House of Refuge—Lesson 1 (of 2) Identity

This is a presentation made at the Sunnyslope House of Refuge in Phoenix, AZ on February 29, 2024. (Leap Year Day)

This is Part 1 of 2 and is about Identity.

I use the word NEST to illustrate that the nest we build for ourselves in our lives will always be built around our identity.
NEST means:
Nature—Live with a sin nature or saved nature?
Eternity—Are we eternally saved or damned?
Servant—Do we serve God or Satan?
Trust—Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the Creator?

FULL TRANSCRIPT:
 MIKE BAKER: And he’s a teacher, but, Vin, you’ve been coming here how many years now?

VIN: It’s been coming on two years now. Two years.

MIKE BAKER: Yeah. And, Vin’s got a, I’m gonna let him explain what his background is and so forth, but tonight he’s, we’re gonna talk about, you’ve got a pass out there that has been given to you and so forth.

So, let’s pay attention. What I’d like you guys to do, put your cell phones in your pocket, please. Make sure they’re turned off. And Jake, don’t call anybody, okay? Ha ha ha ha.

VIN: Alright. Well, I would like to open in prayer if that’s cool with you guys. Alright. Dear Lord, Jesus Christ, thank you for bringing all these men together here this evening.

Please bless the words that come out of my mouth. Let it enter into their ears, and let it affect their hearts. So that when they leave this room this evening they will, have a heart change that will reflect Jesus Christ in their life towards others. We love you, Jesus, and we thank you for dying on the cross.

And we thank you for loving us. And because you loved us, we now love our brothers and we’re going to go out there and we’re going to try to serve one another and by serving one another, we truly start to understand what it means to be a Christ follower. In your name we pray, Amen.

MIKE BAKER: Introduction. This is Vin McReynolds.

VIN: So, it’s a 2-part lesson. You get to see me tonight, and you guys get to see me next Thursday. The title of this lesson is going to be called Jonesing for Jesus. This is Part 1. I’m going to be talking about identity. So, if I’m going to be talking about identity, I probably need to introduce who I am.

My name is Vin. It’s short for Vin Diesel. And I’m half Vietnamese. I’m half Irish. That’s my identity. That’s how I introduce myself to other people. I’m the guy with blue shades most of the time, but it’s getting dark outside. I’ll take them off. I’ll let you guys see my eyes.

Yeah, most people don’t get to. I identify as a Christ follower. So, not everyone in this room can do that, not everyone in this room will do that, but there are those of us in here who can also identify as being a Christ follower. And that’s what we’re talking about tonight. So, when I first became Christian, I called Jesus my Lord, my master.

I was a slave to Christ in a good way, a willing slave. I chose to serve him with all my being. I wanted to do anything to please him and that fire never got extinguished. That was seven and a half years ago, but before I made that decision, before I re identified myself as being a Christ follower, I was a drug addict.

I was verbally abusive to my wife. I was verbally abusive, emotionally abusive to my daughter. They both hated me. I was a chef in a kitchen that brought me away from the house 16 hours a day. I was happy. I identified whenever I introduced myself, I’m a chef. It’s something I was proud of, even though my home life was falling apart.

So, between the drugs and my wife and my daughter and everything falling apart in my life, I hit my rock bottom. And rock bottom for everyone is different. Rock bottom for me, personally, is just when I stopped digging. I hit my rock bottom. So, now, I teach addiction recovery classes. It was actually because of Ron.

Everybody knows Ron. I came here a couple of years ago and he’s talking about this thing called Celebrate Recovery. And I’m like, what the heck is that? You know? And, it has to do with, Christians coming together in fellowship. And non-Christians too. Coming together and learning about a man named Jesus.

And, how this person, Jesus, is also God. In the flesh. And how he can help us get through our hurts and our habits and our hangups. He can give us freedom from that. So, I was interested. I was hooked. I was like, what is this all about? Cause I have a funny story when I was addicted to drugs. My funny story is I thought everyone who became a Christ follower suddenly got over their drug addiction.

Suddenly no longer had cravings. Cause that’s how it was for me. I was like, wow, I should have became a Christ follower a long time ago. But then I started seeing other people who were Christian. Struggling, having cravings, having desires to do cigarettes, to do alcohol, to do all of these drugs that just hurt them and tear them to pieces and drop them below the standards that God wants us to reach for, because God is the highest standard.

So talking to Ron, learning about Celebrate Recovery, learning about this guy named John Baker and how he came up with a 12-step program that was Christ-centered and had Biblical comparisons, but he also had Eight Principles that were based off of a Beatitudes. And those Eight Principles, if you don’t know what the Beatitudes is, it’s in the New Testament, it’s in the Gospel of Matthew.

Really cool stuff. It’s a short read, but it has to do with things that we’re not used to doing. Things that, if you are a part of this world, you wouldn’t normally think made sense. To love, love people that you wouldn’t normally love. To call the weak strong. All of these things are foreign concepts, especially to me, a non-Christian.

I told you I was half Vietnamese and half Irish. My Vietnamese mother raised me Buddhist. I, I was all about reincarnation. If I ever wanted to do something bad in my life, knowing that, you know, it could come back to me later, because there’s some form of karma also in the Buddhist religion. Hey, you know what?

Maybe my next life will deal with that. Maybe I can do this wrong thing today and my next life will have to deal with the consequences. But that didn’t seem real to me. That seemed kind of fake. I needed something that could help dig me out of a hole that could help me in this life, not the next life.

And that’s when I looked at the sky and I was like, God, can you help me? And he gave me a sign. He gave me a sign that I couldn’t ignore. He gave me a sign that I had to listen to. He gave me a sign that moved me to change, to become a new person in my life, to stop doing this sinful behavior, to stop doing this drug addict urges, these desires, these cravings that were just completely selfish and to want to be a better me, to want to be a better human being because I was not a very good person.

You could watch my entire testimony. I made a 12-minute testimony on the website. I had to put the G in there. It’s www.4Given.me if you want to learn more about me. It’s 12-minutes. I like to tell people because it’s 12 minutes of your time. It’s valuable. I don’t want you to hit play and be like, how long is this going to go for?

It’s just 12 minutes. So, Jonesing for Jesus, finding our identity in Christ is what I’m talking about tonight. And Before I found my identity in Christ, I had to believe that Christ was God. I had to believe that Jesus Christ, Son of God, was God incarnate. Incarnate, fancy word, for in the flesh. He was here with us.

In Matthew, it says that Jesus was called Immanuel, which is God with us. And there was an angel that was talking to Mary that said, You’re gonna have this kid, and you’re gonna name this kid Immanuel, and You go through the gospel of Matthew, and they never called him Immanuel, ever. What’s up with that?

But one of the last verses in the Gospel of Matthew was Jesus himself Saying that I am with you. I am, which was a play on the name of God, which is Yahweh, with you. I am with you, which was the name Immanuel. So the very last verse in the Gospel of Matthew is I am with you. I think to the end of the age or something.

So, once I came to the realization that God loves me, God sent his Son, his Son was God, and he came here to save me. I started having to wonder, what do I need saving from? I didn’t ask to be saved. I’m hearing these people talking, these Christians around me, these Bible thumpers, talking about salvation and how some guy died for me.

I didn’t ask anybody to die for me. I didn’t want anybody to die for me. So, to make sense of it in my mind, it was like a hero. Someone who sees that maybe a train’s gonna hit you or a bus is gonna hit you and knocks you out of the way. And takes the impact upon themselves, maybe a secret service agent or something who would jump in front of a bullet for you.

I didn’t ask him to do that, but he did it for me. I didn’t ask that person to save me from that bus that was going to plow into me and kill me. But yet that hero did that for me. So Jesus is a hero. He’s a superhero. He saved me from eternal damnation. Where do I get all this from? It’s in the Bible.

There’s Bibles in the center of each table here. When I first became a Christian, I was very curious. about this, this God. I never actually became, on the day I believed in God, a Christian. I became a God believer. Then I picked up the Bible to learn more about God. That’s what the Bible does. It’s a story about who God is.

And I started in the beginning with Genesis, and I went all the way to Revelation, and I got addicted to it. There’s that word, addiction. I work with a lot of people trying to recover from addiction. I chose to have a new addiction in my life. I became addicted to God. So as I identify in my life with who am I? I’m still trying to figure out who is God?

And when I got to Matthew, and I started reading the New Testament, and I started hearing that they were going to put this guy on a cross, and they were going to hang him with, with nails in his arms, and his feet were nailed to this, this, this, this tree. I, I suffer from anxiety, and I closed the book. And I didn’t touch it again for another week.

I was just like, they couldn’t have done that. They couldn’t have done that. Later on, I remember, seven and a half years ago, I opened up the book and I’m like, I gotta see what happens. These guys can’t have just killed Jesus. And then as I read more and it resonates and it hits me in my heart and I start to realize, you know what?

This is real. This ain’t fake. This is real. And it was one person’s account of Jesus that affected me that first time. It was Matthew. Then you, there’s four gospel accounts. There’s Mark, Luke, and John. That’s like, you know, someone witnessing a car accident and there’s like four different witnesses. These are witnesses. To the life of Jesus.

So then I would read these other testimonies and I would become affected by these other testimonies and it would still resonate and affect my heart. And once my heart was changed, my life was changed, and my life was changed into a new identity. So, having identified in the past as a drug user, as a chef, as a dude who wears blue shades, as some tough guy, as a guy whose wife hates him, has a daughter who doesn’t want to be in the same room as him, I’ve now changed my identity.

It’s like working for a new company. You know, you work for Walmart or Walgreens or wherever you work. You know, you either hate your employer or you love your employer. You’re either going to be good at your job or you’re going to be terrible at your job. And you know when you’re in a room by yourself and you’re thinking to yourself, Who am I?

Am I a good employee? Am I a bad employee? You know. I don’t need to point fingers. You know if you’re going to work hard for that company. You know if you believe in, in, in the employee handbook. If you love the, the, the system of rewards that that company gives you and you’re going to work your butt off or you’re going to slack off.

You’re only accountable to yourself and God if you believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, you’re only accountable to yourself. But the thing is, when we’re accountable to ourself and we’re making our own decisions, what happens when we make the wrong decisions?

Are we going to experience the consequences in the next life? It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to affect me here. Not my problem. It affected that dude over there. It didn’t affect me. My daughter hates me right here right now, but you know what? That’s her deal. My wife hates me, but that’s her deal.

What’s going to help us right here in this life? What’s going to make us want to change? What’s going to make us stand up and be men? Instead of just being tied down to cigarettes and drugs and whatever it is that we call master. Why can we call those things master of our life, but we can’t call the God, the creator in heaven, master?

So, once you find your identity, you can build your life around that identity. You can build your NEST. Once you build your NEST around your identity, I would prefer everyone in this room having identity focused around Christ. But if you can’t do that, well, let’s go through this. I made an acrostic. Anybody here go to Celebrate Recovery?

Yeah, Sunday’s here with Ron, it’s kind of cool.

AUDIENCE: Illuminate.

VIN: Illuminate. Yeah, that’s right. I cook for that. You know, I cook for that. How’s the food? Food’s good, right? That’s right. Food’s good. Go to Illuminate Church on Fridays at 6 p. m. I cook the food. I’m never there because I run a different Celebrate Recovery in Prescott Valley.

Every Friday. I’ve been doing that for over a year. So once you do work like this, if you call it work, it becomes fun. You enjoy it. Sounds like, oh, wow, every Friday you cook for 100, 150 people, and then you, you, you, you leave the food in Scottsdale and you run over to Prescott Valley, you teach a class and you come back home.

I’m home usually by 10 p. m. That sounds like a lot of hard work. I am energized when I do that. I am pumped when I do that. When I am serving God, and when I’m teaching others about this guy named Jesus, I am pumped. And when people say my food’s good, I like that too. I make the cookies. Sometimes my daughter makes the cookies.

My daughter doesn’t hate me anymore. She doesn’t hate me anymore. She helps me make cookies.

So, an acrostic is taking the letters of a word and making them stand for something. It’s a mnemonic. A mnemonic is a way to remember something. So how are we going to remember that you are building a nest with your identity?

Well, nest is the word I chose to make my acrostic.

The N stands for nature. Are we going to submit to our sin nature? That’s something that is, is spoken about in the Bible a lot, or are we going to submit to our saved nature when we accept Jesus Christ into our lives and we have a changed heart? There’s a Bible verse for that.

Someone want to volunteer to read that one? Anyone? No? Okay, read it, man. Read it loud. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.

For all have sinned. So you can’t say, ah, you know, I don’t need to be saved. Ha ha, I’m not a sinner. For all have sinned. All. Well, I don’t believe in the Bible.

You know what? Read it. Read it. The people who say I don’t believe in the Bible didn’t read it. Read the Bible. I don’t care if you go for like the Message paraphrase. I don’t care if you go for the NIV. If you go for the ESV, NASB. I don’t, there’s all these different translations and it kind of blows your mind.

I read them all. I’m a God addict. I want to know who this guy God is and I want to know why he sent his son. I used to cook food and take pleasure in doing drugs and make my wife angry and my daughter hate me. But my identity in God makes me want to read and know who this person is. If you love someone, you want to know about them.

Valentine’s Day just passed, right? You’re gonna be like, here’s your gift of chocolates. What’s your name? What’s your name? No, you’re gonna you’re gonna know her name. You’re gonna know her favorite color

because you love that person. Because I love Jesus Christ. I want to learn more about Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was just joking around with my buddy here and he was telling me. You know, bro love and a brotherly kiss and all that stuff. You read that in the Bible. It sounds kind of weird, but once you become Christian, we become brothers.

That’s your identity. Your identity with me is that we’re related, spiritually related. I love discovering I have a new family. It’s really cool.

The E in nest. So the word is nest. We’re building our identity. We’re building a nest around our identity. The E stands for eternal. In the Bible, if you read it, I know a lot of people say, yeah, yeah, I’ve read it, but actually read it, it’s really cool.

We are eternal beings. We are eternal beings. So, if your argument is, when I die, that’s it, and I’m gonna kick the bucket and that’s it, well, if you read the Bible and you start to realize that’s not it, you will be eternally damned if you don’t accept Jesus Christ into your life. Now, what happens if you do accept Jesus Christ into your life, and you say, He’s your Lord, and He’s your Savior, and He’s your Master, He’s your King, He’s your God, and you serve Him, willingly, as a slave to Him?

Because that’s just what you desire in the morning. Instead of your morning cigarette fix, you just desire to please God. You desire to hit your knees on the ground and get calluses on your knees. You pray so much. You want to serve this God to the point where you, you, you just, you wake up energized. You don’t even need coffee. And then you will have eternal salvation. That’s in the kingdom of God. That’s what they call heaven.

The S in our nest, because we’re building a nest around our identity. The S is servant. So, we’re all building a nest, whether you’re a believer or non believer. And, as your servant, do we serve God or do we serve Satan?

Are we going to pursue the things of this world? Or are we going to pursue more godly things, more spiritual things? Am I going to be kind to my neighbor? Am I going to love my enemy? That sounds so weird. Am I going to give thanks and praise to God for all things, even when I’m in the midst of turmoil?

When I am experiencing a crisis in my life, just last year, my ceiling had caved in and there was nothing but fiberglass insulation all in my living room because the A. C. condensation went into the crawl space in my, in my ceiling. And I had just finished praying in the other room, maybe five feet away, four feet away.

And I heard this crash and I come out to the room and I’m looking at my ceiling. There’s this gaping hole and there’s this huge mess and it’s like six in the morning and I’ve been practicing this. So this is not hard. This is not easy for most people. It’s actually very hard for most people. But because I had been practicing, I said, thank you God.

Thank you God. That I was in the other room, four feet away. Thank you God. I knew exactly what happened right when it happened. I was like, thank you God for giving me an AC. Yeah, it caused this mess, but thank you. To give thanks and praise a week later, an hour later, a month later. That’s cool. It says that we should in the Bible, but to give thanks and praise to God right in the midst of that disaster, in the midst of that trauma, in the midst of that crisis, that’s something else.

My transmission went out the other day when I was going to Prescott Valley and back. That’s a large commute. I had made it home. I was maybe a hundred yards from my house, and the transmission just went kaput. It was done. It was gone. The car wouldn’t move forward. It wouldn’t move backwards. I had to call AAA.

And while it was happening, in the midst of my disaster, I was like, thank you, God. Thank you, God. I don’t know why I’m thanking you exactly. Thank you for getting me really close to my house before this happened. But thank you, God. So if we can actually do things like that because we identify as Christians in our lives, Life gets better.

So you tell me here. If something in your life happens very bad. It happened. Let’s just say it happened. It was done. A loved one died. Your wife left you. She cheated on you. You cheated on her. Something bad happened in your life. It happened. It’s done. How do you react to it? Thank you God? Or how you react,

This is terrible. Boo hoo me. I feel sorry for myself. How you react will affect your future. It will affect your outlook for the next hour, for the next day, for the next week, for the next month, for your life. It will affect the people around you, the people who are looking at you trying to say, you know what, what’s this guy gonna do next?

My daughter saw me look at the ceiling because it was a loud crash. And when it comes down to the ground and there’s like fiberglass insulation everywhere, she comes running out, what’s going on? And I’m like, I don’t know, sweetie, thank God though. And so I was able to give a witness to my daughter, where I give thanks and praise.

I’m not just speaking it, I’m doing it. Because nothing I could have done at that moment in time would have changed what happened when that ceiling collapsed. It happened, it’s done. How I react to it, it can change everything. Okay, when you stub your toe and you hit something, you punch something, you throw something, you damage something, you break a wall, you break a door that did nothing for you, it just increases your expenses in your home.

You have to replace that drywall, you have to replace that door, you have to replace whatever that appliance was that you broke. How you react to a negative situation is going to affect your future.

But, Trust is the last part of this nest. Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the Creator? Has the world done us well?

Are we all in a halfway house right now? Has the world done you well? Have, have the choices that we made, the decisions we made in life made us super ultra rich? Everyone loves us? No, we’re here right now because we’ve made decisions in our life that brought us here. Those decisions could be good.

Those decisions could be bad. It could be the world out to get you. It depends on where you’re at in your mind for why you think you’re here. I think you’re here because God placed you here. I think you’re here because there’s a purpose in your life that hasn’t been accomplished yet. And you can do great things in your life because God is powerful.

If you let him be powerful in your life, If you step aside. and let him take charge. God is amazing like that. I’ve been married 22 years now, celebrated in January. My wife is awesome, but she was ready to leave me. So God is a God of restoration. He never restores us exactly the way we thought we should be restored or when we thought we should be restored.

But I’ll tell you what, he does restore and it’s better than the restoration that we imagined for ourselves.

So, we can go through the bullet points, maybe some people have been following around and looking at it. But, read it on your own. I do want to say though, that if you find your identity in Christ.

And you train yourself up to be that Christian. And you have fellowship with other people. Which is like, basically, a lot of people in a room, talking about Jesus. Iron sharpens iron is the saying. We get to know one another. We build relationships with one another. I become accountable to you. You become accountable to me.

And we become better people in life. And we do life together. When that actually happens in your life, you can’t wait to go out and serve others. You can’t wait to say I identify as a mentor at the Sunnyslope House of Refuge. You can’t wait to say I teach a Celebrate Recovery which is just a Christ-centered 12-step recovery that teaches guys about Jesus Christ.

It opens the conversation. It lets people understand that there’s a God in heaven that loves them. That sent a hero to block that bullet. To push him out of the way from the bus. Because we weren’t going to do it on our own. That identity in Christ can’t just be a switch that you flip inside of you. That, that salvation happens because God does something in your heart.

If I could have pulled myself out of my hole on my own, I would have. But I couldn’t. It took a work from God. A supernatural God. A heroic God. To give me the strength to get over those addictions. To change my life, to become a new me. My daughter hugs me sometimes. And there was a few years where she wouldn’t.

So these days I kid around and I say, Let go of me. Enough of the hugs. I’ll tell you guys. In my head, I don’t want to let go. There was a time she didn’t want to be in the same room as me. She hated me.

So we can affect our own lives. By boo hooing ourself. Or we can affect our own lives by realizing that we’ve already given control of our lives to inferior little g, lowercase g gods. But there’s a big G God, the only God that we have not given control of our lives over to. We’ve given control of our lives over to the drugs and over to the cigarettes and over to the alcohol but we haven’t given control, complete control of our lives over to the big G God, the real God.

We’ve only given our control over to the idols in our life. We’ve got to get rid of those idols and we’ve got to accept that God is our, is our, is our Creator and he sent His Son to save us. So next week in this sermon, if you want to call it a sermon, I’m not a preacher. Jonesing for Jesus, Part Two. …., we’re going to talk about the image of God and how we’re made in the image of God and how we are addicts to the core of our being and we were designed that way.

We are not accidentally addicts. We were designed to be addicted to God, but we found everything else to be addicted to, and that’s what we’re going to talk about next week. But thank you for your time this evening. I greatly appreciate it.