espiritu de la gracia? Pues conocemos al que dijo: <<Mía es la
venganza; yo pagarés; y también: <<El Señor juzgará a su pueblo.>> ¡Terrible
cosa es caer en las manos del Dios vivo!

In English:

©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries

Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of
the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27but only a fearful expectation of
judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. 28Anyone
who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two
or three witnesses. 29How much more severely do you think a man deserves
to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has
treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and
who has insulted the Spirit of grace? 30For we know him who said, "It is mine
to avenge; I will repay,"[a] and again, "The Lord will judge his people."[b] 31It is
a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Footnotes:
a. Hebrews 10:30 Deut. 32:35
b. Hebrews 10:30 Deut. 32:36; Psalm 135:14

Are we clear? You may believe that you can be a child of God. You may
believe that once you become a son or daughter of God that that relationship can
never be changed. I‟m not going to argue with you about that. What I am going to
do is to let you know that whatever is the nature of that relationship in the family
of God, God is very serious about what “his people” choose to do in this life. “ „The
Lord will judge his people.‟ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living
God” (Hebrews 10:30).
I remember a conversation with my mother around the time I went off to
college. Actually, I remember that she used to say this all the time. She said,
whenever I would leave the house to go out of town. “Remember whose child you
are.” She was, of course, concerned that I consider the reputation of our family by
the behavior that I had away from home. As a matter of fact, when she wrote me
letters when I was in college, and for the many years after I was out of college,
wherever I was, She would always begin her letters with the words, “Dear
handsome son: (!)” And of course this was always a great encouragement to me. But
of greater encouragement was the way she ended many of my letters, even after I
was a grown man. It was not the days of the Internet. It was the days of the ball
point pen. The weight of the pen clearly pressed into the paper. And she underlined
the statement with three exclamation points after the words: “Never let me be
ashamed.” Can‟t we make the same application as we think about our identity as
sons and daughters in the family of God? Is he not saying the same thing about our
behavior? Is he not saying: “My son, my daughter, do not forget that you are my

©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries

Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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child. Do not forget that I am your Father. Do not lose your identity in this world.
Never let me be ashamed of what you do.”
You know it has always interested me that in Fort Stockton, Texas we have
no curfew on the street at night. On several nights this summer I have found
myself unable to sleep. You know that our Truck Stop has closed, and only on the
weekends is our IHOP open 24 hours a day when I might go in with a book or a
magazine to read, or maybe my journal to write down thoughts that I have had
during the day. On several occasions, as I said, I have found myself at one of the
Town and Country stores which are open throughout the night. And I was talking
with some members of the Sherriff‟s office who had come in last night at the T&C
across from McDonalds to get a cup of coffee before continuing their rounds
throughout the night. We were talking about the fact that there is no curfew, and
of how in the night, sometimes as late as 3 and 4 A.M. in the morning some kids are
wandering the street. Unless they catch these children of the night, these sons
and daughters who prefer darkness—unless the officers of the law catch them
doing something wrong, all they can do is, perhaps, to drive up to these kids and ask
them what they are doing, offer them a warning, and encourage them to be safe.
Sometimes it is their unfortunate responsibility to take some of them into custody
because they are using drugs or drinking alcohol illegally or trying to break into a
house or trying to cause some sort of damage to property.
Isn‟t God the same way? He has no curfew on our lives. Of course his Spirit
is there within the consciences of his sons and daughters in the faith, as well as in
the minds of those who are not in relationship with him. And there is that still
small voice, that influence that tells us what we should and should not be doing.
And far too often there are Christians who forget whose children they are. They
make their heavenly Father ashamed of them for what they are choosing to do
under cover of spiritual darkness—not living according to their identity as adopted
sons and daughters of Almighty God.
But the story that is one of the greatest in the Scriptures is that God
knows how to run. What am I talking about? You may have opportunity to read it
sometime this week from the gospel of Luke, chapter 15. It is the story of a man
with two sons. One chooses to leave home and to live his life in sin in a far country
away from home. But his father waits every day for him to return home. And after
the son has wasted his life and his inheritance in sin far away, he thinks to himself
that he, perhaps, could find a job working with the slaves and hired men employed
by his father. And he makes his way home. And the Scripture says that his father
has been watching the road, probably every day, waiting for his son to come back
©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries
Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735
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home. And when he looks out the door one day, he sees his son from far away
coming home. And he, the father, runs to meet his son even before he has arrived
on the home property. The application of the story is simple: God never forgets our
identity when we choose to act like sons and daughters without a Father. He is
more vigilant than the local Sherriff‟s department. He knows everything we‟re
doing; he has no curfew; he leaves the responsibility to us; and he gives many
warnings. And when we sin, he is looking for us to repent and to come back home.
And he will run to meet us, even before we get back, to welcome us home.
And for those who have wandered around in life as children of darkness, who
have never embraced the Father, who have never become children of the light. The
invitation has always been open. It does not matter what someone has done. The
promise is written clearly in the word of God in the gospel of John chapter 1,
verses 11, 12 and 13. Concerning Jesus it says

He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to
all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to
become children of God—children born not of natural decent, nor of human
decision or a husband‟s will, but born of God.

Finally, this afternoon, we have the words of the Apostle Paul who writes to
us about how we symbolically become sons of God in Galatians 3:26-29. His words
are very clear. Are you listening?

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were
baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither
Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ
Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham‟s seed, and heirs
according to the promise.

Maybe on another occasion we can explore how we are identified with God
through the faith that is like that of his servant Abraham. But that faith is
concluded and fulfilled in the active faith that we have in Jesus Christ. Write me a
letter at PO Box 7 here in Fort Stockton, TX and I will send you a copy of this
sermon at no charge, and we can talk about this further if you wish. By the way, I
have my email identity back, and you can write to me at DixonDA@gmail.com and I
will send you a copy of this sermon for free. God bless you all this afternoon. And
remember that you are called to be faithful children of God.
©2010 HungerTruth Christian Educational Ministries
Danny Dixon
PO Box 7
Fort Stockton, TX 79735