I Am: Encounter the One Who Gives You Purpose and Peace in a Crazy World

By Matt Fry

Understand that your past does not define who you are, that your fears and insecurities can be replaced with the truth of God's Word, and that when you truly encounter God, you will discover who you are. What you say and believe about yourself determines your destiny. But many people struggle with understanding who they are. They allow past mistakes to define them and shape their future.

In I Am Matt Fry opens your eyes to the true identity you have in Christ. He uncovers seven key truths from the “I Am” statements of Jesus that will help you see who He is. You will be empowered to find Jesus and begin a new life with the power to become everything He has created you to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charisma House
• Release date: May 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781629991047

Book preview

trafficking.

Introduction

God Is the Great I Am

I STILL REMEMBER THE night I sat on the couch in our living room feeling lost and empty. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I had just lost my job and was suddenly struck with the realization that I had lost not only my means of supporting my wife and our two small children but also the status I had enjoyed as part of the staff of a well-known church. As that awareness settled in, I began wrestling with questions about who I really was.

Although there was a lot of noise and activity swarming around me in the house, I felt completely alone. I wondered if God had forgotten about me. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was waking up to the harsh reality that my identity—my sense of meaning and purpose—had been connected to my title and position.

It took some time for me to think beyond my emptiness, but as I began to seek God, I discovered that for a lot of my life my sense of worth had been based on what I did. When I was in high school and college, I was Matt Fry the wrestler. After a decade of serving on a church staff, I was Matt Fry the youth minister. Now I felt like a failure because I was just Matt Fry. I felt as though I had let my family down. And I was angry with God. I had given my life to serve Him, and now I was out of a job. I had surrendered and sacrificed my life for Him, and I thought, This is what I get?

For the first time since I had committed my life to Christ, I considered quitting ministry and pursuing a new career. But that would mean starting over in many ways because my degree, training, and experience were in ministry. I couldn’t accept that God wanted me to leave the ministry, but I had no clear direction about what I should do next.

I worked for a time as a custodian during the week while traveling on the weekends to speak at churches. One of the places I cleaned was a police station. One night I had to work around a policeman who was sitting at his desk. I said, Excuse me, sir. Can I get your trash can? He looked up at me and said, Don’t I know you? Aren’t you the youth pastor at the big church down the street? I said, I used to be, and awkwardly changed the subject and continued cleaning.

During that time in my life, as I searched God’s Word for comfort and direction about what to do with my life, I came across a familiar passage. I had read it many times before, but this time it seemed to jump off the page.

Paul said in Philippians 3:10, I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection (MEV). I thought, "Yes! I want to know Christ and His power! Then the passage continued, . . . and the fellowship of His sufferings (MEV). I thought, Can’t I have the power without the suffering? I remember God speaking to me in that moment and saying, No, Matt, you can’t have My power without the suffering." I had to learn they go hand in hand. It’s the suffering that brings us the power.

I look back now and realize that losing my job was a defining moment in my life. My paradigm shifted as I went from being Matt Fry the youth pastor who happens to be a Christian to a Christian who was a youth pastor. I stopped linking my significance with my title. By seeking God, I discovered that my identity wasn’t in what I did. My identity was found in Him.

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

One of the biggest challenges we face in this crazy, mixed-up world is answering the question Who am I? For some of us, discovering who we are means discovering our destiny. For others, it’s about trying to figure out our place in the world and to feel significant.

We struggle to believe we matter, which can cause us to feel completely unworthy. We wonder how God could love us and want to provide for us. And when we don’t understand that, it makes everything else we face in life that much harder.

The most fundamental thing we need to know is that no matter what we’ve done, God is still faithful, and He is good. God loves you, is pursuing you, and still has a purpose for your life even if you’ve messed up. When I struggle, even when I turn my back on Him, He is still faithful to love me.

There are three things God wants us to be confident of beyond a shadow of a doubt so that we can live out our unique purpose:

•God is good, even when our circumstances are not good.

•God is a great God and has all the power and resources we would ever need.

•God is greater than the enemy, and He gives us the power to overcome the enemy in Jesus’s name.

He is an amazing God! God is good, He is great, and He is greater. As 1 John 4:4 says, greater is He who is in me than he that is in the world.

He gives us all the love we will ever need to face every challenge or opportunity we might encounter in our lives. He is so big that we can’t completely comprehend all of His attributes, and He knows us intimately down to our smallest details. God knows everything we’ve done, and He still loves us! Knowing this lays the foundation for having a fresh encounter with God.

We see many examples in the Bible of men and women who had encounters with God. One of the most powerful examples is Moses. He wasn’t perfect. In fact, he got in a fight, lost his temper, and killed a man, and as a result he lived as a fugitive in the desert for forty years. It appears that Moses even struggled with insecurity, but God revealed Himself to Moses in an incredible phenomenon.

While in the desert Moses encountered a bush that was on fire but not consumed. And this is where we see God speak to him:

Look! The cry of the people of Israel has reached me, and I have seen how harshly the Egyptians abuse them. Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh. You must lead my people Israel out of Egypt. But Moses protested to God, Who am I to appear before Pharaoh? Who am I to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt? God answered, I will be with you. And this is your sign that I am the one who has sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God at this very mountain.

—EXODUS 3:9–12

Instead of accepting this amazing assignment, Moses made excuses. He said: I am not good enough. I don’t have all the answers. People won’t believe me. I am a terrible public speaker. I am not qualified. Yet God still chose Moses, not based on what Moses thought of himself, but based on what God could do. Despite Moses’s fears, God’s plan was for Moses to go to Pharaoh, demand the release of God’s people, and lead them out of slavery in