Missional Community
Colossians 4:1-18
Transcript
All right, well, again, I'm glad you guys are with us for tonight because we're actually coming to the close of our summer-long series, Colossians. It's all about Jesus. And it has just been so good for us to walk through this as a church family. And if you're adding up, we've covered Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. And so tonight we're actually going to be looking at all of Chapter 4. So if you've got your Bibles, go ahead and grab them.
We've got much ground to cover tonight. If you don't have a Bible, if you just look kind of in between the seats, we've got some of our blue and white Bibles for you. If you don't have a Bible, we'd love for you to have that one. Take that one. That's our gift to you. And church family, if you know someone who doesn't have a Bible and you'd like to take one to them, please, that's what those are for as well.
Okay, so again, we've got much ground to cover tonight. But it has been so good, so good for us to walk through this letter as a church family over the summer. Wouldn't you guys agree? It's been good just for us to study this because Paul is writing this letter to a relatively young church and a relatively healthy church. And so it's been great to walk through because he's legitimately pointing them to the fact that it's all about Jesus and how that plays out in their personal faith and in their relationships. And so for us as a young, healthy church, we've been able to look at that and see how can we continue to grow and continue to move forward.
And we've gotten to grow in a couple of different ways. First of all, we've been able to grow in our understanding of the gospel. So if you think back over the last, over the first chapter and the second chapter, we see beautiful language where Paul basically makes us drink from a fire hydrant in terms of trying to understand about Jesus. He's going to use beautiful language like Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He's the creator of all things. He's the son of God.
He's going to talk about what Jesus does, that he reconciles all things to himself, making peace by the blood of his cross. And in light of that, the gospel being who Jesus is and what he's done, what does that mean for us? Paul's going to write and say that we were a people who were alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. We're incapable of fixing that relationship on our own. But based off of what Jesus has done on our behalf, it's going to use language like redeemed, transferred into the kingdom of his beloved son, qualified, forgiven.
And so we've been able to walk through that and grow in our understanding of the gospel. And over the last four weeks, what we've done is we've transitioned a little bit. And we've moved from this vertical idea of focusing on Jesus. And in light of that, in light of who we are, we've transitioned and started to look at, okay, in light of that, how am I supposed to live? So in light of who I am in Jesus, how am I supposed to live?
And basically we've seen the way that our faith impacts relationships. Paul's going to say things like seek things that are above, put to death sinful practices. He's going to talk about the things that we should put on, characteristics, marks of a Christian should be that we love one another, that we forgive one another, we bear with one another, patience with one another, that we should be open and honest with one another. We should encourage each other with the word of God. We should let the word of God dwell richly in us. And this past week, what we looked at is how the gospel impacts some of our most important relationships.
We talked about husbands and wives. We talked about parents and children. And we talked about masters and bond servants, whereas the way we looked at it, we looked at employers and employees. And so what we're going to see in chapter four is that Paul ends this letter with a resounding call. And what we're going to see is that churches that are focused on the gospel and are living that out in community, the natural outflow of that is going to be mission. And that's what we're going to be talking about tonight.
We're going to be talking about mission. And so I'm really excited about it. We've got a lot of ground to cover. And so before we jump into the scripture, I'd like to pray for us. You guys join me. Let's pray.
God, thank you for inviting us into what you're doing. Thank you for bringing us into a relationship with you, for bringing us into a church family, into a community of believers. God, my prayer is tonight that you would teach us what it looks like to be a part of your mission, to live on mission. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, so if you've got your Bibles, we're going to be in Colossians chapter four, beginning in verse two. And if you've got the blue and white ones, it's actually going to be page 639.
Here we go, 4-2. Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us that God may open to us a door for the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. And again, we're going to start with the first couple of verses, so read it with me again.
Verse two, verse two and three. Once again, continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us that God may open to us a door for the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I am in prison. I love this. I really do. All throughout the letter that Paul is writing to the church at Colossae, he is talking about prayer.
From the very beginning to the very end, he's encouraging them in what it looks like to pray. And he's encouraging them to be steadfast in prayer, and he's saying, pray for us. Now remember, Paul's currently in prison, and his prayer is not, Lord, help me get out of jail. What is he praying? Look at it again. He says, pray also for us that God may open to us a door for the word to declare the mystery of Christ, to declare the gospel to those that are in.
I love that. Chapters one and two, we're going to use language where Paul says things like, I struggle and I labor in prayer. We're going to see that even later in this chapter. And every time I get there, it just strikes me. And I have to stop and think, man, when was the last time I struggled and labored for something in prayer? What about you?
And that just strikes me as odd, because I know that Paul and Epaphras and others that we're going to see later are in jail. And I'd be praying to get out of jail, but they're not. And the reason that they're not is they've realized that they get to still be part of the mission right where they are. They're not praying to get out of jail. They're praying that they would make the most of the opportunity that they have in jail to share the gospel. Because Paul, Epaphras, and some of these guys realize something that's hugely important for us as a church.
And I want us to grasp this. What we see in Matthew 16, Jesus says that he's going to build his church. And then he gives his mission to his church. And we're going to see that Jesus is going to send his Holy Spirit on the church to bring about repentance, to bring about change. And I'm going to use that word a lot tonight, so I want to make sure we unpack it. Repentance is realizing that we have sin.
It's confessing our sin, believing that Jesus can forgive it, and turning away from it. That is active repentance. So the Holy Spirit bringing about repentance. Paul realizes that he gets to be a part of the mission still. And he's asking for opportunities because he realizes that it's not about him. It's not his job to save people.
He just gets to be obedient. That's why he's praying for opportunities. And so Paul is pouring himself out for the gospel and for the mission. And since mission is what we're looking at tonight, I want us to have a good working definition of mission. I want us to really understand what it means. So think about it like this.
Paul is going to say in Colossians that it's all about Jesus. Everything. All of life is all about Jesus. It's all about the gospel. It's all about the Son of God who stepped out of heaven, who died on the cross for our sins, who was risen from the grave and gives his mission to his church. It's going to be all about the gospel.
And he gives the mission. Here's the mission. We see it in Matthew 28. He says, go and make disciples. So it's cool.
He looks at his disciples and he goes, go and make more. Go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. So what we see is the mission is the people of God sharing the gospel in relationship with each other to make more disciples. It's relational. It's relational. It's disciples living in relationship with each other in community, going out and making more disciples.
So with that in mind, let's keep moving. Check out verse 4. And I'll tag it with a little bit of 3. That God may open to us a door for the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear which is how I ought to speak. Okay. So what we're talking about is making disciples.
We're talking about sharing our faith, sharing the gospel. And for some reason, when we start talking about this in church, all of us begin to get anxious. Our heart rate begins to raise. We just get nervous. I don't know about you guys. It's just one of those things.
When I start thinking about telling somebody about Jesus or sharing my faith, I just get nervous sometimes. Because it's hard. And our culture says be tolerant. And I want to share my faith. And what we see here is that Paul is saying that he wants to declare the mystery of Christ. And in verse 4, his prayer, he's asking them to pray that he would make it clear which is how he ought to speak.
And so for us as we're moving forward, as we're talking about how do we actually share the gospel with people, I want to give us just a few quick things. And if you're a note taker, you're going to want to jot these down. A few quick things that we can think about that will help encourage us in terms of sharing the gospel. The first thing is this. Paul asks for prayer that he would make it clear. So we get to do the same.
So when you're thinking about sharing the gospel, Paul asks that he would be able to make it clear, which is how he ought to speak. And he's talking about the mystery of Christ. And so what he's talking about there is the gospel. He's talking about the gospel of Christ that he would be able to make it clear. So part of our prayer as Christians is asking God, help me to grow in the gospel so that when I have opportunities to share it, that I will be able to make it clear.
This is why we talk about our community groups all the time. Because that's actually where we get to grow in how we share the gospel, how we speak the gospel to each other. Think about your community groups. When somebody has a prayer, we're going to encourage them with the gospel. When somebody's struggling with a sin issue, we're going to point them to what's true in the gospel. When people are making life decisions, we're not just going to give them wisdom or advice.
We're going to give them the gospel. So in our community groups, we get to grow in the first stage of sharing our faith, which is knowing, knowing the gospel, growing in it. So the second thing is this. We're going to mess this up. We're going to mess this up. There are going to be times when you're intentionally building a relationship with somebody, and you go to start telling them about Jesus, and you're going to get about two minutes in.
It's going to be great, and then a dog's going to start barking, and then your 12-year-old cousin with braces is going to walk over, and it's just going to, like, dissipate in front of you to the ground in a pile of ashes. And it's just going to be, oh, okay, well, that was good. Even in those circumstances, when it doesn't go the way you want it to go, you get to grow in your understanding of the gospel, that it's not about you. It's about the fact that Jesus does the work, and as you think about it, it's not over. You get to go back and have another conversation with that person. You get to try again.
The gospel is true for you. Third thing is the gospel is true for you. On all accounts, the gospel is true. It's Jesus that builds his church, and it's the Holy Spirit that brings about repentance. We're just, whoa, yes, resounding. We're just called to be obedient.
So realize that we get to grow in our understanding of the gospel. There's going to be times that we mess that up, but ultimately, we're just called to be obedient. And one of the most encouraging things for us is that as we begin to grow in our understanding of the gospel, the Holy Spirit will begin to use that and teach us what to say in conversations. Now, that's not always going to be this warm, hair-tingling experience where the Holy Spirit just takes over. It's not always going to be like that. Sometimes, yes.
Sometimes, no. Now, I'll give you a couple examples. I remember walking into work, and the first person I came in contact with, I just asked them how they were doing. And five minutes later, they have tears rolling down their face, and I just walked over, and I just shut the door. And we kept talking, and we talked for probably 30 minutes. And I got to, he talked about his family and about his job, and I just encouraged him.
I told him what was true for him in the gospel. I had been praying for this opportunity for months. I got to pray with him. It was unbelievable. And I walked out, and I can't tell you. I can't tell you what I said.
I cannot tell you parts of that whole conversation because the Holy Spirit just took over. It was amazing. On the other side, around that same time, I was having a conversation with a guy, and he was talking about his girlfriend and how, well, it wasn't his girlfriend. They were talking, as the kids say. They were talking, and she wasn't returning his phone calls, and he was texting her all the time. At the same time, he was getting passed over for promotions at work.
And the whole time he's talking, I'm sitting there praying, God, help me encourage him in the gospel. Give me the words to say. And we literally got to the end of the conversation, and he's looking at me, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, man, that stinks. That stinks. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'll pray for you. That's all I had. That's all I had. I got to the end of that conversation, and that's all I had was I'll pray for you. And I did. And I got to come back and have more conversations.
But the pressure's off. The pressure's off for us as believers because we get to live our normal, everyday lives asking for opportunities and watching Jesus do work. What Paul teaches us here is as we ask for open doors that we can speak the gospel into, that we would speak it clearly, he's going to start doing work. We just get to be obedient. And he's going to turn a little bit. Look with me in verse 5.
So there's going to be a little bit of a change. He says, walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best use of the time. Walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best use of the time. What is the best use of our time? What is it? One of the best ways we can think about this is what was the best use of Jesus' time?
Jesus spent time with people. All people. And Jesus didn't sit around waiting for people to come to him. He went out to them. He went to the lonely, to the rejected, to the hurting, to those that were sick. And at the same time, he went to those that were religious, those that were wealthy, those that were popular.
And Jesus, as he walked through normal everyday life, he took the opportunity to pour into others. Normal everyday life, he did the extraordinary. Walking. Fishing. Sharing meals. Having conversations.
And that's what he's calling us to do. That's what it looks like, church, for us to make disciples, is to use our normal, ordinary, everyday lives that he's given us with the gospel being of first importance. And letting that impact our conversations, our relationships, our activities. And I want us to catch the beauty of this. That's ordinary, but not insignificant. Ordinary, but not insignificant.
And as we begin to pray for open doors, asking for the Holy Spirit to work, no day will ever be small. Think about that. No conversation will ever be a waste of time. No family meal will ever be a drudgery. No day at work will ever be just a day at work. Everything has meaning.
Everything has purpose. And so this is actually a really good gauge for us as Christians to see how we're walking in wisdom towards outsiders is, how are you spending your time? I want you to think back on this last week. This is the easiest way to do it. Think back over your last week. I'm going to keep talking to this.
Start thinking back. In our day and age, we have more time than any generation on the face of the earth has ever had. With the advancement in technology, we've got microwaves and fast food restaurants and dishwashers. We've just got more time to do things, which means two things. One, we can waste more time. All right?
So we've got more time to waste. And the second thing is, with all these advancements in technology, we've got more to distract us. So a really good diagnostic for us as Christians is, how are we spending our time specifically towards outsiders, towards those who don't know Jesus? How are we doing there? Because what we start to think is, did I go out? Man, I didn't go walk.
Okay. No. Think normal, everyday life. Normal, everyday life. How are you walking in wisdom towards outsiders? How are you making the best use of your time?
Think about your family. This is kind of what we talked about last week. Husbands and wives, are you making the best use of your time? Are you spending time together? Are you pouring into each other? Are you encouraging each other in the gospel?
Parents and children, are you spending time together? Are you spending more time staring at the TV than you are staring at each other's faces? It's a good gauge. It's a good gauge for us, especially for those of you who have family members who don't know Jesus. How are you leveraging your time so that you can be around them in normal, everyday life? Loving them, serving them, helping them, encouraging them.
What about at work? This is a big one for us. Think about work. Think about this last week. You at work. How well did you work when your boss was around versus when your boss wasn't around?
How about this? When you finished your tasks at work, did you just do your own thing or did you look to go help somebody else? When you were on break at work, did you sit and look at Facebook for 30 minutes? Or did you have a conversation with people that were in the break room? Who's having a tough time at work that you know about and just needs some encouragement? Who's lonely, isolated, just needs somebody to love them?
That's what it means to make disciples. It's to live like the gospel is true in every relationship, in every conversation, in every action. No action, nothing that we ever do is without meaning. And it's everything. This is your waitress. This is the lady at the bank when you go to deposit your check.
It's everywhere. It's every circumstance. Let me let you guys in on me a little bit. I'm not standing up here saying I'm perfect at this. Not. It's hard.
And you guys know me. I think you know me well enough that I love people. I do. I love you guys. If you don't know it, I'll hug you afterwards. But I do.
I genuinely love people. But I'm slightly introverted. I know. You wouldn't know it. But being around people drains me big time.
It just sucks the life out of me. It just makes me really, really tired. And so there are days when I wake up and I'm excited about spending time with people. And every person I meet, every conversation, I just want to encourage them. I want to point them towards the gospel. And then there are days that I wake up and I just want it to be about me.
I don't want to answer my phone when people call. And so this is hard. This is something that we've got to learn and grow in and realize that we get to be a part of Jesus' mission of saving the world in our normal, everyday lives. Like I said, I'm not perfect at this, but let me give you a couple of good stories. Over the last two weeks, excuse me, not two weeks. Over the last two years, I've had the opportunity to work at Dick's Sporting Goods.
And it's been incredible. So much I have learned there. And I'll give you a couple of stories. I remember walking into the break room one night and there was a girl on the phone. She was talking to her grandma and she was visibly upset. They were arguing, you could tell.
She hung up the phone. And I just, I remember what I was having to eat that night. I was having spaghetti. That's important. I would remember that detail. And I asked her, I said, you okay?
Everything okay? She goes, well, my grandma and my whole family, everybody's putting all this pressure on me to get married because I'm the last of my sisters to get married. And I mean, I've got a boyfriend. I guess he's my boyfriend. He cheats on me all the time. And if he just wise up, he could be my, she just went off.
And she just went on. And I finally stopped. I said, hey, can I encourage you for a second? She's like, you know, she was just letting it go. I said, can I encourage you for a second? I said, your boyfriend sounds like a jerk.
I said, I'm really sorry. I said, I'm really sorry that your family's putting this weird pressure on you. But let me tell you what's true for you. You have a father in heaven who loves you very much. So much so that he sent his son, Jesus, to die on a cross to forgive you of your sin, to bring you into a relationship because he loves you and because he pursues you.
And your identity and your value don't have to be wrapped up in some guy. It can be in him. Tears just welled up in her eyes. Thank you. You're welcome. Hope you break up your boyfriend.
He's a jerk. That was great. It was just a really cool opportunity. Here's another one. When somebody new shows up at work, you have a full license to play the 20-question game daily for a month at least. So this guy named David Hoewaler shows up at Dick's Sporting Goods.
And he's a recent graduate from Clemson University. And so I knew he was great, obviously. And so I just took that chance to build a relationship. I started asking him questions. We figured out that we had a lot in common, that we had a lot of the same interests. We started hanging out outside of work.
I invited David and his wife to come hang out with the first community group of Mill City Church. When it came time to multiply, David and his wife came with our group and started meeting in our house. It came time to multiply that group again. And the guy who was going to be leading the group was in the military and was going to have to do some training. And he was going to have to go overseas. And so David stepped up.
David said, I'll lead. And so we trained him as an apprentice. David started leading a group. In the spring of this year, David did an internship with our church where he got to be a part of our teaching team. And he got to learn more and be over kind of what happens on Sunday in terms of sound and music and videos. We got to the end of that semester and he wanted to keep doing everything that he was doing.
David just took a job this week and we asked him, David, what do you need to pull back on? He said, nothing. He said, I'll keep working my job. I want to keep doing the things that I'm doing. That guy's a leader in our church. And it started with a conversation of, when did you graduate from Clinton?
Normal, ordinary life. And eternity's impacted by that. But it's not just work. Don't think work. Katie and I lived in an apartment when we first moved here. And the last weekend we were there, they threw a pool party.
So it's like, oh, great. Now that we're leaving, you're throwing a party. It's like, bye, guys. There, Katie struck up a conversation with a lady. And they were about our age. And so we invited them to come hang out with us.
They came and had a meal at our house. We invited them to start hanging out with our community group. And five months later, Daniel Gillen became a Christian and was baptized. The Gillens were so pumped up about what was going on, they invited their friends, the C's. The C's started coming. And two months later, DJ met Jesus.
And DJ's going to be baptized in the fall. Started with a conversation by a pool over a hot dog. Normal, everyday life. Ordinary, but not insignificant. We begin praying for open doors and we get to see what God does. We start looking at every conversation, every relationship as an opportunity to encourage people in the gospel.
And we get to watch the Holy Spirit begin to change people. When Jesus calls us to go and to make disciples, this is what he's talking about. Everyday mission. No second of any day is ever a waste of time when it's lived to the glory of Jesus to see his mission go forward. Verse 6. May your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
The speech of a Christian should be generous and gracious. Not complaining. Not whining. Not cutting. Not cursing. But the speech of a Christian should be gracious.
And it should be seasoned with salt. It should be seasoned with the richness of the gospel. That for us as Christians, the gospel should be our native tongue. The gospel should be the lens through which we start to look at the world. How we start to analyze everything. So that when somebody comes to me and asks me for marriage advice, I can't help but tell them about Jesus.
Because I'm called to love my wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. When somebody comes to me and wants to talk about finances and how I handle my money, I get to tell them that Jesus gave everything for me. And so nothing that I have belongs to me. I have everything that I need in Jesus. So I'm going to handle my money a little bit differently.
When somebody comes to me talking about trials and struggles, I get to point them to a Savior who suffered for them on their behalf. Seasoned with salt. Not open the salt shaker and dump it out. Okay, so you don't have to walk around with your Bible at work being like, Oh, you look down. Can I encourage you? And just seasoned.
Seasoned with salt. Asking for opportunities that you would make it clear. That's what it says. So that you may know how you want to answer each person. Seasoned with salt. The gospel impacts everything that we do.
And salt's cool. The fact that he uses this is interesting. Salt brings out flavor. It preserves. Salt can also irritate. So don't be that characteristic of salt.
But what's cool about salt is it doesn't necessarily have a flavor in and of itself. But if you take salt and you put it on five different types of food, it's going to bring out the flavor in different ways in all five of those different foods. It's going to bring out five different types of flavors. And so when he says be seasoned with salt, he's saying be you changed by the gospel. You. You in love with Jesus.
Your personality. So some of you in the room are introverts, even more introverted than me. And you're freaking out right now. You're like, oh, he's talking about people. And I just, I want to go sit in the corner and read a book. No, no, no.
Be, be you in love with Jesus. You have been uniquely and wonderfully designed by Jesus to make disciples just the way you are. So you get to pray and look for those opportunities as well, just like all of us. See, church, that's the mission. People that have been changed by the gospel, that are living that out in community, begin praying for opportunities. They begin looking at their lives, looking for every day, every second opportunities that they can encourage someone.
Speak the truth of the gospel to them. That's what mission looks like. Get this. Disciples begin to live like the gospel's true, letting it impact their relationships. They begin inviting their friends into community. Their friends meet Jesus.
Their friends become disciples of Jesus. We're back here. Those people begin to make more disciples. It's cycles of disciples. We go make disciple after disciple after disciple. That's what the mission of the church is.
It's to go and to make disciples. So let's keep going. Look at verse 7. We're going to walk through this kind of quickly, and I'm going to try to highlight who all these people are, because there's a lot of different names in here. But what we're going to see is a lot of different names, a lot of different people, and what that means for the mission of Jesus.
Tychicus will tell you all about my activities. He is a beloved brother and faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are and that he may encourage your hearts. Okay, so Tychicus, the first time we're going to see him is actually in Acts chapter 20. We see him in Acts chapter 20. Paul picks him up in Asia Minor, and now he's with Paul in Rome, and he gets the honor of delivering the letter, just like the video showed, to Ephesus, to Colossae, and to a person.
And he gets to deliver the letter to Philemon. So he's a part of the mission. It continues. Verse 9, And with him Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. Now, from the video, Onesimus was a runaway slave. Onesimus ran away from Philemon, and he's found himself in Rome.
And then Rome, he hears the gospel, and he becomes a Christian, faithful brother. And Paul is now entrusting to him also the letters. Go back to Ephesus, to Colossae, and to Philemon. So you can see this playing out, right? Onesimus is walking with the letters. Okay, all right.
Ephesus, Colossae, Philemon. That one wasn't so comfortable for him. But Paul sends him back. So a runaway slave gets to be a part of the mission. Keeps going. Verse 10, Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you.
Aristarchus. We see that Paul picks him up in Acts 17 in Thessalonica, and that he's with him in Rome. It continues on. Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you have received instructions. If he comes to you, welcome him. Mark got to be a part of one of the first missionary journeys.
And during the journey, Mark leaves. Mark leaves in the middle of the journey. And so Paul and Mark are actually at odds. And what we see here is years later that they've been reconciled because the gospel is true. And now they're together in Rome. A prison is a pretty good place to get over your differences, right?
So Mark is a part of the mission too. And Jesus, who is called Justice. All we know about him is the next part. These are the only men of the circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God, and they have been a comfort to me. All we know is that he was a Jew who converted to Christianity. He became a follower of Jesus.
That's all we know. And now it starts talking about people who didn't have a Jewish background. They were Gentiles. Epaphras. We know this guy. Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.
For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and Herapolis. So this is Epaphras. Epaphras who planted the church of Colossae and is now in prison with Paul in Rome. And again, we get to see that struggling. He's struggling for them on their behalf in his prayers. I love that.
Luke, the beloved physician, greets you. We see him pick up. He's picked up in Acts. I think it's Acts 18. Luke. Dr.
Luke. Namesake of the Gospel of Luke. Author of the book, The Acts of the Apostles. And Demas. All we know about Demas is that he's with them now and later we're going to see Paul and Luke together and Demas isn't there anymore. It's gotten hard and Demas has left.
It says, I think he chased after worldly things. Give my greetings to the brothers at Laodicea, another church that's in the area, and to Nympha and the church in her house. Nympha got to host her church family in her home. How cool is that? And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans. And see that you also read the letter from Laodicea.
All these names, all these people, what we get to see is that the mission is big. That we get to go and to make disciples, but it's a team sport. It's fishermen. It's slaves. It's men. It's women.
It's all of us working together. It's a bunch of people that have been changed by Jesus and joined together in his mission. And it's not a super special team. It's a bunch of people that have been changed by Jesus and invited in. It's a team sport. We all get to make disciples as a part of a team because the mission's big.
Continues on. I'll read 16 again and keep going. And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans. And see that you also read the letter from Laodicea. And say to Archippus, see that you fulfill the ministry that you have received in the Lord. I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.
Remember my chains. Grace be with you. One of the major things that we've talked about all throughout Colossians is that anytime you see the word you, it's actually kind of the Greek translation of y'all. So Paul's writing this to the church. And so they would have understood this not just as individuals, but as a collective, as a body of believers. And this is one of the only times in the letter where it's the singular version of you.
Look at it. Verse 17. And Paul writes for them to tell this guy, Archippus, see that you fulfill the ministry that you received in the Lord. Archippus, this random guy who is not a major character in this story at all, has a specific ministry that he's been given in the Lord just for him and for him alone. He has a personal ministry as a part of the team. And I want us to realize tonight that just like Archippus had a specific ministry in the Lord just for him, Jesus has a specific ministry for each one of us as a part of the team.
That he has uniquely and creatively designed each one of us to be right where we are doing the things that we're doing with the gifts and abilities that we have for the gospel so that we can go out and make disciples. And in doing so, we grow in our relationship with him. You see, the epic, grand narrative of the history of the world has been given to us. Jesus promises to build his church and to send his Holy Spirit to bring about repentance in people that the church can move forward and make disciples. And 2,000 years later, we're still doing the same thing. It gets better.
I've read the end of the book. Jesus comes back to get his church. We ain't going nowhere. We're not going anywhere. The mission is big and it's going to continue until Jesus comes back. That's a big promise because you've been invited into a mission where the victory has already been won.
And that's huge for us. So this epic, grand narrative of saving the world is accomplished in the ordinary. In the ordinary, but not insignificant. Every one of us has a mission. Every one of us as part of the mission of Mill City Church has a role. Let me help you see it.
I want you to ask yourself these questions. This is how you start seeing it. What are the gifts and abilities that you have? What are you passionate about? Where has the Lord placed you currently in this stage of your life? Where do you work?
Where do you go to school? Who is your family? What are the names of your neighbors? What are the worst areas in our city? You see, each one of us has a part in the ministry. Don't miss this.
Jesus calls us to make disciples. And the way that we do that is we begin praying for open doors with our family and our friends, with the people that we serve so that Jesus would build his church. The Holy Spirit would bring people to repentance. And the gospel would move forward. And what we see in the narrative, in the letter of Colossians, is that Paul is going to say that people that have been changed by Jesus, living that out in the context of community, led by the Holy Spirit, the mission is going to move forward. And every one of us has a different Job and a different role.
Each person has a role as a part of the team. And this means that we've got to constantly remind ourselves that the church is people. The church is not a building. The church is not an activity. It's not a club or an organization. It's a group of people that have been rescued by Jesus, transferred from death to life.
The church is people. And the church is God's chosen vessel to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, and there is no plan B. We are the mission. We get to take the mission forward. In the 1940s, around the time of World War II, there was a ship that was commissioned to be built. It was the SS United States.
And it was supposed to be the biggest and baddest ship on the ocean. It was a troop carrier. The SS United States was built to carry 15,000 soldiers at 51 miles per hour and make it to any destination in the world in less than 10 days. That means she was faster than any ship on the ocean at the time. But see, by the time it was finished in 1952, World War II had ended.
And in the 17 years of service that the SS United States had, it was only put on standby one time, and that was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so at the end of 17 years, a ship that had been designed to carry troops into battle was retired and was converted into a luxury liner. The SS United States, which could carry 15,000 people, had its barracks converted to state rooms that could carry 2,000. It became a luxury liner for presidents and for heads of states and for celebrities who wanted to make it across the ocean in style. Mess halls were converted into four restaurants, three bars, two movie theaters.
The deck was kept open, but they put in a heated swimming pool. They installed 19 elevators. And people that rode on the SS United States got the luxury of being on the first air-conditioned ship on the ocean. The SS United States was designed to be a troop carrier and was converted into a luxury liner. You see, the faces of soldiers that are preparing for battle and their conversations are much different on a troop carrier than they are sitting by a pool eating bonbons. The allocation of resources on a troop carrier are different than that of the opulent wealth of a luxury liner.
The troop carrier is going to go as fast as it can because it's got an urgent mission where the luxury liner just takes its time. It just goes at its own pace. And what Paul is going to consistently say throughout this letter, he's pointing to the church at Colossae that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, that all things were created by Him and for Him, that He spoke creation into existence, including us, humankind, and we rebelled. We decided we wanted to be like God, and we broke the relationship. We brought sin into the world, a relationship that we were incapable of fixing, that the Old Testament sacrificial system and the laws were a mere shadow of the atonement and the reconciliation that needed to be done.
But God promised that He would rescue, that He would redeem, that He would save, that He would accomplish salvation for His glory, and Jesus steps into history. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life. He trained up His disciples. He did miracles. He taught. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and I'm going to give my life as a ransom for many.
And Jesus goes to the cross. And on the cross, the wrath of God is poured out on Jesus so that we could be forgiven of our sins, so that we could be offered redemption. And Jesus dies, and they place Him in a tomb. And three days later, Jesus walks out victorious, showing that He conquered sin, death, Satan, and hell. And He hung around with His disciples for 40 days. And He told them, I'm giving you the mission.
Go and make disciples until the end of the age. And I'm ascending into heaven, but one day I'm coming back. But don't worry, I'm going to send my Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit descends on 120 ragtag believers, and the gospel moves forward. The believers go from 120 to 3,000. The gospel begins to move from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth.
And now Paul and Epaphras are in prison. And 2,000 years later, the mission is still moving forward. The church is a troop carrier, not a luxury liner. We have been designed for mission. We have been invited into the mission of Jesus. The ministry of the church is not designed to be a blessing to the body just as a means of itself.
But we're to be the agent through which Jesus works by His Holy Spirit to save the world. We're the mission. And so as Paul comes to the end of this letter, he's shown them that the gospel is the most beautiful thing in the world, and changed by it as people who are living in community. We get to use our ordinary, everyday lives on mission as we make disciples. That people who have been changed by the gospel and choose to live that out in community will change the world on mission. Mill City Church is a gospel-centered community that has been called into the greatest mission the world has ever seen.
Mill City Church is you and you and you and you, y'all, us. And we've been called into it. The band's going to come back up. This summer's been great for us. We've grown. We've been able to grow in health and what it looks like to be healthy.
And when I say healthy, I mean we've grown in our understanding of the gospel. We've begun confessing and repenting of sin. We've grown in what it looks like to live in relationship with each other and community. And we are at one of the most beautiful places in our church history that is a people that have grown to understand the gospel and are living that out in community. It's time to go all in. The church is a troop carrier and we've been designed for mission.
And I just want to tell you a little bit about our future. Here's where we're going. That because of those things, we get to, over the next couple of months, we're going to be focusing on mission. Next Sunday will actually be our last Sunday here at FBC West Columbia. And then we're moving our gatherings to Glen Forest School. And the reason we're doing it is we're doing it for mission.
We've got the opportunity to go into a school that is underloved, underappreciated, underfunded, that has very little volunteers. And we get to go in. We get to go from a place that's free to where we're actually going to pay to use the space because it's going to help the school. We're going to go from a church to a school. We're going to get to serve them. We're going to adopt them.
We're going to be moving our gathering time from the evening to the morning for mission. We're leveraging ourselves for mission because what we're saying is we want our church family to get up and to worship together on Sunday mornings and then to use the rest of the day to live normal, everyday life with people on mission in the afternoons and evenings. So that means that to see the mission of Jesus go forward, you might have to invite people over to your house to watch the Broncos play. It may be that you need to go play a round of golf. Or invite your neighbors over for a cookout. That's what it looks like to live on mission.
We're going to get into that neighborhood. We're going to get into the neighborhoods around Glen Forest. Not only that, the teaching of our church is going to be very missional over the next couple of months. Dawn of the church is Acts 1 and 2. It's the beginning of the mission. And then the Sunday in between, we're going to be throwing a party.
We're going to be inviting people from the surrounding neighborhoods. And we're going to be inviting our friends. Then on September 7th, we're launching Kingdom Come. It's a series where we look at how the kingdom of God moves forward in the lives of people. Our community groups are going to be focusing on a who. We're going to be focusing on areas like West Hill, like Glen Forest School, USC, and Midlands Tech.
And all along the way, we're going to continue to see our church family make disciples and bring people into community. We're going to continue to see group leaders trained and groups multiplied out. We're going to see our church continue to grow. And then we're going to multiply more churches. We're going to continue to have an impact in the city because we want to see marriages mended. We want to see children and parents relating to each other the right way.
We want to see darkness driven back in our city. And so in a second, we're going to sing. We're going to sing and pray that God would give us the courage that we need to step up and to step out. The mission's big and we've been invited in. And so I'm going to ask you that as you sing, pray for courage. Pray that God would lead us.
Jesus has called us into a mission that he's already won. And we need everybody to get on board the truth carrier. It's time to go all in. And it's time for each one of us to fulfill the ministry that Jesus has given to us. Let's pray.
God, we are humbled by the fact that you would call us in. That we would get the opportunity to be a part of your mission of saving the world. In normal, everyday life. God, when it's about the mission, when it's all about Jesus, we put our preferences to the side. We put our wants and desires to the side. And we chase after you with everything.
Because the gospel's true. Or teach us what it looks like to live on mission. In Jesus' name, amen. Let's stand as we respond and sing. That we, when we yap. If we love others.
Amen. Amen.
Gospel Culture
Colossians 3:12-17
Transcript
One of the things we've been looking at as we've gone through Colossians is in the first two chapters is very much a vertical look that Paul's giving us. So he's saying, here's who Jesus is, here's who God is, here's what he's done for you, and so this is how that affects you. He's the creator of the world. He's the creator of the universe. He's accomplished everything on your behalf. He's reconciled you back to God.
He's paid your debt. He's covered your sins. He's made you new. So he's going to say all of this in Colossians, and then in chapters 3 and 4, he's going to turn from a vertical look of what it looks like between God and us to how that applies to us in normal life. So he's going to turn from a vertical look to a horizontal.
So if that's true, if that's who Jesus is, if that's what he's done, if that's who he's made you, here's what it's going to look like now as you walk in normal life with other people. And so one of the things we've looked at as we've looked at that is that the book of Colossians was written to y'all. So if there was a y'all version of the Bible, every you you see in the book of Colossians except for maybe one at the end of chapter 4 where he's addressing a specific person would be the plural Greek word y'all. And so that's what we're looking at is who are we as a church? How do we interact with one another?
So if this is true about who Jesus is, and that's true for us because he's accomplished that for us, then what does it look like as we interact with other people? And usually we get that backwards. So we think, okay, if I'm good to other people, if I'm generous, if I'm gracious, if I'm moral, and it's always this outside action, then I'll have a right relationship with God. Then God and I will be okay. But what Paul is going to say is that it's no.
Here's who Jesus is. Here's what he's done. And that's going to apply to who you are and how you live. So I'm going to pray, and we're going to hop in and look at a really beautiful section of Scripture that I'm super excited that we get to talk about tonight. God, we pray that you would just teach this to us tonight, that you would show it to us as we study your word, that your Holy Spirit would move and reveal to us the beauty of what this gets to look like as your people, who we get to be. So, God, we praise you.
We thank you. And we ask that we'd be able to make much of your name tonight. We love you. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, Colossians chapter 3, we're going to be in verse, we'll start in verse 11.
So we read verse 11 last week, finished with it, and we're going to pick back up there today. So he says, here, and here means among you, among the church. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. So all the categories we're used to have been thrown out the window. Jesus is all. He's what's important.
He's where hope comes from, value comes from, worth comes from, and he's in all. So we have hope, value, and worth because of Jesus. And so categories thrown out the window. We have worth and value because of Jesus. And then he says this, put on then. And so what we looked at last week was stuff he said that he said, if this is true, if Jesus has rescued you, if he's paid your debt, get rid of this.
Put this away. And now he's saying, put this on. This is what we get to look like because of who Jesus is. Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved. I want to help us see how we ought to think about it as we walk through the rest of this passage. So first of all, what Paul's saying is, as God's chosen ones, as the ones Jesus has already rescued.
So this is written to the church, those who place their faith in Jesus, holy and beloved, holy and loved. So what we said as we read the word holy earlier in the book of Colossians is that that's a really horrible descriptive word for everyone in the room. None of us are holy. Earlier in Colossians it said we're holy, blameless, and above reproach. That's incorrect outside of Jesus. But in Jesus he's made us holy, which means we have a right standing with God.
So he says, because of who you are, because of what Jesus has done, because you're chosen, holy, and loved. And then he's going to say, this is what you get to look like. And here's what I want us to see. I want to tell us this to help us frame up how we're going to read through the rest of this. My wife, her name's Anna. She loves to play a game.
She says it's a game. She'll say, the game is basically pretend vacation game, if I could describe it. She gets on the internet and she'll say, all right, let's play a game. And she'll look at me and go, okay, Groupon or Living Social? Which apparently are two things on the internet that help you choose vacations and stuff. And so I'm supposed to pick one and I'll be like, Living Social.
She'll go, okay. She'll open it up and be like, all right, the mountains, the Caribbean, or tropical paradise. And I'll be like, mountains. And she'll be like, tropical paradise. And I'm like, I don't know the rules of this game. Like, I don't know how I'm supposed to be playing this.
And so then as we go through tropical paradise, she'll be like, okay, Mexico, the Bahamas, or Bermuda. And I'll be like, the Bahamas. And she'll go, you're not really good at this. I'll be like, I don't know. You said it's a game. I feel like I'm losing and I don't know the rules.
And then she'll pick Mexico. And she looks through and shows me pictures. Okay, this is what our vacation would have been. And I'm like, I don't even know why I need to be here for this. She thoroughly enjoys looking at these pictures of places that we most likely will never go. I'd rather she poked me in the eye and let me go away.
Like, I have no desire to look at pictures of somewhere I'm never going to go. And the truth is, as we read through scripture, as we read through this section, we're going to see that it's beautiful. That it's beautiful who Paul's going to say the church gets to be. And I want us to look at it not as people who say, yeah, that's really pretty, but we're never going to get there. I want us to look at it as people who realize this gets to be true for us. So when I actually get to go on vacation, oh, I love looking at pictures of that stuff.
If I know I'm going to be there soon, I'll get on TripAdvisor and figure out where I'm going to eat. I'll be looking at pictures of, like, biscuits. This place says I've got really good biscuits. Like, I don't know. I'm, like, weighing out restaurants and that kind of thing. And the truth is, we get to look at it that way.
So don't look at this beautiful picture of where the church gets to be and go, yeah, that'd be nice. Look at it and realize, no, we're going to get to go there. We're going to get to stick our feet in the sand. We're going to get to smell the salt air. We're going to get the sunburn from being at this place. So as we talk through this, realize this is who we get to be because of Jesus.
So don't just look at it and say, yeah, that's nice. Yeah, that's beautiful. And walk out of here. Realize that we get to have this because of what Jesus has already accomplished. Because we are holy and beloved. Because we're chosen.
Because he's already done this for us. That Jesus on the cross has already done all the work necessary for this to happen for us. And we just get to put this on and walk this out as this church. So here's what we get to be. So he said, put on them as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.
So Paul says that the church gets to have compassionate hearts. That when we gather together in our community groups, we actually get to care about each other. Not only just do we have compassion, but our hearts are compassionate hearts. Which means just our general posture of the people in the church is we care about each other. We want good things for each other. And not just compassion, but compassion that drives us to action.
So that when the church gets together, we listen to each other. We pray for one another. We serve one another. We help pay bills for each other. We have compassion. It says kindness.
Compassionate hearts, kindness. Just genuinely enjoyable people to be around. The church gets to be fun, pleasant, gracious, generous. Humility. Man, our society says that you need pride. It says that you need to have your own self-worth.
It says that you need to assert yourself. And what Paul says is no. Jesus didn't assert himself, but he came and he died for us. And so that the church gets to have humility and meekness. Which means that we genuinely, as we get together, we want others to go first. We want to hear other people out.
We don't want to assert our opinion all the time. We want to listen. We just get to gather together as Jesus' people changed by the cross. And have a flavorful, rich community of people. Then he says this.
So we get to have compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness. And then I love this next section. And you'll see why in a minute. It's one of my favorite passages in Scripture. And patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.
As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Quickly, let me tell you a story about, let me explain patience to you. Raz was talking. He's one of our community group leaders. And he was talking about when he used to lead a group in Australia. That he had a guy in his community group that just drove him crazy.
Raz, and he didn't say this, but I know Raz well enough to know he was really close to choking him. And so Raz said that this guy just drove him crazy. And he was talking to his group's coach. And he was saying, how do I? He said, I've been praying for patience. And I don't know how to handle this anymore.
And his coach looked at him and said, you know what patience is, right? He's like, patience doesn't mean the problem goes away. It means the problem stays. That's how you grow in patience. I love that patience is in this list. What Paul's saying is, he says, patience bearing with one another.
What he's saying is, if you're going to walk in relationships with each other as the family that Jesus has made us, you're going to get on each other's nerves. It's going to happen. You're going to be annoyed. You're going to be frustrated. Let me tell you something. We talk all the time about our community groups.
I can guarantee you something. We want you to be a part of a community group. And we want you to go ahead and be prepared to be hurt, to be frustrated, to be annoyed. When I went to get married, I did not think, okay, my wife and I are going to get married. And now we'll have happy, glitter, rainbow bliss for the rest of forever. I had better sense than that.
I knew that one sinner plus another sinner doesn't equal Rainbow Skittle's unicorn ride. Like, that's not what happens. I know that marriage is, I'm going to argue with someone for the rest of my life. I just made a cognitive decision to have it be Anna. She knew someone was going to get on her nerves for the rest of her life. She knew she was going to have to deal with someone's sin and someone else was going to have to deal with her sin for the rest of her life.
And she just chose to let that be me. And the truth is, when you take the church, which is just a group of people who were the first to raise their hand and say, I'm messed up. I need Jesus. I'm broken. I'm off. I'm not going to straighten this out.
I'm not going to fix this. But Jesus will. When you take that group of people and you say, we're going to walk through life together, that's not happy, rainbow, glitter bliss. That's not how that works. We're going to have frustration. We're going to have problems.
And so Paul says, put on patience. Bearing with one another. That we get to have grace for each other because it's not always going to go swimmingly. It's not always going to work out perfectly. The truth is, you are going to annoy people for the rest of your life. We're just inviting you to annoy us.
I'm going to annoy and sin against people for the rest of my life. And I couldn't think of a better group of people to do that to. That's all church family is. That's what it is. That's what it gets to be. So he says, have patience.
Put it on. Bear with one another because you're going to have problems and frustrations. And here's the thing. This is so beautiful. So when I'm by myself and I sin, I'm the only one who has to deal with it.
When I'm in community, everyone has to deal with my sin. And I have to deal with everyone else's. And so you'd say, isn't that worse? Yes. Yes. Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But it's so much better. It's so much better because we actually get to grow in it. We actually get to walk through it.
And here's what Paul says. And this is why I love this section. He says, patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord. That's Jesus has forgiven you. So you also must forgive.
So Jesus came and died for our sin. He took our brokenness, our sin upon himself. And he died for it and forgave us of everything. And so we get to forgive each other the same way that he forgave us. We get to walk in forgiveness the same way that Jesus has forgiven us. And so what's really cool about this is that the church is a group of people that you know have to forgive you.
You know it's a group of people that you get to walk through life together and you're going to forgive each other. You're going to walk in forgiveness for one another. And so the basic process here is that we bear with one another. First step in this process is bear with one another. So Paul says that the way we're going to walk through this is to bear with one another.
And what that means is the Bible uses the word forbearance, which just means we overlook sin. So that would be like if my wife over and over again told me to clean my dishes in the sink, put my dishes in the sink, clean them off, and then stick them in the dishwasher. I thought I said washing machine, which would have been weird, but it didn't. But then I brought it up anyway, so there you go. Take my dishes and put them in the dishwasher. And then she finds them sitting on the table in front of the television.
Forbearance is her picking it up, cleaning it off, putting it in the dishwasher, and choosing to forgive me even though I don't deserve it. That's what forbearance is. And so when it says bear with one another, what that means is that in your community groups you actually say, well, that was annoying and that was frustrating. But I'm going to forgive you, and we're not ever going to have to talk about it. I'm just going to choose to forgive as Christ has forgiven me, and we won't ever have to bring it up. When you cease to bear with one another is when those issues have piled up so much that you can no longer relate to the person the same way.
So bearing with one another is, yeah, some people in my community group have borrowed my DVDs, and I haven't seen them back yet. And I don't know if I'm going to get these back. And bearing with them is me choosing to forgive and let it go. And when I cease to be able to bear with them is when I need to say, hey, man, we need to talk about this DVD situation because it's starting to bother me that this is going on. It's not me not addressing the issue. And so what Paul says is you bear with one another, and then if one has a complaint against another, you talk about it.
This destroys southerness. I'm sorry. Destroys it. What that means is this. Like I'm hanging out with somebody, and you're talking to them, and you're all having a conversation. Someone else walks up, and they'll be like, hey, buddy, how you doing?
How's your mom and them? Yeah, everything good? All right, cool. And then they talk for a little bit, and they'll walk off. And you go, who's that? And he goes, that's right.
I hate that guy. I don't personally know a whole lot about hate, but I think you're doing it wrong because you, like, asked about his mom, and y'all talked a lot, and it was like a bro hug at the end of it. The truth is we do that. We think as southerners that bringing up an issue causes more problems, and what Paul says is no, because of the gospel, we have a way to resolve them, so we have to bring them up. So we forbear.
So we forbear, and then when we can no longer forbear, when we're no longer actually forgiving, we're just allowing something to bother us, we talk to the person. We don't talk about the person. We talk to the person. Which means that just so you know, as our church family, this is our response, and I want y'all to pay attention. When someone comes to you to talk about a third party and tell you something they did that got on their nerves or bothered them, your response is what they say when you told them. That is your response.
That is how we respond as church family, because biblically, the Bible says if we have a problem with someone or someone has a problem with us, it's on us to talk to them. And so if they don't repent, if you can't work it out, then you bring more church family into it. So if you're talking to me about an issue you have with someone else, I'm just assuming we're on step two, which is you already talked to them and y'all couldn't work it out. So church family, do that. Just assume we're on step two if someone's talking to you about someone else. The response is, well, what did they say when you talked to them?
And I've said that to people, and they looked at me like a lobster just fell out of my mouth. What did you say when you talked to them? I don't know. The best part is they didn't go, oh, you didn't talk to them? They're right over here. Let's go talk to them.
People would be behind you going, no, I just, I didn't have a, and you just walk right over and say, hey, y'all, there's an issue here. Let's talk about it. And it's the most awkward thing, and you just get to be a part of it. It's the best. It's the worst when someone does it to you, but it's really good when you do it to someone else. The truth is, one of two things will happen there.
You will help work that situation out, and that will be good. Or in the least, that person will never complain to you about anyone else ever. And you'll at least have fixed the issue when it comes to you and them. You won't have helped it continue. So what Paul says is, bear with one another, which is just choose to forgive and don't let an issue arise.
Once an issue has arisen, once there's something in between you two and you can no longer operate normally, you talk about it. And here's why we talk about it. Bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. When we won't talk about issues inside of the church, when we allowed weirdness to develop, when we allowed little petty things grow up in between us, what we are saying is that we assume the gospel isn't true. When I won't talk to you about some sort of a conflict between us, I'm assuming that we have no way to fix it.
And what Paul is saying is, no, we're going to talk about conflict because we have the way to fix it. I'm sinful. You're sinful. Jesus paid for our sin. We can work this out. I've been reconciled to God.
I can certainly be reconciled to you. I've been forgiven of everything. I can certainly forgive you of this. And you can forgive me. So we actually walk functionally in the truth of the gospel when we talk to each other about conflict.
We just assume we're going to work it out because Jesus has worked out everything on our behalf, and we are Jesus' people. So we get to work it out. And let me tell you what that means. You're going to have to have some conversations with people. First of all, you're going to have to forgive people of things that you shouldn't be mad about. You just get to forgive them.
Second of all, you're going to have to have some conversations with people about some stuff that seems petty, and y'all get to talk about it. I know this is weird. It really bothers me when you do this. Let's figure this out. It means that you have to get yourself prepared for someone to come tell you something. Go ahead and get mentally prepared for someone to have a problem with you about something.
People come tell me stuff all the time. You know this is annoying. You know that was offensive. Why did you say that? This hurt my feelings. I've just gotten used to the fact that I'm sinful.
I know what's coming. I never enjoy those conversations, but I'm ready for it. Someone tells me I did something wrong. I'm like, all right, probably did. Explain it to me. Let's talk it out.
So we get to, and we get to apply the gospel because it is true. We get to forgive one another. Then he says this, Above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. So that the church actually gets to be a group of people who forgive, who walk in flavorful community, and who have a love for one another. Above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.
And be thankful that we just get to be people who have peace because of Jesus. We get to have rest. We get to have peace ruling in our hearts as we relate to one another. Don't just look at this and think, yeah, that'd be nice. Realize that this is who we get to be because of what Jesus has already accomplished for us. That we get to walk this out.
Here's a, Charles Spurgeon has a quote when it comes to the church. He says this. He says, give yourself to the church. You that are members of the church have not found it perfect. And I hope that you feel almost glad that you have not. If I had never joined a church till I had found one that was perfect, I would never have joined one at all.
And the moment I did join it, if I had found one, I should have spoiled it. For it would not have been perfect church after I had become a member of it. Still imperfect as it is, it is the dearest place on earth to us. That we get to, because of Jesus, have genuine, long-lasting, real relationships. Because sin breaks relationships down and Jesus has already conquered sin. We get to forgive.
We get to walk in life. We get to have peace ruling our hearts. And so here's what happens. We look at this and we start saying, okay, well, how do we do that? Functionally, how are we going to walk that way? How are we going to actually live that out, play that out?
And here's what Paul says. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. That you is y'all. Let the word of Christ dwell in y'all richly. For this to happen, we have to be Bible people. We have to have the gospel penetrating who we are.
We have to have it sinking down into how we view the world. That's why we're going to study the Bible. That's why every time we get together, we're going to open the Bible together. That's why in our community groups, we're going to study the Bible together on a regular basis. Because we want the word of Christ dwelling in us richly. So that we can actually have everything that Jesus has already given us.
See, relationships like this don't happen outside of the gospel. They break down. And so we have to be gospel people. We have to have our culture as us as a church be affected by the gospel. And so we talk a lot about community groups. And we talk a lot about walking in church family and being in life with each other.
And so there's a lot of times you hang out for a while and you're like, okay, I get it. Community groups. That's how we be church. I get it. You've said that enough. Thanks.
And the truth is we've been made into church family by Jesus. We've been rescued and redeemed and made into a community. We have a way to walk this out. But I want to tell you something else that's a really one of the major reasons that we love community. You get to grow in the gospel in the context of community in a way that you never would by yourself. You get to grow in the gospel and how it applies and how you understand it and its depth and richness in your soul in relationship with other people that you never would by yourself.
See, when I'm by myself, I'm super easy to get along with. I'm really smart. All my ideas are good. My jokes are hilarious. Like I'm really generous. Like I'll think, man, I really like some chicken right about now.
And then I'll be like, you know what, man? I'll get you some chicken. I'll be like, thank you, man. You are so generous. Like when you're by yourself, when I get really angry by myself, there's not a whole lot of collateral damage unless I just start tearing up stuff. But for the most part, I'm just angry by myself.
I don't offend other people. I don't hurt other people. The truth is when I'm by myself, it's easy for me to believe that forgiveness is cheap, that forgiveness is easy, and that it's simple, that sin's not that big a deal. When I'm in the context of community, when I actually have to forgive somebody else, I realize that forgiveness is costly, and it's not easy, and it's not simple. And it's only inside the context of community that the weight of what Jesus did for me on the cross can be applied in a real way when I actually have to forgive someone else, when I have to dig deep into what Jesus has done for me, when I have to remind myself that the gospel is true, that I was forgiven of everything so that I can actually forgive someone else.
In the context of community, when I have to confess sin to somebody, I have to dig deep into the truth of the gospel, which is my worth doesn't come from my ability to behave. My worth doesn't come from my right moral action or what people think of me and how well I'm viewed. It comes from Jesus. My relationship with him is based off of the fact that I'm a sinner. And so when I have to confess sin to you, I've got to walk in the gospel to do that. When I'm going to be generous, when you're at my house, when my community group meets in my house and we have white carpet, we didn't choose the color of the carpet, our carpet looks terrible.
It looks like people just rolled in dirt and then rolled around on our carpet. Like, it gets new colors every week. So it's white now. A couple years, it'll be like technicolored. I'll be like, yeah, that's Kool-Aid. That's Dr.
Pepper. That looks like half a watermelon. Like, I have to grow in generosity when my community group is over at my house. I have to remind myself of what's important and what's valuable. And I have to walk in the light of the gospel as people are at my house breaking things, hiding things from me because they think it's funny. Like, I have to grow in forbearance and the truth of the gospel in a way in a community that I never would get to outside of it.
You see, the way we do our community groups is we have infants to grandparents in the same community group. That's odd. Y'all know that's odd, right? Like, a lot of churches don't do that. There's a couple of reasons why we do that. Two are biblical and one's just really practical.
The practical one is we're pretty small. So if we broke it up by age group, some of you would be by yourself. We'd just be like, if you start getting on your nerves, talk to us. We'll help you walk it out. If we broke it up by age group and gender, some of y'all just, your community group would be you. You'd probably get along well with yourself, I reckon.
The two practical ones are, biblically, the Bible says that we're supposed to let the older generations coach up the younger generations. So that those who've walked with the Lord for a while, those who've walked through life for a while, actually need to pour into those that are younger than them. And we just don't see how we'd do that well if we didn't have them actually being around each other, getting to coach up and say, Hey, man, I see the way you talk to your wife. This isn't healthy or helpful. I used to talk to my wife that way. This is going to be a problem for y'all.
We can't walk through life together if we're not around each other. The third reason is this. And we read it at verse 11. I just want to point it out. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. If we break up constantly by age group and gender, by affinity, which is we all like the same stuff, we'll begin to believe that that's what holds us together and that's what makes us a family.
We'll begin to believe that that's the bond we have with each other. We all like the same stuff. When we pile in barbarians, Scythians, Greeks, Jews, circumcised, uncircumcised, when that's what the community group looks like, age group across the board, income across the board, life stage across the board. You have to, what you like and don't like, the type of music you listen to, the type of food you like. We've got some people that are vegetarians and some people that only eat meat. We got, I mean, we pretty much, we're across the board when it comes to how we relate and interact.
We have to realize that Christ is all and he's in all and Jesus is what bonds us together because we have nothing else in common. Like I've had super awkward conversations with people before in my community group just because we have nothing in common. A couple of my favorites were, I was like, so you watch football? You don't watch football? Okay, what kind of hobbies you got? Tea?
Like sweet tea? Oh, hot tea? You like coffee? Mm-hmm. You like Jesus? Like that was, we just broke down.
You just hear conversations just like derail. We had a conversation about heavy metal music in my community group. I know nothing about it. I just got to watch people just shoot and miss all over the place. Like this? No, not like that.
Like this? No, not at all. Like this? And I would just throw in unhelpful things for fun. Like it's great because we had nothing in common outside of we're a group of people that have been rescued by Jesus. And when we walk through life across the board in non-affinity based, non-age group based, what we remind ourselves functionally is that it's Jesus that makes us family.
And it's Jesus that makes us work out. And it's Jesus, only Jesus, always Jesus. And if we're going to grow and if we're going to learn, if we're going to forbear and we're going to forgive and if we're going to have this type of relationship, we're going to need Jesus. And we're going to have to be gospel people. So something weird has happened in the American church where we can say with an amount of credibility, I just don't fit in there.
I'm the only one who's not married. I'm the only one in that group who's got little kids. I'm the only one there who likes this or we just don't have the same interests, we don't have the same hobbies. And we act like that's an okay excuse for something. And the truth is every time we say statements like that, not every time, most of the time, what we're actually declaring is that this is my best opportunity for growth. When we make statements like that, what we're saying is this is my best opportunity for growth because this is where I'm going to have to apply the gospel.
This is where I'm going to have to walk with Jesus. This is where I'm going to have to remember what's important for this to even work out. This is where I'm going to have to allow the gospel to dwell in me richly because we don't get along. And I'm going to have to forbear. And we're going to have to talk out issues. And we're going to have to forgive.
And we're going to have to be kind and humble and meek. I'm going to have to show up not wanting my will to be done but wanting to allow other people to get to the front. I remember having a conversation with – so we have to have the gospel apply. We have to have the gospel working in us for this to work out. We have to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly. I remember having a conversation with a pastor when I was up at Liberty.
I was in seminary there talking about planning a church and talking about how we were going to do community groups and we wanted to just be in life with each other. And he told me, he said, he's a godly man, love Jesus, super smart. And I would talk with him several times just about different things. And he told me, he said, my dad, his dad was a professor who was older, had his own school of the Bible, really sharp guy. He said, my dad has been a Christian for a very long time. He said he's been a professor of theology for a very long time.
And he said he would not need to be a part of one of your community groups. Like if that's where discipleship is going to happen, if that's where people are going to grow closer to Jesus, he wouldn't need to be a part of one. So what would he do? How would he plug into your church? So I remember thinking, okay, that's a good point.
Let me think about that. And then I realized, no, that's contrary to the yallness of who we get to be in the New Testament. And it's contrary. If he is walking with Jesus that much, he may not need a community group, but his community needs him. His community group needs him to be training him up, to be pointing him towards Jesus, to be helping him understand how the Bible applies. Here's what it says.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom. Wisdom is the application of knowledge. So you can know things and have no clue how it applies. Wisdom is knowing things and how it applies. And so as we walk in relationships with each other, we get to teach and admonish one another. We get to call each other out and point each other towards the gospel and how the gospel applies in relationships.
And here's another thing I can guarantee you about him. If he came down here and joined one of our community groups, he'd get to grow in patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. Guaranteed. And that's actually one of the ways that we grow in understanding the gospel. So as he gathered with some people who had just become believers and didn't really even understand how it applied.
I have conversations with people in our church family, and I love it because we've got a lot of young Christians and a lot of people who have just become believers and a lot of people who are tractor-beamed by Jesus and will be believers soon. It's one of my favorite group of people to talk with that just don't even understand. You'll talk to them about stuff from the Bible, and they're like, I didn't even realize that was like a thing that I wasn't supposed to be doing. I didn't understand that this even applied. And it's like, yeah. And so they've been offending people, and they've been hurting people's feelings, and they've been walking in sin because they didn't even realize that that was in here, that this is how they should walk with Jesus.
And so we get to, as we grow together, teach and admonish one another because the gospel dwells in us richly, because the word of Christ is in and among us. Community forces us to walk in the gospel in a way that we would never get to, and it allows us to have a richness and a fullness to life with Jesus that we never get to have outside of the relationships we get to have with one another. The joy that we get to celebrate together, the life that we get to walk through together, we'll miss out on if there isn't a y'all to us walking with Jesus. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. When we gather together on Sundays, this is not an event. It's a gathering of the church. And we sing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs is one of the ways that we teach and admonish one another. When you're singing, yes, you're singing to Jesus, you're also singing to every other person in this room who can hear your voice. You're teaching and admonishing and helping everyone else realize that this is true.
This is who Jesus is. This is what he's done for us. This is what's happened for us in the gospel. So we gather our groups together to sing, to teach, to be thankful. And then we walk through life in the mess and joy of life together as we get to be Jesus's people. Realize that we don't just get to look at that and say, man, I'd love to be a part of a group of people who had compassion and kindness and humility and meekness.
Don't look and say, man, I'd love to be a part of a group of people that I knew had to forgive me. I'm going to cause problems for the rest of my life. I want to be around people who have to forgive me. Realize that gets to be us. We get to sit on that beach. We get to feel that breeze.
We get to inhale that salt air because of what Jesus has already done for us. Because for those of us in Christ, Jesus took our sin and he nailed it to a cross. And he paid our debt and he set us free. And we have the way to interact with one another because Jesus shows us what humility looks like when he stepped out of heaven. The king of the world, creator of all things, stepped out of heaven and took on our sin so that we could be free. He didn't assert his way.
He didn't destroy his enemies. He died for them. So we understand what meekness looks like. He forgave all of us of everything of those of us who placed our faith in Jesus. And he offers that to everyone to place your faith in Jesus and be forgiven. So we understand what forgiveness looks like.
And we know with the cross that it's costly, but it's possible. And so we allow the gospel to dwell among us richly as we study scripture and see what Jesus did for us. And then we walk through life together. Normal, everyday life. If you don't have people in our church family getting on your nerves, I will tell you something. You probably don't have, you haven't plugged in enough.
You haven't hopped in enough. That's how relationships with sinful people works. That's what we get to be with each other. We get to have genuine love, real love, and real life and relationships because of Jesus. So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to stand up and we're going to sing. We only sang one song when we came in here because we're going to sing a lot now. We're going to be thankful. We're going to praise Jesus for what he's done, for who we get to be. We're going to sing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in our hearts towards God because of what Jesus has done for us in the gospel. I'm going to pray.
We're going to sing. God, I thank you that this gets to be true for us. That we get to actually have these kind of relationships. That you've invited us into your family and your family is beautiful. That, God, we get to be a group of messed up people rescued and redeemed by Jesus and that your church gets to be the dearest place on earth to us. We thank you.
We praise you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Life in Jesus
Colossians 3:1-11
Transcript
Apostle Paul has been writing this letter to a church in Colossae. And they, it's a relatively new church, relatively healthy, but they've kind of been having a bunch of nonsense pumped into their brains, both inside and outside of the church, as to what it looks like to follow Christ. And so Paul, for the first two chapters, has just been, here's who Jesus is, and here's what he's accomplished for us. So here's, he is the image of the invisible God. He's the firstborn among all creation. Before by him all things have been created in heaven and on earth.
I mean, he just goes in this massive, here's how glorious, how inconceivable, how uncomparable Jesus is. And then he goes into, and he died so that we could have a right relationship with God. We've been rescued and redeemed by him. That he's paid our debt. And so there's no more, no more work and effort that we have to put in and nothing else that we have to do that by which we are judged as to whether or not we're right or wrong. And so Paul's going to, in the first two chapters, he just, this is who Jesus is, and this is what he's done.
This is who Jesus is, and this is what he's done. This is who Jesus is, and this is what he's done. That's the first two chapters. And then in chapter three and four, he's going to turn and say, okay, so because that's true, here's what we get to look like. Here's what life gets to look like. Here's what it gets to look like as we interact and live life together.
And so the book of Colossians is written to a church. Every time he uses the word you, it's the word y'all. It's the Greek version of y'all. And so he's talking to a group of people, and he's saying, this is what it looks like for you to live in community, for you to be people affected by who Jesus is and what he's done. And so we get this backwards all the time. We almost feel like it has to be backwards.
And so what I mean by that is this. Every other religion and even what we try to operate in, the mode of operation we try to work in in our own souls is do these things, be this type of person, and then God will love you. So do these things, be this type of person, and then God will love you. So we try to work it out here. We try to try really hard here, and then we earn a goal here that God loves us, that God accomplishes us, or that he gives us worth or that we have worth because of what we've accomplished. And so every other religion is going to be don't do this, do this, don't dress this way, dress this way, talk this way, don't talk this way, have your hair this way.
All of these rules and regulations, and if we follow those, if we're good, if we're moral, if we're right, if we have the right nationality, whatever it is, then we'll earn nirvana or we'll be accepted by God or we'll be loved by God. And that's actually the way humans want to operate. We want to believe that I can do something, that it's within my power to make myself right with God. And so Paul, in the first two chapters of Colossians, has been crushing that. He's been saying, no, it's not inside your power, it's who Jesus is and what he's done, and now we live in light of that. So we operate in a certain way because he loves us, because he gives us worth, because he gives us value, not to earn it.
I heard it explained this way, and I thought it was helpful for my brain, so I'm going to share it with you all. If a king has a castle and an enemy is approaching, So the king brings all the people in around the castle, he brings them inside the city, he closes the gates, he sets up some military units and soldiers and archers, he sets them all up, and then he and most of the force, most of the military rides out to meet the enemy. So he wants to go meet the enemy on the battlefield, and he wants to have some units left to protect the city. And so what happens is one of two things. If the king wins, he gathers some men and he sends them back to give the good news.
He gathers some men to be heralds of what has been accomplished. And so these men just come back, and all they do is give good news. All they're good newsers, they're giving a report of, all right, so here's what happened. The battle went like this, the enemy came this way, we did this, which was awesome, and then like a bunch of them died, and then they ran away, and we won. King went out, and we won the victory. And so now you get to live in light of the good news.
So open the gates, bust out the mead, get the cheese and the meat, and let's have a party. We get to celebrate the fact that we don't have to be in here preparing for battle, we don't have to be huddled up in fear. Victory's already been won, we get to live in light of it. Or, king loses. And then he gathers some men, and he sends them back, and they are advisors. Military advisors, and they're there to give good advice.
So they ride up, and they say, okay, king said this many men are coming, we were able to stop this force, but we know what's headed our way, and so we need to have extra men here prepared to do this. And he said to line up all the men here, and all they can do is give good advice. And what they can say is if we do these things well, if we try hard enough, we may live. But there's no guarantee. It's one of two options. And what Christianity is, is the king already came.
The king already fought the battle. The king already won the victory. And we get to live in light of it. That's Christianity. It's not good advice that if we do these things, if we try hard enough, if we're prepared enough, we might live. It is no.
We now get to live in light of what has already been accomplished for us. And so that's what Paul said in the first two chapters. Here's what the king did. He left heaven. He lived on earth. He was crushed in our place for our sins.
Our debt was nailed to the cross when he was nailed to the cross. And we're free, and we have life in him. That's chapters 1 and 2. 3 and 4 is, so here's what it looks like for us to live in light of that. Here's what it looks like for us to open the gates and start the party. Here's what it looks like for us to be in relationship with one another.
And so that's what we're doing. That's what we're hopping into in chapter 3 and 4. And so it's going to be Paul telling us more. This is what you do. This is what this looks like. But at no point is it do these things, and then God will love you.
It's no. Here's what he's already done. So we live in light of that. I'm going to pray, and we're going to hop into chapter 3. God, we thank you that the battle has already been fought and the victory has already been won. That at no point as we talk through what it looks like for us to be your church are we trying to earn anything.
We're honestly just getting to live in light of what you've already done. So God, I pray that you would impress that on our souls, that you would make that real to us, that we would know it to be true. We love you, and we praise you. In Jesus' name, amen. So Colossians 3, verse 1.
If then you have been raised with Christ. So he's saying if you're a Christian, if you've placed your faith in Jesus. In chapter 2 he just said that you died with Christ, so your sin died with him, and you've been raised to life in Christ. So that the old you died with him, and the new you has life because of him. So he took our sin and gave us his righteousness.
He took our death and gave us his life. That's what Jesus did when he died on the cross and when he rose again. And so Paul says if you've been raised with Christ, if you've placed your faith in Jesus, if you have been given new life in him, this is what it looks like. So I know some of you may be in here hanging out and are just kind of checking this whole Jesus thing out. We think this is a really safe place to do that. Paul is talking specifically to those who've placed their faith in Jesus, what it looks like to follow him in that.
And for those of us who haven't placed faith in Jesus yet, you get to approach him knowing that he pays for your sin and gives you new life through faith. So if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is. Seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.
So what Paul says is if you've been raised with Christ, if you've placed your hope in Christ, set your mind on the things that are above. Live as if you understand what has happened. Live as if eternity is real for you because of Jesus. That Christ who is your life. That our life is in him. So we're not going to find it here.
Basically, Paul is saying that Jesus in his death and resurrection and when we placed our faith in him has reset the way we view the world. So like I remember middle school. There were some things that were super important and intense in middle school that when you got to high school, you were like, huh. That wasn't as big a deal as I thought it was going to be. I remember a couple stories. Anna told me that when she was in middle school, the first day she wore chapstick, she thought people were going to notice and it was going to be a big deal.
So that her lips were going to be more glisten-y and less chap-y than normal. And so she just felt like, because when you're in middle school, everything just feels like this is going to be way more intense than it is. And everything seems bigger than it is at that moment. And as you get older, you're like, that wasn't as big a deal. In middle school one time, I wore, I don't want to tell this story, but I've started. So I wasn't planning on telling it, but it popped down my mouth.
I wore some short, like gray, kind of cut-off sweatpants. And I was like, I don't know how I feel about these in middle school. Like people may give me a hard time. But I was like, whatever, I'm going to go for it. And they were comfortable. And so I was like, I'm going to do this.
And then at lunch that day, I sat in gravy. Brown rice gravy in the worst place possible. And so I was like trying to walk down halls up against the wall for the rest of the day and stuff. And the way I found out was one of my friends, I was walking down the hall. He was halfway away. And the way I found out was one of my friends yelled to me something that I'm not going to preach right now.
But just a question. He had a question that he had for me, giving him a pants situation. And I remember thinking, I don't know if you live this down. I think this may go with me forever. Like I may have earned a nickname. And it may stick with me forever.
Got to high school. People didn't remember. I didn't bring it up. Like it wasn't a thing. And I realized that it was less important than I thought it was. And the truth is, this happens to us all the time.
So you'll meet people that went on a trip to a third world country. And they come back and they just, they're like, oh, toilets are the best. It's like they just appreciate things that we don't appreciate anymore. Like we've gotten used to it. If you're watching a good movie, this can happen to you. Have you ever seen the movie Hidalgo?
It's like a guy rides a horse through the desert. There's this part where he's like crawling along in sand. His face is like cooked by the sun. His lips are split in half. And if you're drinking water while you watch that, you're just like, I love water. I forgot how wonderful this is.
And so what Paul is saying is that Jesus has given us the ability to see life differently. And that we get to set our minds on the things that are above. We get to realize that what is here is enjoyable. We get to realize that what is here is for his glory. And that we get to partake in it. And we get to enjoy it.
And we get to celebrate. And we get to have friends and family. And all of the good things that he's given. But it's not about that. And life isn't found in them. So he says that set your mind on the things above.
Not on the things that are on earth. For you have died. And your life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. And so often we think that we're going to find life hidden somewhere. And for those who place their faith in Jesus, our life is hidden in Christ.
And when he appears, our life appears. I was trying to think about how that plays out. And I've got two separate examples that I'm going to kind of smush together just to try to give us a picture of what that's going to be like when our life appears. When Christ who our life is hidden in appears. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.
Tolkien and a couple other guys were in a, they hung out with each other. And so C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books like Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, thanks. So they hung out together in this thing called the Inklings.
And at one point one of their friends named Charles died. And there's this quote by C.S. Lewis saying that not only does he miss Charles, but now he gets less of Ronald, which is what he called J.R.R. Tolkien. So I'm assuming his name was like John, Ronald, Ronald, Tolkien or something like that.
Named after both his granddads, both their names were Ronald. I don't know how that works. But he called him Ronald and he says, not only do I get, I don't get Charles. He said, but you would think that now I have Ronald all to myself. He said, but that's not true. I actually get less of Ronald.
Because there's only certain ways that he interacts with Charles that I'll never get to see again. He said, I'll never get to see Ronald laugh at a distinctly Charles joke. And he said, so you would think I get more of Ronald, but I actually now get less. Hold that in your brain. I've got another example that we're going to try to smoosh them together to help just paint a vague picture of what this looks like. Anna, sometimes when she would go out of town or when we hadn't seen each other for a while, she would ask me, like we'd be on the phone and she'd be like, do you miss me?
And I've since learned, but originally I would say, uh, no, not really. After I said that several times, I realized this isn't going well. That conversation never takes a good turn after I answer that way. And so I've learned how to answer better. But the truth was I never had moments because I always understood missing her as like having these moments where I was just like, oh, I wish she was here.
Like I just felt it. And that wasn't how it was. And that's what I thought missing was. So I was just like, nah. I'm busy. I got stuff going on.
Like I was working on something. So no. But the truth is every time I would see her and if she goes out of town now, every time when she comes back, it's there's this moment when she first shows up that it clicks in my brain. That's what was missing. That's what's been off for the past two days. And I didn't stop and think about it.
And I never really sat and allowed that to sink in. But it's just been something's been missing. And there's, in a very small way, some of my life, some of who I am is tied up in Anna, but not the way that it's hidden in Christ. And so what Paul's saying is that the fullness of who we are is brought out in Christ. And that when we see him, there's going to be this moment for all believers that we go. So that's what's been missing.
That's what's been off in me so often that I've thought I've needed something else to fill me up. That's the hunger inside of me that I've never been able to quite quiet down. That's where my life was. And I've been thinking that these cheap substitutes would replace it. And that he's going to bring out more of us. And we're going to get to, as we enjoy him in church family forever, see more of him than we'd ever get to see if it was just us and him.
And so there's this amount of life that's multiplied as he calls his church back up into him. And Paul says, your life is hidden with Christ. And so for believers, we're not looking for life other places. And so Paul's saying, chapters 1 and 2, here's what Jesus has done for you. Here's what he's accomplished on your behalf. He's taken away your sin.
He's paid your debt. And your life is in him. And now he's going to start saying, so this is what it looks like. For us to have our life in him, for us to be gospel people, here's what it looks like. Five. Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you.
As Paul says, our minds are on the things above. Our minds are on eternity. We realize that what is here is enjoyable, but it's not the goal. It's not where our life is. There's more important things than just having comfort or amassing success. There's more important things.
Life isn't here. We get to see things from an eternal perspective. So put to death what's earthly in you. Paul says, put to death. You kind of read that and you're like, all right, Paul, tell us how you really feel. It's intense.
He says, put to death what is earthly in you. And then he's going to give us some examples. Sexual immorality. What we're going to do is we're going to walk through this list and just explain briefly what they mean. And then we're going to kind of zoom back and go back through them as Paul kind of puts them together in categories. Sexual immorality.
That's the Greek word pornea, which is the word we get pornography from. It is just a sexual junk drawer. It's a sexual junk drawer, which just means that he's not being specific here. He's saying all sexual sin. He's not going to give a big list of this is sexual sin and this is sexual sin and this is sexual sin. All of it.
So get rid of that. All sexual sin and sexual sin in the Bible is any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. So God invented sex. Made it enjoyable on purpose. Knew what he was doing. But it's for marriage to create oneness, to create unity for health and life and procreation.
Like it's it's a good thing, but not outside of marriage. And so he says sexual immorality. Put it to death. And so we immediately ask the question. Well, like what? How far is too far?
If it's this vague term. And he clarifies for us. Sexual immorality. Impurity. So he says it's not a line that we work our way towards.
It's purity or not purity. So like if you have water, it's H2O. It's water. And you can't be like, well, it's water with just the hint of battery acid. It's like, no. No.
That's impure water. It's no longer drinkable. That's not a good thing. It's water, but just a little bit of dead animal bacteria from up the creek here. It's like, no. And so what Paul is saying is the question isn't how close can we get before this becomes a problem?
The question is how can you be pure? How can you honor Jesus with the way you live and act? And so Paul says for those of us who've been rescued by Jesus and had our debt paid, get rid of this. Put it to death. Passion, evil desire. So we use passion in a good term, and so I don't think it's necessarily wrong.
What he's talking about here is overwhelming desire for reaching our goals, for having success. It's this passion and evil desire, this overwhelming, I have to have what I want. I have to achieve what I want. And he clarifies this further. But that's what he's, passion and evil desire.
And covetousness, which is just wanting things that aren't ours, desiring things that someone else has, greediness, which is idolatry. So idolatry is when we love anything more than God, when we worship anything that isn't God, when we seek in something what only God can give. So Paul says your life is hidden with Christ. So quit seeking life in these other things. It's idolatry. It's us pursuing this to give us something that we think it will fulfill us, we think it will give us worth, we think it will give us value, and it's not going to.
So he basically, when I was reading through this, I was like, dang, Paul. I feel like he read our mail a little bit when it comes to how we operate in American culture. So I'm going to put these into three kind of categories, and I think he kind of does as well. He talks about idolatry. So the God of sex, the God of success, passion and evil desire, and the God of more covetousness.
Tell me our culture doesn't tell us that joy and life and hope are found in sex. It does. That's how you know you have... If you watch any amount of film, television, the way you know you're successful is your sex life. The way you know you're okay, the way you know you're valuable, the way you know you have worth, the way you know... Sex.
It'll complete you. It'll fulfill you. You can look at magazines. Sex. This is what you need. Does your partner fill you up?
Do they complete you? Are they doing what they ought to? We have bought into the lie that sex is somehow going to fulfill us, make us whole, and give us worth and value, and that our life will be found in it. Paul says it's not. He says for Christians who've placed your life in Jesus, who's died for your sin, put it to death. Truth is, this shows up in the church as well.
This belief, this cultural belief that sex somehow will fix us, will fill us up. It shows up in the way we treat single people in the church. Like they have a disease or something. Where you can't be single in the church without having people constantly ask you like... Because we have this assumption. We know you can't be having sex now.
We're in the church, so stop it. But won't you like it later when you can? Like there's this... This you're not complete yet. You're not full yet. You're not fulfilled yet.
Your life will be found when you're married. The problem is... Paul says our life's in Jesus. Not future magic marriage. It doesn't exist, by the way. And Paul says our life's in Jesus.
And the truth is, biblically, it's okay to not be married. It's a perfectly acceptable way to honor Jesus and walk through life. Marriage is good too. It's a gift. But Paul says that not being married is a gift and that he wished more people had it.
The God of sex. Paul says, put it to death. Live as if the gospel is true. The God of success. This is another one that we buy into. Passion and evil desire.
That our life will be found when we've made something out of ourselves. So we have the concept of the self-made man. That when we've become successful enough. When we've earned enough. When we've achieved our goals. So we pump this into little kids' brains.
Like every little cartoon ever. Some animal shows up. Like a grasshopper or something. And it's like, follow your heart. Live your dreams. It's like, kill that grasshopper.
He's lying to you. I go to children's movies just so I can yell, No, don't do it! I don't, but that would be fun. But we believe that. We believe that if I earn, if I achieve, if I get the things I desire. Then I'll have life.
Then I'll know I'm complete. Then I'll know I'm fulfilled. If that were true. The happiest people in our society. Would be movie stars. Musicians.
That have made it to the top. Got everything they ever dreamt of. So just as a brief case study. Is that true? No. The reason we can continue to believe it's true is because we haven't succeeded and grasped everything that we've desired.
So we can still believe it holds the promise of life because we haven't found it, caught it, and seen that it comes up empty. And Paul says, put it to death. Your life is not going to be found in your ability to succeed. Your life is not going to be found in your ability to get everything that you want. Covetousness. Man, we've this hook, line, and sinker.
The God of more. That we need more. That life would be better if I could just have... Oh, this would work out well if I could just... If this would just... Our whole economic system is based off of the fact that you need more.
Because we produce way more than we actually need. So we have to buy more to keep our economic system going. So that advertisers have figured this out. They don't sell you on need. I saw a commercial the other day for a Buick. And all it did was inside of the car tell you features.
And it was like this old man talking really slowly. And it was like, plush leather seats. A knob that controls the radio. And I was like, this is the weirdest commercial I've ever seen. Because he's trying to sell me this car as opposed to something that the car will bring me. Because he's acting as if I need the car.
But we don't need the car. I think it was directed at really old people. But the better example of this and the way our society works... I used to work at the mall at Sears before they shut down. So I apparently wasn't crushing it or anything.
But I used to work at the mall at Sears. People would come in with Hollister bags. And that's the best. Hollister is a clothing store that sells clothing. And on their advertisements, on their bags, is a picture of a guy from about ribs up with no clothes on. That's how Hollister advertises their clothing store.
A clotheless guy. Now, if they're not selling me something other than their product, I don't know what they're selling me. Like, you look at that and you go, Oh, I need to buy my clothes at Hollister. So I'll be cool enough to not wear clothes. Maybe if I buy enough of those shirts, I'll get abs like that guy. I'm going to need a lot of those shirts.
But the truth is, we're sold on the idea that we need more. That we're incomplete. It's the absolute antithesis of the gospel. That Jesus has completed everything on our behalf, and we're sold on the idea that if we could just have a little more. That we'd be better off if we just had a little more. And Paul says it's idolatry and put it to death.
But all of us walk around saying, Life will be good if. I'll know I'm okay if. I won't have to worry anymore if. And Paul says, Christ is your life. He's already done everything for you. So put it to death.
And the truth is, for some of us who have placed our faith in Jesus, we're still operating. Paul says this is earthly in us. We're still operating as if this were true. And Paul says, Get the guillotine out in your soul. Have an execution. And put it to death.
And for some of us, that's going to be a daily process of taking this and putting it to death. And reminding ourselves that Jesus already died. We died with him. He already rose and gave us life. And this does not hold the promise of life. And we don't have to live up to it or be enslaved to it to know that we have worth and value.
Jesus has already done it. So we can put this to death. That this died with us when we died with Christ. He keeps going. He says, On account of these, so on account of idolatry, on account of rebellion, the wrath of God is coming. We, I think, often like to believe that the wrath of God is not coming.
Or that God does not have wrath. And he does. He has wrath for sin, rebellion against him, worship of anything other than him. So we read in chapter 1 how magnificent, how holy, how exalted, how worthy he is, and how he created everything. And that his little creation turned around and said, nope, we want to worship ourselves. And we want to chase after smaller things.
And it says, on account of these, the wrath of God is coming. And the truth is, God has wrath and love. And that's what we see in the cross. Where God loves us enough to take wrath for us. So that he can bring wrath towards rebellion and not have to destroy everyone.
So that we who placed our faith in Jesus, he took our wrath on our account. Some of you in here have been hurt by evil people. God has wrath. He loves too much to not have wrath. The God who is love cannot sit in heaven and watch molestation, murder, lying, pain, heartache, rape, and not have wrath. If you show me a God who doesn't have wrath, I'll show you a God who doesn't love.
God is love, and he has wrath. And he loves enough to take our wrath for us. But those of you in here who have been hurt, and who have seen those who hurt you, go free. You don't have to pick up wrath. You don't have to take up the sword. God does.
And those who harmed you will have one of two things happen to them. They'll receive the same overwhelming, undeniable, undeserved grace that we've received. Because Jesus will have paid for their wrath. Or they'll receive the wrath of God. Sin will be paid for. The question is, will Jesus pay for it or will we?
So Paul says, On the count of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these two you once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Jesus at one point says that, that from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. And so some of us just have anger, and wrath, and malice, and bitterness inside of us. I've heard the example, and it's a simple one, but if I was holding a cup up here, you wouldn't know what was in it until I shook it.
And so some of us like to pretend like we're pretty nice people, but the truth is, we don't really know what's in our heart until it begins to overflow. Until we're pressed. And then we realize that, man, we're angrier than we thought. We have more wrath and slander and malice than we thought because of what I just shouted at my wife. Because of what I just yelled at my roommate. Because of what I'm saying about my parents behind their back.
Paul says, put it away. That we've been rescued and redeemed. We don't have to dwell with that anymore. Like, I know that there have been times in my life, people have told me before I'm not super emotional. And I used to be like, yeah, I'm emotional. I get angry and hungry.
Like, I have emotions. But there's been times where, that's all, that was really all I operated in was anger. Malice and wrath and slander. Paul says it doesn't fit with a Christian who's been forgiven. So put it away.
And we don't have to walk around with that. And we don't have to, because his wrath is coming, we don't have to be wrathful. We get to know that we're forgiven, so we get to forgive, and we get to know that God's sovereign, and that he'll take care of it. Then he says this, do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices, and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge, after the image of its creator. It feels to me, so he goes through this list of major idolatry, and then he goes through this heart level anger, and then he goes, and don't lie to each other.
And it's like, okay, that's helpful. That's good advice. And I know it's in a list of how we ought to exist with one another, but it's the first time he says one another, and he's not just kind of talking about what we pursue. And so it feels a little bit like he's showing us something more, and trying to help us more than just saying, hey, lying's not going to be helpful for you. See, what he says is, do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices, and put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge, after the image of its creator. we're being made to look more like Jesus.
And so Paul says, just be honest. He's taking a very real look at sin here. You see, he's not condemning us at any point, because condemnation would mean that we're judged based off of our ability to behave, and chapters 1 and 2 says that that's not true. That we couldn't behave, we couldn't get it together, we aren't moral enough, we aren't going to control our sexual desires, our desire for success, we're not going to be able to get rid of all the idols in our soul, and that Jesus had to die so that we could have life. And so, and then Paul goes right into chapter 2, right before he gets here, he says, you're not judged by morality, spirituality, effort.
You're judged by Jesus paying your debt. And then he says, so he says, put to death what is earthly in you. In these two you once walked, when you were living in them, now, now you must put them all away. So what he's saying is, look, I know this is in you. Paul's a human, he knows it's in him. At no point is he taking an unrealistic view of this, and acting as if you're judged or condemned by it.
And so what he says is, don't lie about it. Be real. We get to be real about the fact that we're broken. About the fact that we often pursue things that we think are going to give us life and that they aren't. Everyone in this room who's a Christian knows that value comes from Jesus, not from us. And so that when I stand up and tell you, here's how I messed up, we're not surprised.
People often would, non-Christians that were friends of mine, would be like, I can't believe you did that, you're a Christian. And I'd be like, whoa, entry exam to Christianity. I'm a horrible person. Listen, Jesus is awesome. It's not about our ability to behave. But that means we get to live like we're free.
We get to live in light of what's already happened. We get to live in light of the victory. So we get to throw open the gates and start the party. We don't have to live as slaves to chasing after other things and seeking life and small things anymore. As Paul says, don't lie. Be real about it.
John says this. He's one of Jesus' disciples. John says in 1 John, and we're going to put it up on the screen. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So John says, look guys, if you're going to say you're not sinful, if you're going to say you're not broken, you're going to say you've deceived yourself.
And I think you've deceived yourself in one of two ways. Either you believe that you're not sinful or you've actually deceived yourself enough to believe that you've got it together or you're deceived in thinking that we believe it. But I'm a Christian. I know everybody in this room is messed up. And I know that we all need Jesus. So Paul says this.
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is no Jew, here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. What Paul just said is, all the categories that we use to assign worth are gone. He's talking to a society that just knew that there were certain people that inherently had value and certain people didn't. That certain races were just worse than other ones. That certain types of people, certain people were just born to be slaves than they were supposed to be.
They had less value than the people who were supposed to be not slaves. Paul says, all the categories that you use to gauge whether or not you have value and worth are gone. Paul says, there's no good people and bad people. There's no moral churchgoers and heathens. There's no people who get it together and act right and those people that keep falling short. He says, Christ is all, which means that everything is about Jesus.
All worth and value and joy and hope are found in him. And he says he's in all, which means that Christ, as he dwells in us, gives us worth and value and joy and hope. So if Christ is all, all that matters, he's the only category that matters and he's in all, then we don't have to lie to each other. We get to be real about where we are, where we're struggling. We get to confess and repent and we get to put to death what's evil inside of us, what's earthly inside of us, where we're trying to pursue life, where we're angry and slanderous and off. So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to play some music so that we don't have a band up here that can't also do this and can't also operate as church family. We're going to play some music and we're going to repent, which is just that we confess that we're off, that we've been chasing other things and that we begin to change because the gospel gives us the freedom to do that. We're not repenting. We're not turning away from the sins so that we can have life. We're getting to live in light of what's already been accomplished. Every time I don't want to share and confess sin, all I'm saying is that deep down inside of me, I still believe that my value comes from me.
Deep down inside of me, functionally, I can say all I want to. I can stand up in front of you as much as I want and say that Jesus paid everything for me. If I'm not willing to be open with where I'm off and where I'm broken, what I'm saying is I don't really believe it. So Paul says, put it to death. I know it's there. Put it to death and live in light of what's already happened.
All Paul's saying is fling open the gates and start the party. No longer live in the slavery of my value comes from what I do. My value comes from what I can accomplish. No longer live in the slavery of if I could just have more, if I could just, I would find life. No longer live in the slavery. He's saying, you don't need to be huddled up in fear anymore.
The enemy's defeated. You don't need to be gathering weapons and coming up with plans of how you're going to succeed. The enemy's been defeated. Fling open the gates and start the party. And what that looks like as we put it to death is that we confess and we're open with where we're off and we're open with where we need Jesus to rescue and to fix and to redeem and to change us and to pay for a debt that we can't pay. So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to repent. We're going to play some music. We're going to sit in here and we're going to, as church family, we're going to move around. Some of us are going to need to talk to Jesus about some areas in our lives and our hearts, areas where we've been pursuing something else to give us value when our life's actually in heaven. Some of us who don't know Jesus, haven't placed our faith in Jesus, is open for you to repent, to ask Him to rescue and to redeem because life is only in Him. You're not going to find it anywhere else.
Some of us are going to need to talk to each other because there's been wrath and malice and slander. We're going to need to confess. We're going to ask for forgiveness. We're going to forgive because Jesus forgives. We're going to live in light of what's already been accomplished, that our worth and our value doesn't come from us, but it comes from Him. That we get to be real.
Some of us are going to need to step outside and make phone calls. We're going to do that. Some of us are going to start a conversation off like this. I'm going to want to lie to you the entire time we talk. I'm going to need you to ask me some real questions because I want so badly for the gospel to functionally dwell in me like it's true and the whole time I'm going to fight against that and try to hide. But I don't want to lie.
I don't want to hide. I don't need your help. Some of us are going to invite people in our church family to just end on what we're struggling with. I've been believing this is going to give me life and I just want a teammate. I just want somebody to pray with me. I don't want to pursue this anymore.
I want to live like the gospel is true. I want to fling open the gates and start the party. Then we're going to take communion. After we confess, after we talk, after we repent, Jesus says if we're at the altar and we realize that someone has something against us or we have something against someone else that's on us to go talk to them. So we're going to talk.
We're going to pray. We're going to actively live as if the gospel is true. We're going to do chapter 3 because we know chapter 1 and 2 are true. That Jesus paid our debt. He disarmed the enemy. The victory has been won.
We're going to fling open the gates. We're going to be honest. We're going to be real. And then we're going to party. We're going to sing and make much of Jesus and celebrate the fact that we get to be church family because of what he's done for us. I'm going to pray.
We're going to move around. We're going to talk to each other. We're going to live like the gospel is true. God, I thank you that at no point does my value come from my ability to behave. I thank you that at no point does my value come from my good morals, my wise decisions, my pure heart. God, we so often in this room believe that other things hold our life, that our life is hidden in something other than you.
God, and I pray that through your Holy Spirit you would convict us, that you would lead us to repentance and to the joy that comes from the freedom from slavery to sin. God, so impress upon us the victory that's already been won that we will come out of the darkness, out of fear, fling open the gates, and live in light of the fact that you give us worth by your death, that you give us life by your resurrection, that our value and our hope is not seated in us, that our life is not hidden in us, but it's hidden in you. Lead us now. In Jesus' name.
Discernment Radar Wk. 2
Colossians 2:8-23
Transcript
Well, all right, everybody doing well tonight? I hope we did have a good Fourth of July. It's been two weeks since we've gotten together like this on a Sunday to dig into and talk about Colossians. I just spent the past couple of days, I manage a fireworks store during the Fourth of July and New Year's. And so if you've ever thought, is he kind of a redneck? I hope that clears it up for you.
I am. I love fireworks. I get in there and I get like a little kid. But you can't tell people when you sell fireworks, you can't tell people all the cool things they can do with them. You have to be like, no, don't hold that in your hand. No, don't throw that at your brother, like those kind of things.
But it is fun and has been a busy past couple of weeks. And a week before we didn't gather, we had the opportunity to eat or to eat here with First Baptist West Columbia or to come hang out with Midtown Fellowship or to stay at your house and nap. So hopefully people made good choices there. I think eating here and then napping would have been a good combo, but whatever you want to do. But what we're talking about tonight, we're in Colossians chapter 2.
We've been going verse by verse through Colossians. What we're talking about tonight, we're finishing up. We started talking in Colossians chapter 2 about a discernment radar. And so we'll be in 8 through 23 tonight. And what we're kind of doing is we're finishing up this idea of having a discernment radar that Paul kind of starts off in the beginning of chapter 2. And so really what we said that was is as Christians, as really as humans in the United States, we're bombarded with ways to think and to feel about everything.
So we're told constantly by television how we ought to view romance, life, joy, hope, the purpose of why we're here. We're told through books that we read and through shows that we watch. I mean, constantly. I was watching the end of a show. My wife and I were watching the season finale of a show. And I found myself sitting there wanting one of the main characters to get rich.
There was a job he was trying to work out. And I was wanting him to have it work out really well at the end of the show so that I could just know that this character, who wasn't real, was going to be okay off in Fake World when I was no longer allowed to watch him. And I remember sitting there thinking, like, wanting that to work out. And then I was like, you know, the truth is I don't think that's where life and joy and hope and happiness come from. I don't think that wealth accomplishes that for us. But through this show, I was believing that for this guy.
And I was beginning to think that that would make his life better and he would have joy and hope and life if he had that. And this was like two nights ago, and it just reminded me of the fact that as we watch television, as we read books, we're constantly being sold a worldview. And so what happens is we get indoctrined by everything around us. And that's what Paul is. He's writing to the Colossians. He's saying, look, there's all of this coming in at you, and I want you to have a way to process it.
I want you to have a way to understand what's healthy and helpful and good for you. And so what we talked about in the first seven verses of chapter two is, and we kind of went through it backwards, but Paul says, I want you to be knit together in love. I want you to be one so that you can have the full assurance of Christ, so that you can know what is true in the gospel, so that you're not led astray by plausible arguments. And so what we basically said last time we got together was, we're constantly being attacked by plausible arguments, things that sound smart and good, but we need to be able to submit them to Jesus in the context of community.
And that's actually what our discernment radar is. Does this line up with Jesus? And we do that in the context of community. As we finish out this chapter, we're going to see that Paul, it feels kind of like a father talking with his children in this passage. It's almost like, look, I'm not going to be here with you, and I want you to have a way to process everything that's coming in. I'm not, Paul tells them, he says, you've never seen me face to face.
And so I'm just trying to equip you with a way to understand the world around you, a way for you to know what's good and helpful and true. And the truth is, as we go through, we're going to look today more at what comes into us from the church, what comes into us from what we see and read in Christian literature and books and pastors and teaching and all that. And so in some ways we get constantly attacked by society. And then we'll walk into a bookstore and we'll like run to the Christian living section and feel like we're at home base. It's like, can't get me here. I'm safe.
That sign says Christian. Or like you're flipping through television channels and you'll flip to some sort of a Christian channel. And it's like, no, can't, this, this is going to be good for me. And that may not necessarily be true. And so Paul's going to kind of unpack. And what he does in this passage, we've got a lot of ground to cover.
It's a lot of verses. And Paul's going to bring up a bunch of ideas. And so actually some of this will need to be unpacked in our community groups as we go throughout the rest of the week and weeks as we continue to walk through Colossians. But what basically Paul does is he brings everything into the room. So he's going to bring up all kinds of different teaching and philosophies and, and ways to understand the world.
And he's just going to gather them all together and say, the way you process this is by looking at Jesus. And so he's going to bring up all this stuff, but he's going to point to Jesus. And so that's what we're going to do tonight. We're going to pull it all into the room. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time unpacking what all of it is, but we're going to point to Jesus. So I'm going to pray and then we'll, we'll hop in.
God, I pray that you'd help us see you clearly in this. You would give us wisdom as we walk through it. Thank you for your word that you do in it, reveal yourself to us and that you lead us through it. And so we praise you. We thank you. Pray that you'd bless our time that we have together tonight in Jesus name.
Amen. Okay. So chapter two, he just, we just finished reading in verse six. Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. So what we said last week was that we're to be one.
We're to be knit together. We're to know that everything submits to Jesus. And then that way we won't be led astray by plausible arguments. One of the things we said is that that means we have to be one. We have to have the Bible, not just books. We have to actually study God's word to know that, that Jesus, God revealed himself through Jesus coming to earth.
And that then we, we have him revealed to us through scripture. And so for us to know whether or not something lines up and submits to Jesus and lines up with what's true about the gospel, we have to know scripture. We can't just read books. We can't just, because it's a Christian author. We have to even weigh that against scripture. We also said it has to be community, not just crowd.
So we can't just be like, well, I read some online reviews. This is probably pretty good. Like we can't do that. We have to actually have people around us who know us. One of the best things about my community group is that they know me well enough that I can't trick them. I can't try to try to tell them half of a truth and convince them that what I'm pursuing is actually good for me.
They'll be like, no, man, we know you. And we know that you're actually pursuing this for wrong reasons, even though it's an okay thing. And they get to help guide me. They get to help me point me in the right direction. And so we actually have to have people around us who know us. And so then we get established in the faith and we abound in thanksgiving.
So verse eight, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Okay. So we've said in Colossians that every time we see the word you, it is the plural you. It's the Greek version of y'all. And so every time we see you, it's actually y'all. He's talking to the church, the group of people.
And so when he says, see to it that y'all aren't taken captive. What he's saying is that it's actually a team effort. That the person responsible for you not being led astray is you and all the Christians around you. That we actually have to care enough about each other to point out where we're getting off, where we're chasing after dumb things, where we're believing something that isn't true. And we have to actually care about each other in order to do that. And so it's, it's our job to defend against everything together as a team.
So see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit. So basically philosophy, ways of thinking, ways to process the world, empty deceit, people who are just outright lying, just making stuff up to try to trick us. Philosophy, empty deceit, according to human tradition. So just, this is what we've done forever, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. But he says, he starts gathering all this in the room and he says, everything has to point to Jesus.
We submit to what points to Jesus and nothing else. And so what we're going to see as we go through this is Paul is going to tell us where we actually have the power and the authority in having discernment, what we actually hold everything up against, what we actually hold everything up against so that we know whether or not it's true and helpful and good. Just keep going. For in him, that's Jesus, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. It means that God became a human, that fullness is in Jesus and Jesus alone, that wisdom and life and joy and fullness are in Jesus. And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority.
So fullness is in Jesus and we're filled up in Jesus. And he's the head of all rule and authority. You know, that's really good news. We have so many rules and authorities in the world right now. In Colossians, what that means is it both means spiritual rulers and authorities and earthly. So Paul in chapter one would say that Jesus is in charge of visible things, invisible things, things on earth, things in heaven.
I did my hands backwards, but you know what I'm talking about. And, and so what, what this actually means for us is that everything submits to Jesus. And so someone has a PhD that has a rule and authority. It's submitted to Jesus. You have a local church leader, rule and authority submitted to Jesus, local government submitted to Jesus. Which means if I stand up here and point you to something other than Jesus, you tell me to shut up and sit down.
Everything submits to Jesus. That's how that works. And so all rule and authority is submitted to him who is the head and he's head over all rule and authority. Verse 11, in him, you also were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. This just got weird. Um, uh, so Paul's going to start talking about circumcision here.
If you're not familiar with what circumcision is, Matt would love to talk with you about it afterward. Uh, he'd love to walk you through that. Um, okay. So what Paul's going to start talking about circumcision and what, what he's referring to is Jewish religious Acts. So in the old Testament, the way that you knew you were initiated into being a God fear, a God follower, uh, was circumcision.
So all the males were circumcised and that was how they knew that they began to follow the law and how they followed God. And so what happened is after, um, after Jesus came, after he died, after he rose again, and after the church began, it began amongst Jewish people. Uh, contrary to the painting your grandmother has at her house, Jesus was Jewish, not some sort of blonde haired, blue eyed woman with a beard, uh, that you may have seen in a painting. Or if you Google it, there are some pictures of him with dreadlocks, but Jesus was Jewish. So dark hair, dark eyes, Jewish, uh, and Christianity began out of Judaism.
And so what happened was as Christian, Christianity began to grow to those who weren't Jewish, Jewish people would say, yes, you need Jesus. Yes, you need the gospel, but you also need to be Jewish. You need to be a good Jewish person. And your initiation into that is circumcision. And you need to also follow the law. And what Paul is saying is that he says, in him also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.
Paul says that our initiation into following Jesus was done without hands. That is such good news. That means that nobody in this room accomplished salvation on their own. It was done without hands, that he accomplished it for us. What brings us into being Jesus followers, brings us into being rescued by Jesus is not our hard work, our good morals, our intellect, our effort. It's Jesus.
Jesus has already accomplished it for us. And so what it says is that you, verse 12, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. Christianity is us placing faith in God. And faith is not us doing work. It's us admitting that we can't, that we wouldn't accomplish this on our own. So we place our faith.
We say, I'm not going to work this out. I'm not going to accomplish this, but you can on my behalf. And that's what baptism is. It's us saying that Jesus died for our sins, that we died with him, that our sins died with him. And that when he rose again from the grave, we rose with him. And that's all it is, is us publicly proclaiming that the gospel is true for us.
And so some of you in this room may have become Christians, and you actually need to be baptized, which is just a public declaration of, this is true for me because of Jesus. We'll be doing some baptisms again in August. We throw parties when we baptize people, because we want to make much of Jesus, and we want to celebrate, and we love dunking people to point to Jesus. It's great. And so we eat food and celebrate and make a big deal out of it. And so that's what he's saying.
You were baptized with him. You were buried with him, and you've been raised again through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised Jesus from the dead. It's about to get good, y'all. It's one of my favorite sections in Scripture. And you who were dead in your trespasses, trespasses means sin. Every time we've overstepped the bounds, every time we've stepped out of line, every time we've rebelled against God, every time we've loved something more than we've loved him, every time that we've pursued something, that we've placed in higher importance in our life than he is.
Every time we've been greedy and selfish, every time. So we were dead in our trespasses, and those of us outside of Christ in this room are dead in our trespasses, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, meaning that Jesus hadn't brought you in yet, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. All right, we're Americans, so we're familiar with debt, correct? Y'all know what debt is? Okay, it has legal demands. So like China could show up and be like, give us everything now, and they have legal demands on us.
We'd tell them no, because we don't have anything to give them. But we'd say, come get it, we have guns. But we have debt, and Americans have debt, and we accrue debt constantly. I saw a thing after the Olympics that said, it was USA and China talking, and it said, USA, we got more gold medals than you did. And China was like, that's cute. You owe us infinite money.
And then USA said, USA, USA. Just change the subject. But anyway, what it's saying is that we, when we sin, have a record of debt with God. A record of debt when we sin. My wife and I own a house. We rent it from the bank.
It's the correct way to say that, I think. Because if we quit paying our mortgage, we'd find out really quickly who actually owned it when they took it from us. But we have a mortgage. We have an electricity bill. We have a Netflix bill that comes in. We have an internet bill.
And they show up every month. We live in West Columbia, but not in the city of West Columbia. So we have to pay water to the city of West Columbia and sewer to the city of Casey. Seems a bit fishy, but that's how that works. And so we pay two bills on that. And so they show up every month in my mailbox.
And that's debt that we owe, and it has legal demand. And so I got to thinking about this. What if God sent me a bill every month for the record of my debt? Sins of commission, which means when we do something we shouldn't do. Every time that I'm just absolutely just selfish with my wife or just pop off and say something really mean to her just because I'm a jerk and she lives with me. Every time that I should have done something and didn't, when I should have been generous, when I should have cared more about someone else than myself, but I convinced myself that I deserved my money more than they did, that I had earned it, that I had more value than they do, and so I don't need to be generous to them.
Every time I stepped over the bounds, every time I missed the Mark, God kept a record of my debt and sent it to me at the end of the month. My neighbors would wonder why I got a phone book once a month. They'd be like, man, we get a phone book once a year. This cat gets a phone book every month. I'd be like flipping through and be like, wow, Tuesday the 12th was a bad day for me. I must have had to have been around a lot of humans.
So what it says is that we have a record of debt, that we're dead in our trespasses, and that we owe a debt to the God of the universe. And here's what it says. We'll start back in 13. And you who were dead in your trespasses, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Jesus was nailed to the cross.
He became our debt. He became our substitute, that he died in our place for our debt, and in so doing, paid it for us. You see, Jesus is the fullness of deity. See, God became a man and lived a perfect, sinless life. He wouldn't have gotten a bill every month. He had no record of debt.
He had a clean slate. He had not only not committed sin, but he'd done everything he was supposed to do to be right with God. And then, he died to pay our debt. So our God is a judge. We stood before him in his high courtroom, and he looked at us and declared that we were guilty and that we owed an unpayable debt. And then he passed our sentence on to Jesus.
So that Jesus, who owed no debt, paid our guilty sentence. And that we, who owed all the debt, received Jesus' innocence. So that we were declared innocent, and Jesus was declared guilty because he swapped places with us. If you're a Christian in this room, you have no debt when you stand before God. Because Jesus was nailed to the cross, and he became our debt, and he canceled the record of our debt. And we've been set free.
Let me show you why this is such good news. Other than the fact we've been set free, it says this. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. So that when he canceled the record of our debt, he disarmed the rulers and authorities. And so this is both spiritual heavenly rulers and authorities and earthly rulers and authorities. Let's talk about spiritual ones first.
Satan, who is real, he's a created being. He has fallen angels that follow him. They're called demons in scripture. They are spiritual beings that exist. He's called an accuser, which says that he accuses God's people before the throne of God day and night. When Jesus died for our sins, he has nothing left to accuse us of.
So when the enemy shows up and tries to tell you, how on earth can you call yourself a Christian when you did this and this? How on earth can you say that you love Jesus when you've just acted this way? They're disarmed. All that is is an opportunity to say, good point. You're right. Grace is unfathomable that Jesus would pay for that.
Thank you so much for helping me praise his holy name, that I am that messed up, that I did just do that, and that I get to claim the name of Christian because Christ has already paid my debt. The enemy has been disarmed. I used to watch a bunch of movies when I was growing up, like action movies and stuff, and in any pirate movie or Princess Bride has a scene like this, and I think Three Musketeers has a scene like this, but they're always fighting, and then the hero does this wrist thing that I'm not sure actually exists in real life, but they do this, and then the sword shoots up in the air out of their enemy's hand, and then they grab it. And then the bad guy is standing there with no weapon, and he's suddenly in a really bad position because he used to have a weapon, and now he doesn't, and the guy he's fighting has two weapons, which makes it harder because both ends are pointy now, and so it's just a bad day.
That's what Jesus has done for us. What the enemy held against us, what the enemy would hold against us to say that we had fallen short, that we weren't good enough, that we weren't going to make it, that we hadn't earned it, Jesus has disarmed him so that when he says that, we say absolutely. Isn't Jesus good? Absolutely. Didn't he rescue me to the utmost? He's disarmed.
Not only spiritual enemies, but earthly rules and authorities that say you have to do this to know that you have value. You have to do this to get God to love you. You have to accomplish these things to know that you're successful, to know that you have worth. Not at all. Not no heck no. Jesus has already accomplished all that for me.
I've already been given worth freely. I've already been made successful freely. There's nothing that's held against us anymore. And so that's what Paul says here. He says, therefore let no one pass judgment on you. Judgment is where God stands up and he Judges us based off of our merit.
Judgment is when you're in any kind of a competition, there's a certain level of standard or measure that you have to measure up against. And so if you were in a beauty contest, you'd be judged based off of beauty. So if I entered into a beauty contest, I would lose. I would have losing well in hand. Like I wouldn't even get like a participation award. They would just be like, no, stop it.
Go home. No ribbon for you. Because they're basing it off of beauty. If I was in a pie eating contest, that I could actually do. I'm just going to, let's just think about eating pie for a second. But you have to, you have to be based off of the rules that are there.
And so what Paul is saying is that there are no more rules that apply to us that base our acceptance, that our acceptance is based off of, that our merit is based off of. Because Jesus has already brought us in. He's already initiated everything that needs to happen. He's already accomplished it without hands. And so what we're going to look at is three areas that this shows up in the church, that this kind of plays out in how we walk through life as Paul unpacks this. So he says, Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink, or with regard to a festival, or a new moon, or a Sabbath.
These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Okay. If Jesus has already accomplished that for us, and if that's what we hold everything up against, then we aren't judged by legalism. We're set free from it. So what Paul says is, don't let anybody pass judgment on you when it comes to how you behave and how you participate in religious activities.
That they're a shadow of the things to come, and the substance belongs to Christ. And so what that means is, we gather together on Sunday nights. We gather with our community groups, and we walk through life, normal life together, but it's not to get God to love us. It's not to qualify ourselves. It's because of what He's already accomplished. So if you're here tonight to make God love you, that's not how this works.
He's already accomplished it for us. So we do these things because, He says, these are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. We do these things because we enjoy the shadow, because it points us to Jesus. We enjoy the shadow because it outlines Jesus, but the shadow is a means to point us to Jesus. It's not Jesus. It's not the goal.
Religion isn't the goal. Legalism isn't the goal. Adhering to a certain strict set of rules isn't the goal. It's to point us to Jesus. And we get off on this in our thinking. I know my grandparents were, a pastor and wife and my dad, whenever he was sick, they would come home from church, if he was sick and didn't go to church on a Sunday night or something, they would come home and touch the back of the television to see if it was hot.
Because if he was too sick to hang out with the church, he was too sick to watch television, which seems like odd logic. Because you know those people aren't real. Like I can't get them sick through the screen. They're not actually there. Like I think I can watch TV while I'm sick. But that's what they would do.
Because the point was, your adherence to following God in this religious way, but that's not the point. The point is growing closer to Jesus, finding Jesus and realizing that he's already accomplished everything for us. Another way this shows up in the church is Christian karma, which is when things are going well, I just assume I must be doing things right. God must like me because I'm behaving well. And when things aren't going well, I just assume that God must be mad at me. I've got to figure out what I've done wrong.
Jesus. Y'all know everybody likes Jesus, right? That's a thing. Like not many people are like, man, if I met Jesus, I bet we'd fight. Like most people think that Jesus is probably an okay guy. All right?
Jesus was God and he was perfect. Jesus died to cancel the record of our debt that we owed. That's not karma. That's grace. So our walk with God isn't based off of our actions and our effort and our merit.
It's based off of Jesus. So when things are going poorly, it just means things are going poorly. You get to talk to God about it, who's good and who in the cross has already shown you that he's good and that he's for your good. And when things are going great, you get to praise Jesus for it, who's good. But it's not based off of you.
So we're not judged based off of legalism. We enjoy the shadow. We enjoy the things that God's given us that point to him, but we don't base our worth and our value and our salvation off of it. Let no one disqualify you assisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows with a growth that is from God. We aren't judged by spiritualism. So some of us think that Christianity is about having intense spiritual experiences, that we've got to have these experiences, these moments that we're just swept away or it's not real or we're not actually in.
But that's not how that works because it's not based off of you and your experiences. It's based off of what Jesus has already accomplished. And so what Paul's saying is that there are people that get swept up in worship of angels, which I didn't know this was a thing. I was talking to Jordan about it. He's from Liberty University, and he said that there's a whole section of Christians now that have gotten into very experiential worship, which there's nothing wrong with that. But then they've started talking about like glory clouds and finding angel feathers, and it's like, nope, that's gotten weird.
And biblically angels fly, but there's only one place that we're ever told anybody had feathers, so I'm not even sure that's a thing. Usually they just show up looking like really scary men. The wife of Samson's mama told her husband there's a really awesome man outside, which I'm sure made him feel great. He's like, awesome man, I'll show you an awesome man. Good gosh, you're gracious. So we get caught up in all of this thing, and we'll overly spiritualize things.
And this isn't the case in all churches, but in some areas in the holiness church and in Pentecostalism, they're taught that in order to show that you are truly a believer, you have to speak in tongues. That's not true. That's not in here. Speaking in tongues is, it's a gift given by God, but it's not to show, you don't have to have this experience to prove that you've been rescued. You don't have to have this spiritual moment to prove that Jesus has accomplished this on your behalf. So for us, we want to have spiritual experiences.
We want to speak in tongues. The Bible says not to forbid the speaking in tongues, and so that's what Baptists have done. They forbid it, and it's like, okay, explain to me Romans 14, where it clearly says, don't do that. Let me show you, let's get into Greek syntax. I'm pretty sure it means don't do that. And we want that to happen, but in a way that points to Jesus.
He says that they're not holding fast to the head. And so we have spiritual experiences, yes, and the Holy Spirit moves, yes, but he points to Jesus. Revelation says that the spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. And so if you want to know if you're in a spirit-filled church, you're talking about Jesus, you're praying Jesus, you're praising Jesus, everybody's pointing to Jesus. That's what the Holy Spirit is about. It's pointing to Jesus, it's making much of Jesus, it's showing us that salvation is in Jesus, it's convicting us of sin, and drawing us close to Jesus.
A way that we do this, overly spiritualized things, is we throw around the phrase, God told me a lot, and we use it like a trump card. So you'll be talking to somebody, and be like, hey man, I really don't think that this relationship you're in is really healthy, there's some obvious signs of some sin areas, and some things y'all need to be working on, it's like, well, God told me we're supposed to be together. It's like, okay, I don't know if that's true, maybe, after you repent, and start lining up with the other things that he said clearly and wrote down. So, we'll say things like, I feel more spiritual when I'm not, I don't feel like I have to read the Bible much, I feel more spiritual when I'm not reading the Bible, I don't feel like I have to be around the church much, be around church family, I just, I get really spiritual in the woods, and it's like, okay, the Holy Spirit's gonna point you to the head, who's Jesus, who's revealed to us clearly in scripture, and the head, is going to grow the body.
It says the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God, as we hold fast to the head. So we don't overly spiritualize things, we won't have spiritual experiences, and so some of us in this room, you want to have that, that's great, but let me tell you something, let me just pastor you a little bit, if you've never had intense spiritual experiences, it doesn't mean you're not a Christian. It doesn't. It's faith in Jesus, and what he's accomplished, and not what your life looks like, and the experiences you've had. It's faith in Jesus, and what he's already done.
We're not judged by spiritualism. Last one he points out, knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with the growth that is from God. If with Christ you dived to the elemental spirits of the world, why as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations? Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. Referring to things that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion, and asceticism, and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
So what Paul's saying is, yeah, we're Christians, and we deny the flesh, which means that we deny ourselves, pick up the cross, and follow Jesus, which, whatever he calls us to, we follow him in. But that doesn't mean we're ascetics, is that how that's said? Asceticism, which is just, you don't indulge any area of the flesh, which means you don't, anything that seems enjoyable, you just don't do. So it's like, your clothes should be uncomfortable, and you should eat gross food. And it's like, well, what does that do? C.S.
Lewis, who's a theologian, he said, yes, deny yourself, but don't pour out the port, and get rid of the cigars. Like, he's like, no, we still get to enjoy things in life, but as they point us to Jesus, and so we don't make it about, what we're partaking in. Like, I can eat a really good steak, but the enjoyment doesn't end on the steak, it points me to the God who invented flavor, and cows, and flavorful cows. And so we're not judged by moralism. We're not judged by our adherence to a set of rules. Here's the thing, with all of these, we love rules.
We do. Everyone thinks they don't. There's a few people that probably know you do. Everybody loves rules. Because if I, like, if I invited you to my house and said, we're going to play a game, first question, okay, how you play, like, what are the rules? And I said, there are no rules, and then I pushed you and said, I win, like, you wouldn't play that game.
If I, like, kicked your shin and yelled Yahtzee, like, we wouldn't play the game, because you're like, no, there's no rules, this is stupid. And so, our whole life is based on rules. Like, the way you woke up this morning, you woke up at a set time, based on a general set of what's acceptable in our society. When you drove down the road, you followed road signs, you dressed appropriately for generally what's acceptable in our society, because our whole life is guided by rules. And when we approach Christianity, we want something that tells us whether we're in or out. We want something that we can measure ourselves by and say, no, I know I'm in, I know I'm here, because I've done this and this, and I don't do these things.
Because I act this way, or I participate in this, and not those things. It's not about that. It's made without hands. It's not your calloused hands that accomplish your salvation. It's Jesus' scarred hands that accomplish it. It's not your hard work, your effort, your religion, your morals, any of it.
Does God love morality? Yeah. Does He want us to repent of sin? Yes. Does He want us to gather as a church family? Yes.
Does He want us to enjoy the shadow that points to the substance? Yes. Does He want us to have spiritual experiences? Yes. Does the Holy Spirit lead us to prophesy, and to speak in tongues, and to move, and change people, and lead us to repentance, and joy in life, and grow us in the body? Yes.
But none of that gets us in. Jesus does. None of that pays our debt. Jesus does. No amount of adherence to rules, and regulations, and experiences brings us in. Jesus does.
And so when it comes to how do we know what's coming in? Is it helpful? Is it good? Is what I'm reading helpful and good? Is what I'm being taught helpful and good? We hold it up to, does it make much of Jesus?
Or is it telling me that I have to accomplish something to bring myself in? Is it pointing me to Jesus, or is it saying that my worth and value comes from my hard work, my effort, my experiences, my life? And so when it comes to our discernment radar, when it comes to how do we vet, how do we know, there's two really helpful questions. Who's the hero? And what's the goal? Who's the hero, and what's the goal?
Because in this story, Jesus is the hero. He's the one who pays the debt. That old school, I'll pay the rent thing, and then you put the bow on your head, and you say, oh, my hero, you know what I'm talking about? Anybody know what I'm talking about? No? Nobody knows what I'm talking about?
I think that's an old SNL from like the 60s. My mom loved it. But anyway, I should have known better than to bring that up. At the end, the guy pays the rent, or he pays the debt, and then the girl says, oh, my hero. And the question is, who's the hero? Who are you pointing me to?
Who's bringing salvation about? Me, or Jesus? Is it my hard work, my effort, my morality, or is it Jesus? And what's the goal? What am I getting out of this? A good marriage, or Jesus?
Is it I'm getting a good life out of it? Is my goal financial success, or is it Jesus? We love to take the American dream to Jesus, and have him rubber stamp it, and he's not into that. The enemy has been disarmed, and that's really good news for us. And so for those of us in this room who feel like Christianity, Christian or non-Christian, you feel like Christianity is about your morality, your effort, your work, your goodness, your value, I'm here to tell you that you have debt that's paid by Jesus, and you have value that's given to you by Jesus, not by you. It's not made by your hands, it's made by his.
And that's really good news, because none of us were actually going to get that accomplished. Jesus is the hero, and Jesus is the goal, and we walk in community pointing each other to Jesus, because he's where life and joy and hope and wisdom are found. Band's going to come back up, we're going to sing, and we're going to make much of Jesus. We're going to praise Jesus, that he has rescued and redeemed us, that he's paid a debt we couldn't pay. And if you're in this room, and you haven't placed your faith in Jesus, I'm here to tell you that you get to, that he pays our debt, not on your own merit, but on his.
You don't have to clean yourself up, he accomplishes that. You don't have to make yourself good, he accomplishes that. And we're not inviting you into religion. We're not inviting you into, come behave like us. We're inviting you to come follow Jesus as we repent, and learn what it looks like to be more like him, and continue to have the gospel change how we live, and how we think, and how we feel. I'm going to pray.
We're going to praise Jesus. God, we thank you. Thank you for your grace. We thank you for your love. We thank you that you did disarm the enemy on our behalf, and that we are made new and right because of you. We thank you that you are the hero, and that you are supreme, you are what we, you are our prize.
Help us to see that, help us to walk that out in community. Thank you that you paid our debt. Pray for those people in this room right now, God, that are still trying to pay their own debt. Pray that you, through your grace, show them they can stop. Show them the futility of paying off debt, and show them that you, when you died, you died for them. That in faith, you can pay their debt and give them life.
We love you, we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.
Discernment Radar Wk. 1
Colossians 2:1-7
Transcript
Okay, so we're in chapter 2. Here's the thing. Our culture is confused when it comes to a lot of stuff. Like, we're all over the place. I think some of it has to do with we have the internet now, and so we have all this access to information. I saw a thing that said, if you met somebody from 100 years ago, the most difficult thing to explain to them would be that you have a device in your pocket that gives you access to all the information in the world, and you use it to watch videos of cats and to get into arguments with strangers.
So, like, that's what we have access to. We got a phone book was sent to our house the other day, and my wife was like, do you want this? And I was like, no, I know where the internet is. Like, I can get there, so I don't need a phone book. But the truth is, we've got a lot of information, and not a really good way to sort it.
We have a lot of information. We have access to studies. We have access to what scientists are learning. We have access to what great minds in the world think, but we don't have a really good way to filter it. And so I even got to just thinking about simple things. I remember when I was growing up, milk was, like, super good for you.
And then for a while it was like, well, we're not so sure it's good for you. Like, it doesn't help your bones as much as we thought, and it might be the reason you're fat. Like, there was just like, so now you can have skim milk, which is basically white water. It's just lying to you. It's not actually milk. And so, like, there was, and then it came back, and it was like, no, milk's good.
And they had the big advertising. And so I was just, so I just got on Google and started typing in why blank is, and then Google fills it in for you. So I did milk first. Why milk is, and immediately my options are bad for you, because Google fills in related searches. So why milk is bad for you, why milk is good for you, why milk isn't good for you, which is the same as the one above it.
It's just trickier. Why milk is white and why milk is bad for cats. Those are the things you can search when it comes to milk. So I could get on Google, and I could stand up here and give you reasons why milk is bad or why milk is good just as easily. So I started thinking, okay, if milk has this, what else do we have that's pretty baseline stuff that Google's going to help me either fight for or fight against.
The next one is water. Why water is important. Why water is good for you. Why water is so important. Why water is bad for you. Why water is important for life.
At least bad for you is further down the line than on milk. But there's probably some sort of a study that proves that water is bad for you that scientists did. Just for the record, water is not bad for you, unless we're in one of the boil water things that Columbia does constantly, because we can't apparently not need to boil our water on a regular basis. So water, I did eating. So eating, pretty baseline thing.
Why eating is important. Why eating is good. Why eating is important for weight loss. I need to check that one later. Why eating is bad for you. Here to tell you, there's two things you need to stay away from.
It's water and eating. The internet says they're bad for you. I did sleeping, because I thought if people had a problem with eating, why sleeping is good, important to your health, healthy, so important, why sleeping is awesome. The internet agrees. Nobody's making an argument against sleeping. Sleeping is great.
It just got better. As you went, ends in awesome. Nobody's like why sleeping is bad for you. The internet would get rid of them. That person would be wrong. So we have people willing to argue that you shouldn't eat, but nobody's against sleeping.
Then I started doing some things that are really important to me. Bacon. Why bacon is bad for you. Why bacon is healthy. Why bacon is amazing. Why bacon is called bacon.
Why bacon is the best food ever. Which really doesn't even need to be on the internet. If you've had bacon, you know why it's the best food ever. And then I checked another one that really means a lot to me. It's fried chicken. Why fried chicken is bad.
Bad for you. Unhealthy, good for you. But right there in the middle, why fried chicken is racist. And I'll tell you, that made me feel so good about fried chicken. Because you know how people would be like, meat is murder and stuff. This fried chicken is racist.
I'm glad we killed it. People would be like, you shouldn't eat so many chickens. What about a chicken? I'd be like, you want this racist chicken to live? This chicken hated Filipinos. And I'm glad that it died.
It deserved it. Now pass me the hot sauce. So just so you know, fried chicken deserves to die. It's racist. All of us should eat fried chicken and get rid of racism. Because those racist fried chickens.
I guess if you bake it, it's not racist. They only take the racist ones and fry them, I guess. I don't know how that works. But here's the thing. We have access to an inordinate amount of information. We have access to studies and all of this kind of stuff.
And people would back these things up with facts and reasons why. And you'll hear all the time, well, studies have shown or doctors say. And we've got all of this coming in. And we don't have a really good way to sort it out. We have a constant flow of information. But we don't have a good way of filtering what's good and what's bad and what's healthy and what's right.
And I'm not even just talking about, those are just fun examples. I'm not talking about when it just comes to food. But in more important life issues, we are constantly bombarded with ways to think, ways to feel. And we just don't have a good framework in America for how we handle that. How we process what's good and healthy, right, wrong, or otherwise. And so we're in the sixth week of Colossians.
And Paul is writing this book to the Colossian church. And a lot of times Paul would write a letter to a church and he'd have a specific thing that he was mad about. Like that he was angry about or that he was fighting against. In 1 and 2 Corinthians, he's answering specific questions. There are even times where you can tell he's like quoting them in response. Like you said this, let me respond to that.
In the book of Galatians, he's arguing against people that said you needed to be good Jewish people in order to be good Christians. And so Paul doesn't beat around the bush. He starts off with like, hey, my name's Paul. What the heck is wrong with y'all? And like he says some really mean things in the book of Galatians. That's why it's one of my favorite books.
He just goes after them when it comes to adding religion to Jesus. And so in the book of Colossians, he doesn't really do that. He talks about, you can see that he's talking about different concepts. And so it seems as if more he's combating just culture around them and culture inside the church that was slowly pulling them away from Jesus. And so it wasn't a big thing. It wasn't this one specific area, but it was just this constant onslaught.
And so it actually is helpful for us because we're in the same situation. I saw a statistic that said, because studies have shown, that the average American is going to see 2,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day. 2,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day. So thousands of times a day, we're going to be told, you need this to be happy. You need this to be complete. You need this to have fun.
You need seven razors to shave your face and not just four. Loser. Like we're going to be told over and over again that we need something else to make us happy, to make us complete, to fulfill us. I saw a statistic that said the average American watches 34 hours of television a week. Now in some places, that's a full-time job.
Definitely a part-time job. 34 hours a week. That's average. So some people in this room probably watch a little more, some people a little less. But here's the thing.
Each of us for hours a week are having worldview pumped into our brain. How we should think about romance. How we should think about finances. How we should look at success. How we should know what masculinity and femininity is. Like what makes a man a man and what's to be honored in females.
Like we're having that pumped into our brains. And how do we sort out what's helpful, what's right, what's good, and what's not. So that's what Paul is going to point them to. And so what we're working to do for the next two times that we get together is to build a discernment radar. We just want to have something. Discernment just means to make a good decision, to judge rightly.
And so Paul's giving them, he's equipping them in chapter two to discern well, to judge rightly. And so radar just means something that, you know, the little, when you're watching a movie and the little thing's spinning around and they're like watching for an enemy aircraft or something and it's just the little green thing. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, radar, yeah. And then it goes, boop, boop. You know, they can see it or whatever.
That's what we're talking about. So we're talking about we all have some sort of a system to gauge what's coming in and whether it's healthy, good, or right. And so some people in this room, we all have one. You all have some way that you gauge what's coming in. Some of us, super intense, like we're way over here. We believe like stuff our grandmother said and maybe some things Billy Graham said.
And if you're the president of the United States, but it depends on which team you're on. We'll listen to you a little bit. Like that's it. Like we have like a very tight amount of who we'll listen to. And then some people more in the middle. Well, we have some gauge for how we what we believe and what we won't believe.
And then some people just pretty much we don't have a system at all. If it just sounds good. It's like, cool, that's true. And so here's the thing. We've gotten to where we're so used to having information pumped in that we've stopped sorting it. We've stopped thinking through what's good and right.
And the truth is, it's the same way that water can run over a rock and and bore out a channel. And it's happened slowly and it happens over time. But eventually, a river running over rock will dig its own hole. And for some of us, that's what culture is doing to us. We have constant cultural onslaught of information and ways that we should believe. And we don't notice it.
But it's happening slowly and slowly and slowly to where we're drifting and how we think and what we believe. And so that's what we're going to be looking at in Colossians. We'll be in chapter two. And so I'm going to go ahead and start reading. Verse one. For I want you to know.
This is Paul writing to the church. For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea. And for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the fullness of assurance and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. And so he says, I want you to know how much I struggle for you, how much I'm fighting for this, that you may be encouraged being knit together in love.
So he says that y'all would be together. Being knit together in love to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom, in Jesus, are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible argument. So he says, I want you to be knit together so that you can grow in Christ. And I'm telling you this so people won't delude you, trick you with things that sound smart. That's what he's talking about.
So here's the thing. Paul's going to say that what our discernment radar is, and that's all we're talking about tonight is what it is. The next time we get together, we'll talk specifically about how it functions and how we kind of catch things. But what he's talking about tonight is what it is. And he says this. It's submission to Jesus in the context of community.
So we hold things up to Jesus in the context of community, that we were knit together so that we can grow in the fullness of understanding of Christ. You can go ahead and skip to the Colossians slide. Don't show the one with the other. Yeah, there you go. We'll get to the other one later. There you go.
Yeah. That we would be together and we would submit things to Christ. So here's what happens. We constantly have a lot of viewpoints pumped into our brains. And so I think sometimes as Christians, we like run into the bookstore and we run over to the Christian living section and we feel like we're at home base or something like safe. That sign says Christian.
Or we flip it through the channels and we cut it to like, oh, TV preacher, we're good. He's going to talk about good Bible things. That's not actually always the case. We have to submit everything to Jesus. We have to submit everything to Christ. It's about him.
And so what's the criteria for how we do this? Like what's the criteria for even with Christian things? Like they have cool hair. Is that like what we're shooting for? They have a TV show. So obviously, I know what they're talking about.
That they pastor something. I wish that was true. I wish that if someone was pastoring a church, that meant that they were pointing people to Jesus. But that's not always true. What is it? They seem trustworthy.
Like they wrote a book. They have a doctor in front of their name or a PhD after it. See, a lot of times we have information being sold to us, given to us, we're reading books about, and it actually isn't pointing us to Jesus. And so what Paul says is it's got to be in submission to Christ. It's got to point us to Jesus. It's got to be about him.
So you heard about blood moons? Anybody? Not in a long, some people have heard about blood moons. People, a guy wrote a book about blood moons, because there's going to be blood moons this year, which a blood moon is a way that Jewish people describe a certain type of lunar eclipse, I think, or solar eclipse, but I think it's a lunar eclipse. And so they're freaking out because there are blood moons, which is a type of lunar eclipse, landing on major Jewish holidays. There's a big book written about it.
And it's a Christian book about how we as Christians should be thinking about, worried about blood moons and what they mean for us. Okay, first of all, it's not a super big deal that blood moons land on Jewish holidays, because Jewish holidays follow a lunar calendar. So if there's ever going to be a blood moon, it's going to be on a Jewish holiday, just for the record. So that's how that works. Secondly, the Bible mentions a few things about prophetic, the moon will turn to blood, but it does not camp out there, and it's not a major thing, and it's not super described. And so for us to run off into some sideline small issue that doesn't point us to Jesus is actually not appropriate.
Because Paul says, the understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So if we have any Christian teacher standing up and pointing us to some hidden treasure, some hidden mystery, and it's not in Jesus, they're actually pointing us in the wrong direction. And so I've actually gotten into conversations with people before, Christians who are telling me, oh, but these blood moons. Somebody said, but Jewish scholars say, and I let them just talk for a while, and then I said, yeah, Jewish scholars miss Jesus when they're studying the Old Testament.
And the Old Testament's about Jesus, so I'm glad they found this blood moon stuff, but I'm not sure they're hitting on much when it comes to how we're supposed to grow and know and what we understand to be true. Harold Camping, anybody know who this cat is? He had a radio program. He did Bible math. Numerology, I think is what they call it. It's where you take random Numbers in the Bible, and then you do math, which sounds horrible.
And then he figured out when Jesus was coming back, when the world was going to end, I think is how he did it. And so there was a bunch of, like, billboards. This was a big thing up in Lynchburg, where I was at the time, but, like, it was a thing. And he said the world was going to end at 6 p.m. Which time zone, bro? Like, how's that going to work?
Is it Eastern Standard Time? And some people asked him, because he said that, and people asked him, and he was like, at 6 p.m., wherever you are. Which means that the world's going to end until it hits a time zone and wait. No, no, no, wait for it. Wait for it. There we go.
It doesn't make any sense. And what he's saying is he's found secrets, he's found mysteries, he's found knowledge, he's found understanding, and it's not in Jesus, it's in something else. And so what Paul's going to say is that if anybody comes with mystery, secret, knowledge, wisdom, and they're pointing you to something other than Jesus, it's not right. Now, those examples are a little bit easier, although they are big mainstream Christian things. But how do we do this in a very simple day-to-day basis?
How do we know if the information that our aunt or our best friend just told us over coffee points us to Jesus or doesn't? How do we have a functioning radar for when people are talking to us that we grow in our knowledge of the gospel, that we grow in following Jesus or something else? So I'll give you a few examples. You're a dude, and you're wanting to get married. You have a desire to meet a lady and to get married. And so you're talking to someone about this, and it's like your aunt, and she's super nice and has really cool blue hair, and so she's talking to you about how to meet a lady.
She's Christian, you know, in church, and her advice to you is make yourself a good gift, that God gives good gifts, and so you need to make yourself a good gift. So you need to get your finances in order. You need to have a job. You need to, you know, if you're a little bit overweight, like you need to get healthy. Like her advice is make yourself a good gift, and then God will give you as a good gift to someone else. And that's the advice.
Okay. That's actually not bad advice, but does that point us to Jesus? Is that what the gospel says? That we work on ourselves, that we make ourselves good, and then he owes us? Is that the gospel? That you do good religious things, and then God owes you something?
No. It's that we're completely messed up, that we don't deserve anything, and that in his grace he grants us things. That in his grace he gives us things. So yes, good advice. Take a shower. Yes, use shampoo.
Get a job. Sure. Quit eating things that end in Edo. Absolutely. But God doesn't owe you anything on the back end of that.
You don't earn a spouse from God that way. That's not how that works, and that actually doesn't point you to Jesus. It points you to legalism. It points you to moralism. It points you to hard work, and then he owes you something. And so nice advice, but wisdom, knowledge, mystery wasn't found in it because it didn't point you to Jesus.
Okay. You're a, um, you're female, and you've gone from guy to guy. She's gone from guy to guy, and she's constantly just needs a man to be in relationship with, to have a relationship with, to know that she's okay. She has to have a man, and so this has been a problem. It's kind of derailed some things in her life, and so she's sitting with a counselor, and the counselor tells her, here's what you need. You need to get a job.
You need to be successful. You need to be able to stand on your own two feet, and then you won't need a man. You'll be your own person. That's the counsel that's been given. Okay. Is that good advice?
Does that point us to Jesus, or does that point us to something else? Where, where are we trying to grow? Do we, as we take in advice, as people say these things to us, we have to submit it and see, how does this fit with the gospel? How does this fit with what we know about Jesus? Okay. The truth is, she does need a man, and his name is Jesus.
She's not complete by herself. She doesn't need to be self-sufficient. Getting a job is fine, if she needs to be able to operate on her own, but the goal isn't to be a successful, self-made woman, to be empowered. She actually needs to find rest, and hope, and life, and be a complete person because of Jesus. And then, yeah. Have a man, don't have a man.
Be successful in a job. Don't be successful in a job. But the goal isn't to find something outside of herself on earth to make herself complete, but to find Jesus, to rest in him, to find fulfillment and satisfaction in him, so that what she's looking for in a man, she finds in Jesus. So, yeah. Get a job. Don't have to have a man.
Sure. But realize that hope and life is found in Jesus. All right. Here's one. I've seen this a good bit. Hanging out with some people, Christian people.
Somebody's, like, super depressed. Just, maybe not even depressed isn't the word, but, like, just feels, unworthy feels, like there's no, there's no way God loves me. They have this guilt. And so what I've seen people do is they'll sit around them and start telling them why they're special, why they're good, why they're loved. Here's all the great things about you. And so it could be a spouse, sit down and say, here's why you're wonderful.
Here's why you're good. Here's why you should feel good about yourself. Or it could be a group of guys in, like, a community group, and one of them is just like, man, I just feel, every time I mess up, I mess up so much, and I just don't feel like God could love me. And everybody says, no, you're doing great. You're trying really hard, and you did that nice thing for that kid two months ago. Remember?
Remember that? You pumped up his basketball. Like, God wrote that down, and he loves you. And, like, they do this, like, you should feel good about yourself. And the truth is, that's encouraging. That's nice to say to someone.
But if my standing before God is based off of how I feel about myself and how good I feel like I'm being at the moment, you're not pointing me to Jesus. You're pointing me to me. And as soon as I stop feeling good about myself, I bottom out again because my rest and my hope is in something other than Jesus. And so what they ought to say is, hey, man, be encouraged for these things. This is where Jesus is at work in you. And know this.
You don't have to feel good about yourself. Jesus loves you regardless. And you don't have to have it together. Jesus died for you because you don't and because you never will. And then we get to point to Jesus and we get to grow in the gospel and we get to find riches of knowledge and wisdom and mystery because we submit everything to Jesus. And so we have to have a functioning radar for how we do that so that when someone says something to us, we can gauge, is this gospel?
Does this help me grow closer to Jesus? Are you pointing me to Jesus or is this something else? Are you pointing me to me? Are you pointing me to something outside of me? Do I need a job or a man? Like, what are you pointing me to?
And just for the record, don't point me to a man. I'm not going to take the bait. We have to have something, some way that we functionally walk that out. And so Paul says this. He says he's praying that their hearts would be knit together in love, their hearts be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the fullness of assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this, that no one may delude you with plausible argument.
He says, I want you to be together and I want you to know that everything's found in Jesus. And I'm telling you that so that you won't be led astray by plausible arguments. He doesn't say dumb things. He says stuff that sounds smart. Plausible argument. Yeah, actually sounds pretty good.
That's what leads us astray. Not when someone tells us something blatantly stupid. But when someone says something that sounds pretty good. So he says, I want you to be together. And so that's our discernment radar. Submission to Jesus in the context of community.
That we actually have people around us that we're knit together in love. So that we can reach the fullness, the full assurance of the gospel and that we won't be led astray. So really practically, we're going to land on a few things that we just need to know. Here's what we do. Here's how this happens. Oh, sorry.
I already went to my last page and then I hid it for myself. Anyway, here's practically how this happens. Somebody tells you something, you hear something, you read something, you don't just accept it, you think. Does this line up with the gospel? Does this line up with Jesus? And then when you've thought about it, you take it to a team, you've got a team, and you say, hey, other believers who know me, this is what I think this is saying.
Is this smart? This is what my aunt told me. Didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, although I did take a shower. Like, is this, is this, does this line up with the gospel? And then your teammate gets to say, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?
Like, this doesn't really line up. And this passage says this, and we get a team. We get to do this in community. So practically, just a few things this means for us. It has to be Bible, not just books. We have to have Bible, not just books.
What I mean by that is this, we have to know what this says about Jesus. We can't just read what other people say this says about Jesus. So in college, I used to work out a good bit. I worked out a good bit in high school, playing football, and different times I was trying to put on weight. And I would take supplements like protein powder and creatine and, you know, Explode, some different supplements. And so there's stores at the mall that sell just straight up supplements.
And so, they are to help you put on weight or bulk or whatever. They tell you they do all kinds of things. Some of them, I think, are more helpful than others. But they're supplements to you exercising, to you lifting weights, working out. They're supplements. If somebody asked me, hey man, what kind of workout program are you on?
I was like, I eat creatine three times a day. Yeah, but what kind of workout program? I just told you the creatine plan. It's like, you know, you've got to lift weights and run. There's got to be, that supplements what you're doing. The truth is, books, commentaries, devotionals, they supplement us spending time with Jesus.
Now, here's the thing. One of the pushbacks a lot of times for reading the Bible is a couple of things. One is, I don't know where to start. Start in the book of John. Or if you're walking with us, start in the book of Colossians. Study it along with us.
Read it ahead of us and be studying in it. I don't know where to start. I don't know what Bible version to use. There's a bunch of them. We can have conversations about that. And some people will be like, well, the Bible's confusing.
Yes, sometimes it is. But here's the thing. The disciples who hung out with Jesus all the time were constantly confused by him. Because he'd be like, here's the gospel. It's like a tree. You plant that tree in your garden.
And he would talk and then he'd walk off and they'd be like, I don't know who he's talking about. What kind of tree did he say it was? Like, constantly confused. He would look at them and say just straight up, I'm going to die. They're going to deliver me over into the hands of men. They're going to kill me and three days later, I'm going to come back.
And then it would say that he left and it would be like, none of them knew what he meant, but they didn't ask him. So you know they were having conversations. No, no, John, you ask him. I ain't asking him. I asked him last time. See the look he gave me?
So, here's the thing. Study this. Catch 60% of it. And grow and grow and grow in your understanding of the Bible. You should rather be confused by Jesus than to understand completely the nonsense that someone else tells you. You should rather that happen.
We need to be Bible people. It has to be Bible, then books, then movies. All right. They made the TV show The Bible miniseries. Okay. Then, the show did well.
Then they wrote a book about the show. So they took the Bible and they made a show about it. And then the show did well, so they took the Bible show and wrote a book about it. Which is great, because now we have all our favorite Bible stories in book form, which we already had. And here's the thing. Some of us are, we grow, we learn by watching Bible shows and by reading the Bible stories, Bible show, miniseries, book thing, which it says, based off of the Bible miniseries.
And I wanted to say, that was based off of the Bible. We've got to read the Bible first. We've got to grow in that. And that way, when somebody tells us something, we have a framework for, uh, not, because I read this. And here's the thing. We say the Bible's confusing.
We get to do this in community. So we read the Bible and then we go talk to other people. I was reading this. I think this is what it's saying. Is that what it's saying? Is that what he means here?
The other thing is this, and you need to realize this as a Christian. For those of us in this room who've placed our faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit of God actually dwells in us, which we talked about. Paul says this is a profound mystery, that Christ is in us. The Holy Spirit authored Scripture. So he knows what it means and can teach us.
So there are times, this happens probably about once a week. I'll be reading Scripture and I'll read something and I'll just be like, I don't fully know what that, what you're trying to say, like what I'm supposed to take from that, what that's supposed to mean. It just seems like it's a story or just, and so I'll pray, God, if you want me to understand this, tell me. He wrote it. It'd be like if you had the author of the book with you and you could say, what was this whole thing about? Chapter three was weird.
Like you get to do that and so I just ask, tell me. And then I'll read it again and if I still don't get it, I just assume he didn't want me to know and I move on. I don't let it stress me out. I understand enough of the Bible to stress me out. Like I understand enough of it to know where I ought to be doing and how I ought to be walking and the things that I don't get, I just assume he'll teach me later. We get to do that.
So we get to be Bible first so that we get to know Jesus, so that we know if things submit to him. It has to be community, not just crowd. So Bible, not just books, community, not just the crowd. What I mean by that is don't take, oh yeah, I talked to other Christians because I read a review online. You actually have to, if we're going to process what's coming in and what we're being taught and what we're trying to believe and how we're trying to function, we actually have to have people around us. He says be knit together.
It should almost be awkward if we're doing things on our own because we're so used to being in community. It has to be people that are actually around you, that actually know how you walk in life because the truth is this. The people in my community group know that approval isn't a big thing for me. I don't super struggle with approval. It's more success. I don't care if you like me, I just want you to think I'm awesome.
That's a thing for me. And so I talk to my community group about this. And so when I have a life decision coming in, something I've got to think through, I get to bring them in on it and they already know me so they can actually give me helpful advice. They can see where I'm chasing after wrong things. They can say, well this isn't really something that you're pursuing for wrong reasons because we know you, we've been around you. And you want actual community because you need people to say hard things to you sometimes.
You need people that care enough about you to say real stuff and that know enough about you to be able to do that accurately. So it's got to be community. It's got to be actual people around. Here's the difference between me watching somebody I don't know about to do something stupid and me watching someone I do know about to do something stupid. Someone I don't know. That fool's about to hurt himself.
And then you just watch. You just, I think this is going to be really bad. So I'm watching this. Like this is what I'm doing at the party now. I'm going to watch this guy hurt himself. And then if I know them, I'd be like, hey fool, you about to hurt yourself.
And then you still get to watch. And that honestly is some of the difference between community and just people that are around. You need people around you enough to call you out, to talk to you, to say real things with you and to know you well enough to be able to do that accurately. You need people around you. The thing about blind spots is that you can't see them. And so if you're processing things and there's a giant blind spot in your life and you just don't realize it, you may make some poor decisions or you may not line things up well.
But if you've got people around you, just say, hey, you don't realize this about yourself, but I see this pattern and actually be helpful. And it makes life way easier and way better. That's what Paul says he struggles for. He says, this I'm struggling for, that you'd be knit together in love. I want you to be community. I want you to actually care about each other.
Okay. We've got to study the Bible. We've got to know the Bible. It's got to be Bible, then other things. And then we can actually decide whether those other things are helpful. And it's got to be community, not just a crowd of people, not just people around that we every once in a while sit down and say, hey, here's the situation.
I'm going to give you the gist of it. Is this smart? Because all you did was give them the stuff you're seeing. So of course they'll agree with you most often. But if you've got people around you who say, actually, yeah, but don't you know this is how you're pursuing this and this is what's going on with you?
It's actually more helpful. So it's got to be community, actually people around. We get to have faith. So don't freak out. We get to have faith. I've gotten to go out of the country a couple of times.
Not a lot, and I hope to do it some more, but it's always funny to me when you're leaving the country and coming back into the country because there's customs. And customs is like when you come in or out of the country as a foreign person or coming back into the country and they have to check your passport and they ask you questions and stuff. And it takes a super long time to walk through. But like I've been in four and you walk up and they're like, are you checking anything into the country that you should not bring with you? Like do you have anything that is illegal? They just ask you.
And you're like, nope. No ma'am, I am not. And then she looks at you and she's like, checks out. And like they don't check at all. Like they don't look at your bags. They just ask you.
And you're like, okay. Like I could have smuggled all kinds of things in here. And so some of us, that's been our radar. Is this bad for me? No. Seems legit.
Like that's how, that's our customs process. This person said it with their mouth so it's got to be true. Read it on the internet. Like that commercial with that guy. It's like everything on the internet is true and he shows up and she's like, he's French. And he's like, oh yeah, bonjour.
Like that. Like that's our, that's our process. We just believe it because we read it or because someone said it. And then, all right, so, but don't, don't freak out. We get to have faith and so sometimes you're somewhere and they've got like the drug dogs. So it's like an armed officer.
Got one on the side. Maybe he's holding one. He's got a, an intense looking dog. Like a scary, pointy ear. No nonsense. Like you don't see that dog and think, I need to pat his head.
Like, you know, that dog's got a job to do. He means business. He's got this look that like scares children and stuff like that. Like he's, he's in the zone and, and they're looking for drugs and it's a serious thing. What I am not saying, when we build a discernment radar, I am not telling you to go live in the woods and be afraid of everything or to start a website where you just look for stuff to argue with. That's not, that's not what we're talking about.
Fruit beagles. That's what we want. When you're coming back into the country, they have fruit beagles, which is a beagle, still an officer, walking around with a dog that is smelling for fruit because it's actually not good for us to go to another country and bring fruit back to the U.S. because it can have bugs that we're not ready for. And it can actually, like, you could bring an apple back and it could decimate crops here. And so, that's what we want. We want something that, we're not always having to be super intense, we're not always having to start pick fights with people, but we have some process for how we bring things in, how we know to check whether or not something's good.
We have the ability to submit it to Jesus in the context of community. I always like it when the fruit beagle comes by because I know he's being helpful. You do look at him and think, I can pet this dog if I wanted to. Like, he's still got a job to do but he's not crazy and I'm never worried because why would I have fruit? Now, if they bring a bacon beagle by, I might be in trouble but it's like, I never have fruit. We're okay.
Me and you, we're okay beagle. And so, we just, we want to have some process. So, you just need to be willing to know that we have to have a process and we get to have faith. Here's the thing, we're not going to always get this right. We're going to believe some stupid things. We're going to not believe some good things.
And we get to walk that out in the context of community and we get to constantly push towards finding hope and depth and wisdom and knowledge in Jesus. And here's how he lands this. This is what he says. We'll start in verse 5. For though I'm absent in body, yet I'm with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. Therefore, so therefore meaning all this stuff we just talked about, that you would be knit together, you'd have a community, you'd submit everything to Jesus.
Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. We get to rest. We get to have joy. We get to be in community and we get to talk about real stuff and we get to have joy. We get to abound in thanksgiving. We get to, therefore, as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith.
Here's the thing. All of us received Christ Jesus in the same way. We were messed up. We had fallen short. We were not going to fix our lives or get it together. And Jesus came and lived perfectly on our behalf and died for our mistakes, died for our rebellion, died for our errors, died for our inability to fix the situation.
And then he rose again three days later so that he could fix the problem for us. So that he could take care of our errors, so he could take care of our sin, our rebellion, our brokenness, and we place our faith in him. Not our good works, not our intelligence, our faith. That he was good on our behalf and that he gives us life. That he paid for our sins. He paid our penalty and he gives us life.
That's how we receive Christ. That's how we're rooted in him. That's how we're built up. Not in our ability to work really hard. Not in our ability to have a really good discernment radar and not do stupid things. That we get to follow him.
Yeah, we get to have that. We get to follow him in faith. That he's good and that he'll teach us and that he'll train us and that ultimately it's up to him, not up to us. And then we get to do this in community and we get to abound in thanksgiving. We get to have joy in relationship with each other as we try to follow Jesus and we try to point each other to Jesus. That's us.
That's what we get to do. That's our discernment radar. Submission to Jesus in the context of community. Band's going to come back up and we're going to sing. We're going to abound in thanksgiving. We're going to make much of Jesus.
And then we get together next time, not next week, but next time. We're going to talk about specifically things that we need to be on guard for. Specifically why we have a discernment radar. What it is we need to be looking for. What it is we need to be in defense of. But ultimately we get to rest in Jesus and our faith is in him not in anything else.
I'm going to pray and then we're going to sing. God, we thank you for your grace. We thank you that we get to be built up in our faith in you. That in you is found knowledge and wisdom and life. So we praise you and we thank you.
We ask, Lord, that we would submit things to you. That we would be willing to test what comes in. Know what's good and keep it. Know what's bad and get rid of it. We ask for you to lead us in this. Give us community.
Help us to grow closer to you. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Him We Proclaim
Colossians 1:24-29
Transcript
Wow, alright, that good. Goodness. Felt like I was at a rock concert there for a second. With all that shouting. Can we do something? We don't do this often and we don't do it for some reasons, but also don't want us to not do it for bad reasons.
Let me explain what I'm talking about because that's getting confusing. We don't always clap for or make a big deal of much of what we do on the human side of things when we get together, but there is an appropriate amount of that, an appropriate amount of appreciation for the people that put in and serve and work, and we actually get to praise Jesus in praising people. That's an appropriate thing to do, and so can we just for a second, can we just clap for everybody that just helped lead worship, and everybody that just... It is okay for us to appreciate that, and they put a lot of work into it, and are very...
They love Jesus, and they want to help us love Jesus, and they want to point to Jesus and everything, and that's not always found, especially among people that are talented in different ways, and so I just want to... We appreciate all of that, and we need to, and it's good for us to. We're in Colossians. It's our fifth week of walking through the book of Colossians, and so grab your Bibles. If you don't have a Bible, there should be some at the end of the row, and so if you need one, look at the people down the row from you, get them to pass one to you, or do like a weird shimmy thing where you crawl all the way down to the end of the row and grab one.
So we'll be in Colossians. It'll be... We'll be in chapter one. It's our fifth week in Colossians. So how...
How are we doing? We've been in Colossians for five weeks. Are we... Are we growing? Are we changing? Are we seeing Jesus for who He is?
Are we learning that we're a y'all, that we exist in community with one another? Are we putting knowledge into practice? And as we practice that knowledge, are we learning more things like how to do stuff, how not to do stuff? You know, are we? Are we doing that? Has it been good for us?
Are we growing? Are we learning? It is our fifth week, so we're at half to today. We'll be halfway through. And I know some of you may be looking at the book of Colossians and doing some maths. We've been five weeks in chapter one, and there's three chapters left.
And so some of y'all might be calling lie on us being halfway through. But the last three chapters are going to move a little more quickly. The first chapter was pretty dense. And so we'll actually spend two weeks in chapter two, two weeks in chapter three, and a week in chapter four. So the maths currently is working out.
We're in Colossians 1. I'm excited about what we're going to get to talk about tonight because it's foundational for how we are as a church. Kind of who we believe we are and how we operate. And so it's something that actually this passage went into part of how we operate and part of what we talk about all the time when we talk about being a gospel-centered community on mission. And so I'm excited to get to talk about this passage in the context of Colossians because it's affected our thought process and how we do what we do as a church family. So I'm going to pray, and then we're going to hop in looking at Colossians 1.
God, we thank you. We're excited to be able to gather as your people, to be church family. And so we just pray that we would make much of you and that you would teach us and lead us through your Holy Spirit to understand clearly your word as we walk through this section of Scripture. So we love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, Colossians 1, starting in verse 24.
This is the Apostle Paul. He's writing to the church at Colossae. Every time he says you, he's saying y'all. He's using the Greek word for y'all, which is a plural you. And so verse 24. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.
And in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body. That is the church. All right, we're going to stop. We're going to walk through this section. We have a problem sometimes when we come to Scripture. I think we get used to it.
Sometimes studying Scripture. We're going to get together on Sundays and we're going to open it up and we're going to study Scripture. We're going to read from the Bible. We read from the Bible on our own and we read from the Bible in our community groups. And I think sometimes we get used to the Bible. And so we don't always approach it in such a thoughtful way.
And so we'll read something in the Bible that honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And our response will be, hmm, okay. Like we just don't think about it. We're like, hmm, sounds good, Apostle Paul. Like it doesn't affect us and like we don't have to approach it thoughtfully. And so what Paul says here is I rejoice in my sufferings.
I rejoice. I rejoice. I'm excited. I'm pumped about. I have joy in my sufferings. And we'll read that and go, hmm, sounds good.
When we should read it and go, do what now? I mean, really, if he's rejoicing in suffering, we have one of two options when it comes to the Apostle Paul. If he rejoices in sufferings, either he's crazy or he knows something we don't know. It's possible it's both because a lot of times crazy people know things you don't know. But that's just because they're crazy.
So that really gets smooshed into option one. So really, either he's crazy or he knows something we don't know. And so when you read that, when you read that he rejoices in sufferings, don't go, hmm, sounds good. Let's look at that a little bit. And so what is he saying? How can he rejoice in suffering?
That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make sense to us. That's not how we operate. Now, for those of us who have been around the church for a while or been in a community group for a while or studied the Bible for a while, this concept may not be super new to us. We may understand that that's something that Christians ought to be able to do. But we're not good at it.
And we don't really do it. So even though the concept may not be new to us, we can't act like we understand it or completely have it down when it comes to actual suffering in our lives. And for those of us who've just started hanging around church stuff, just started being, maybe just became a Christian or are just learning, checking this whole Jesus thing out, that's a pretty ridiculous statement to rejoice in suffering. To actually, not bears. He doesn't say I bear suffering or I put up with or I find some sort of a purpose in. He says I rejoice in it.
Like I'm excited about it. And that doesn't make any sense. And so, especially when it comes to like Americans, we're told that the American dream is the pursuit of our happiness. If our goal, if the most important thing in life for me is my happiness, is self-fulfillment, suffering beats that every time. Every time. Suffering always beats half my happiness.
So when my happiness and suffering lace up their shoes and head to the court, suffering dunks on my happiness every time. That's how it works. My happiness never comes away with a W on that one because happiness and suffering, happiness loses. And so what Paul is saying when he says I rejoice in suffering is that obviously he's not banking on his own self-fulfillment and his own happiness. He's writing this from a jail cell and he says I'm excited about my suffering. So he's not banking on what we're banking on.
It's not based off of his own self-fulfillment and his own personal happiness. Now, what we're going to see as we go through this passage is that this is not the point of what Paul is talking about. His point here is not how to rejoice in suffering. That's not what he's telling us here. He's talking about something completely different. But him saying that he rejoices in suffering illustrates for us what he is going to be talking about.
It pointedly shows us and demonstrates for us that what he is going to be talking about is real and it affects every aspect of his life. So I just wanted to point that out because it's a little bit bizarre for us and we can't just brush past that. And what we're going to see as we walk through is that he's actually in saying that indicating the weight of what he's going to spend the rest of the time talking about. So what's his reason? If he can rejoice in suffering, he's got to have some sort of a reason. So he says it.
Now, I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. So it's for y'all's sake. For y'all's sake. Or when Anna and I lived in Virginia, they would say y'all's. Which is the plural, plural version of y'all. And so she worked at the bank and they'd mess up money stuff and somebody would look at her and be like, well, I think it's y'all's fault.
And Anna would be like, that's not a word. Although y'all's maybe not isn't either. If you ever have to text y'all's, it just looks ridiculous. But anyway, what he says is for y'all's sake, for plural, your church's sake. So he says, I rejoice in my suffering for y'all's sake.
And in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body. That is the church. Quick time out. That last sentence is confusing. What he is not saying is that he is completing the atonement for sin. So that's not what he's saying.
When he says the afflictions, filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. What he's not saying is that he somehow has to suffer to help continue to atone for sin. Or that we as Christians have to continue to suffer to atone for sin. That's not what he's saying. So Jesus, when he died on the cross, fully and completely forever paid for our sin.
Atonement was finished. When Jesus on the cross said, it is finished, he meant it. When he uses the word affliction, which is actually a different word than what is used when it talks about Jesus' suffering in the Greek. He's talking about the continuation of the effect of the cross on the world. That he is suffering. He's facing afflictions to continue to spread the gospel, to continue to move this forward.
And so what he's saying is he's taking part in affliction as a Christian, as part of the body of Christ, and for the sake of the church, the body of Christ. And so he's not saying he's continuing atonement. Is that clear? We don't need to get super bogged down here, but that's what he's saying. So what he says is it's for the sake of the church.
It's for the sake of those who would become believers, those who would place their faith in Jesus. So when he says for y'all's sake, he's talking about the church in Colossae. And so he's saying basically that he can suffer because of the mission to see more people meet Jesus. That he can suffer because the mission to see more people meet Jesus, to see the church grow is actually bigger than his own personal comfort, his own personal self-fulfillment. But what we'll see, and when it comes to mission, is that yes, the mission is bigger, but there has to be a reason for the mission.
And as he keeps going, we'll see that there is a reason for the mission. We just recently, in June 6, celebrated D-Day, the 70th anniversary of D-Day. And so there were some cool things that happened around that. There was a guy in Britain who was 89 years old who wanted to go to the Normandy celebrations. They were all the people that had stormed Normandy were going to go celebrate. And the people whose caretakers weren't able to kind of organize something for him to be able to go.
And so he just put on his best suit, pinned his medals to his suit, put on a raincoat, and dipped out. He was 89 years old, and he just left where he was because they weren't able to work it out. And he made it over to Normandy. They were looking for him later, and it was like, I went where I wanted to go. I'm a grown man. I do what I want.
I didn't need permission to come here the first time. I don't need permission to come here the second time. And so I thought that story was interesting. Whenever I think about the storming of Normandy or Operation Overlord, I always think about my favorite Vin Diesel movie, which is Saving Private Ryan. It's my favorite Vin Diesel movie because he's only in it for like 20 minutes, and he dies, and it's great. But that movie does a really good Job of showing what that looked like, what the Operation Overlord looked like when the Allied troops took back the Beechins of Normandy, France.
And here's the thing. The Allies knew what they were doing. They knew what they were doing. They knew how to do it. So they knew what they were trying to do.
They were going to take back the Beechins of Normandy to begin pushing out the Germans. They knew how to do it. They knew how to operate the machinery and the weaponry that they have. And they knew how to work in relationship to one another. But in order to do it, they had to know why they were doing it.
They had to know why it was worth all of the loss of life, all of the pain, all of the suffering that would come with it. They had to know why. And so when Paul talks about the mission, and when he talks about how he walks through this, and how he can rejoice in suffering, he's going to tell us that it's for the mission, but then he's going to explain why it's worth it. So they suffered in the mission of Operation Overlord, but they knew why it was worth it. They knew what they were going after. Why it was worth celebrating every year since.
Why we celebrated it this year is because of the why, not because of the what and the how. And so what we're going to look at is, yes, we're going to talk a little bit about the what. We're going to talk a little bit about the mission. But we're going to land in, and Paul's going to land in, why. So, what we see first is the mission. That's what he's going to talk about, and then we'll talk about why.
He says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I, Paul, became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, for y'all, to make the word of God fully known. So he's still talking about the mission, and here's what he says. He says, I was given this because of the stewardship of God. So God, creator of the universe, who's working to redeem and to save people and to bring them back in relationship with himself, has a stewardship.
He commands and controls his mission, and he invites humans into that. He invited Paul into that because of the stewardship from God. So God, who's overseeing all of this, gave some of it to Paul. And Paul says, It was because of the stewardship of God that was given to me for y'all. So he's talking about the Colossians church.
Now this is how this worked for Paul. Paul was a Jewish guy, super smart, had the equivalent of like several PhDs, was on the fast track to go be a part of the Sanhedrin, maybe even high priest one day, fingers crossed. And he was super zealous for Judaism. So he began to persecute all Christians, all of those who rose up against and began to proclaim that Jesus was God, that he died in our place for our sin, that he rose again three days later. So he began to persecute them.
And he was very zealous for it, which means he enjoyed it and liked it and was good at it. And so he was persecuting the church, deserved to be destroyed and crushed by Jesus, who's in control and in charge of everything. Jesus shows up, knocks Paul off his horse, makes him blinds and says, Why are you persecuting me? And then he says, I'm going to show you how much you'll have to suffer for my sake. Jesus, instead of crushing him, rescues him, gives him grace, saves him from his sin and invites him into his mission, gives him the stewardship of his mission. And so Paul becomes a missionary for Christ.
In Christ's name begins to proclaim the gospel that Jesus gives grace to those who don't deserve it. He goes to Ephesus. In Ephesus he's proclaiming the gospel. We know that Epaphras most likely becomes a believer in Ephesus. Philemon may have been with him. It's possible that Epaphras led Philemon to Jesus when he went back to Colossae.
Ephesus begins to proclaim the gospel in Colossae. The Colossian church is born. Those who submit to Jesus, repent of their sin and are rescued by grace by him in the Colossae. People begin to meet in homes, Philemon's home and some other homes. And Paul looks at the Colossian church, writes this to the Colossian church, whom he hasn't met and says, God in his stewardship gave it to me for y'all. And what's really exciting, heavy and intense is that each of us who know Jesus have a for y'all.
We have a for y'all that God in his good stewardship of his mission has handed over part of it to us for a y'all. So Paul says it was given to me for y'all. So there was a guy named David Thomas who became a believer. He lived in South Carolina. It's not Dave Thomas who made cheeseburgers. It's David Thomas who lived in South Carolina, started serving as a part of his church, started working with students and small children.
While he was doing that, one of the students he was working with named Matt Freeman became a believer. Repented of his sins, accepted Jesus as his savior, as his substitute for his sin, became a believer. And so Matt grew up as a Christian, felt called into ministry. Eventually, while he was in college, started working at a church where he was serving. At that church, he met a female that he was picking up what she was putting down. And he talked to his roommate, who was a complete prophetic genius, about dating this girl.
And his roommate, who's really smart and ruggly handsome, told him, you should not date someone that you work with at a church. That would be stupid. And because Matt completely appreciated this prophetic advice and because he knew the wisdom that his roommate had, began dating her anyway. Which totally worked out for him. They got married. Her name was Katie.
They then felt called to be a part of a church plant in West Columbia. Felt called by God, who in Acts 17, it says, sets our boundaries so that God knows where we are, has us where we are on purpose, knows where you live, knows your address, knows why he has you in relationship with the people he has you in relationships with. So he set your boundaries. So God who set our boundaries, Matt and Katie feel called to be a part of a church plant in West Columbia, and since they feel called to be a part of a church plant in West Columbia, they moved to Northeast Columbia because that's what you do. Made no sense to me.
But God who sets their boundaries had an idea of what he was doing. And so while they lived in Northeast Columbia, they became friends with the Gillens. While they became friends with the Gillens, they invited them to be a part of community group, invited them to start being a part of church family. Daniel Gillen becomes a believer, repents of his sins, and follows Jesus, accepts Jesus as his atonement for his sin, begins to follow Jesus. Daniel invites DJC to come be a part of things. DJ starts hanging out with their community group.
DJ meets Jesus, repents of his sins, and starts following Jesus as his sacrifice, as his atonement, as his king, because of the stewardship from God that was given to David, that was given to Matt, that was given to Daniel, that was given to DJ for y'all, for a y'all that's not over with yet. That's how that works. And each person in this room has had the king of the universe extend some stewardship of his mission to us for a y'all. And he sets our boundaries, and he knows who we know, and he knows why he has us on the street that we're on, and it's been given to me for y'all, as Paul says, and each of us has a for y'all that we toil, struggle, pray for, build with, spend our time chasing after because of the stewardship of a great God and king who knows what he's doing when he hands out his mission.
That's what Paul says. Paul says, first of all, the mission's bigger than my personal self-fulfillment, than my personal enjoyment and my personal happiness, so that I can be in prison and I can rejoice because of the stewardship of the mission that was given to me for y'all. So, what that means for us is that the mission's bigger. Mission's bigger than how we want to spend every weeknight. Mission's bigger than how we want to spend our money. The mission's bigger than how we want to be viewed by people.
I know my wife and I have this conversation all the time because I harass my neighbors because I'm just trying to talk to them, just trying to build a relationship with them. And they'll look at me and go, they're not going to come outside anymore. I can see people from my backyard. And so I'll see people. She's like, they're in their backyard. You can't go talk to them.
And I'll be like, watch me, which I do creep people out. And so I got to work on it. But the mission's bigger about whether or not I want to be seen as creepy or not. Like, we got to start talking to people. We got to build relationships with people. It's bigger than how we want to spend our time, how we want to spend our money.
And we know that. And now Paul's going to tell us how it's bigger, why it's bigger. Why it's worth it. Why it's worth the suffering. So we'll start in 25.
Of which I became a minister, just means servant, according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for y'all, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints, all those who have placed their faith in Jesus. That's what saints are, holy ones, made holy by Jesus. To them, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles, Gentiles are all non-Jewish people, so me and most everybody else in this room are Gentiles. To them, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So what Paul says is the reason the mission is bigger, and what he's been called into, is to proclaim this mystery, the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Paul says it's about the gospel. And the two ways he describes that, the two ways he puts that out, is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Christ in you is a profound mystery. A couple weeks ago we spent some time talking about how big Jesus is, how he rules over everything. And what Paul says is that, yes, that's true, and he dwells in those who have placed their faith in him.
That's crazy. It's a profound mystery, but it's been revealed that the God of the universe would indwell, would live in, those who place their faith in him. And so what he says is, when he does that, that's our hope of glory. So, glory is, it kind of just means like shining. And so like, if you took a hot red poker and stuck it in a fire, and then you pulled it out of the fire, it would glow for a while. It's glorying with stuff coming from the fire.
But what he means here is that we, one day, will spend eternity with Jesus in glory. Where there aren't, there isn't pain, and there isn't shame, and there isn't guilt, and there isn't brokenness anymore. And so what he says is, the reason he can do this is because of the gospel, which is that Jesus Christ came to earth, lived a life in perfect relationship with God, died for our sins, so was crushed, as he says earlier in Colossians, that he, through his body of flesh, by his death, was crushed on our behalf, so that we might place our faith in him, and so that our sin that deserves to be punished, might be punished on him, and his righteousness, which deserves God to love, and share, and glory in Jesus, can be given to us, and that Christ can dwell in us, and that we have hope of glory. Our hope is not in this life.
So that's why Paul can say he rejoices in suffering, because his hope isn't here. He has a hope of glory because of Christ. It's not here. It's not in his personal satisfaction. It's not in how everything works out for him. It's not in his happiness.
It's in Christ. He has a hope of glory that's in Christ. I am. My granddad's name was Chester Phillips. It's actually who I'm named after. He was a pastor.
Bob Jones, Independent Baptist pastor, for a long time. He graduated from Bob Jones, so he went to, let me see, let me tell you some of his story. He went to, he was in World War II. He was in London during the bombing of London. He spent most of his time on a ship. He was a medic because he made glasses beforehand.
He and my grandmother got married like the week before he left. And so he left. World War II ended. He came back. He went to Bob Jones, learned how to be a pastor, went through their school. When he graduated on Friday, he began preaching at his first church on Sunday.
So he graduated on Friday. They moved on Saturday, and he started working with his first church on Sunday. He was not super comfortable with public speaking, and so my grandmother one time came down in his office, and she said in his office, he would always have his Bible laid out, his notes laid out, and he would have a brown paper bag over here on the right. And so she asked him one day, finally, after he'd been pastor for some years, she'd been married to him for a while, she said, what's the brown paper bag for? And he said, well, sometimes when I'm working on a sermon, I have to throw up.
Because I don't feel good about it. And that's why the brown paper bag's here. And so, but he was a pastor for a long time. I remember I was a part of his church when I was little, and he used to go to his office after he taught, and he'd open his drawer and give you a moon pie, because he loved Jesus, and moon pies are great. And so he'd give you a moon pie. And when I was seven, six-ish, five-ish, somewhere around in there, he started having trouble driving.
And my grandmother started noticing that he was drifting some, and it was like he wasn't seeing very well. And so she taught him to go to the doctor. He didn't like going to the doctor. He went to the doctor, and he had a brain tumor in his head. And so they said, we've got to operate. It's big.
It's just going to be a problem. And so they operated. They removed it. When they removed it, it was as if he had had a stroke. And so his whole left side of his body no longer worked. And so he had to do a lot of rehab to even just be able to walk.
And talk in a coherent manner. And so he found out he had a brain tumor. And then within just a few months was no longer pastoring and was not going to be able to. He wasn't able to open the Bible and proclaim God's word anymore. He was doing well to walk and to kind of communicate. And so they did not think he would have much longer, live much longer after that.
But he lived for another 15 years. Was still a complete trip. He was hilarious, enjoyable to be around. I remember one time we were at the beach, and I was about to go out swimming, and he called me over. He said, Jack, come here. So I came over to him.
He said, Now look. He's sitting in his wheelchair. He said, If you start drowning, I want you to call me. I said, Okay, yes, sir. He goes, Because I've never watched anyone drown, and I'd love to see that. I was like, Yes, sir.
I got you. That's just what he was like. But I remember about two years ago, he passed away. He was 87 years old, had been confined to a wheelchair for a while. Pretty much every day he'd had since his brain tumor operation was grace. And when God called him home, it was grace.
And I cried. And we knew it was coming. And I was genuinely sad and broken over it. And I cried. And I don't cry over much. Because there's something about death and suffering that strikes all of us as wrong.
There's just something in it. That even though we know it's coming, and even though 100% of people are going to die, and even though it happens all the time, it is as common as births. It is as common as getting colds. It is as common. It happens to everyone. There's something in us all the time that screams, this is not how this ought to be.
This is not how this is supposed to work. All of us, when we come to death, when we come to suffering, when we're faced with pain. And what the Bible says is that you are correct. That is not how it's supposed to be. That God created the world in a relationship with himself, and that we as humans rebelled. We ran from him.
The Bible says that we're the problem. That because of self-fulfillment, because of our desire to be God, because of our desire to prop ourselves up, that we rebelled, and that we're the problem. I read a thing the other day that was talking about the deadliest animals on earth. Wolves, sharks, elephants, hippopotamus, mosquitoes came in second to humans. Because we kill more people than anything else. Because we're the problem.
We're broken. We're greedy. I saw a picture of a shark swimming next to a scuba diver, and it said, one of these is the most deadly animal on earth. And the other one's a shark minding his business. Because we're the problem. But what Paul says, and what scripture tells us, is that Jesus didn't stand far away from our suffering.
Didn't stand far away from death. Didn't just crush us for our rebellion, but that he came to earth, he gave up all of his good things, so that he could live as a human, in the relationship with God that we could never accomplish. That he could live perfectly on our behalf, and that he could be crushed. That he could step into suffering, pain, and death. That he could bleed and die on our behalf, and that in him, not only can we face suffering, not only do we have purpose in suffering, but we also have hope of glory, that one day it'll be worked out again. That it'll be back right.
That that thing inside of us that screams that this is wrong, will be straightened back out, and it won't be wrong anymore. That we'll have hope of glory, where we'll spend eternity, with our great God and King, who's rescued and redeemed, and has made everything right again. Who's wiped every tear from every eye. Death and pain are no more. And that we get to celebrate and worship him for eternity. That's what hope of glory means.
And that's what the gospel is for us. And that's why we can suffer. That's why we can face pain. And that's why we can rejoice. Because God and his good stewardship has given this message to us for a y'all. And suffering isn't the end of it for us.
Suffering has purpose for a Christian. And we have hope set somewhere else other than on ourselves. It doesn't terminate on us. And it doesn't terminate on our happiness. Our hope is set with him in eternity. So that's why Paul says he can rejoice in suffering.
Because of Christ in him. Christ in us. And our hope of glory. So, here's what this looks like for us. So it's the gospel that empowers us for mission.
It's the gospel that empowers us in life. It's the gospel that lets us walk through suffering. That lets us walk through pain. It's the gospel. It's that Jesus stepped into our suffering. That he rescues us.
And that in him is our hope. Jesus. It's not set in anything else. It's in Jesus. And so here's what Paul says this looks like. We'll start in 27.
To then God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery. Which is Christ in you? The hope of glory. Him. Jesus. Him we proclaim.
Warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. So Paul in this passage talks about suffering. He talks about affliction. He talks about toil and struggle. And he says it's all about Jesus.
And he says it's him we proclaim. Warning everyone and teaching everyone so that we can present everyone mature in Christ. This is foundational for us as a church. What he's talking about is that it's the gospel that we point each other to. It's the gospel that we point ourselves to. It's the gospel that we point each other to in community.
It's the gospel that we point everyone to. It's Jesus. We talk about Jesus. We make much of Jesus. All the time. That's it.
That's all we do. It's how we view the world. One of the ways we talk about this is gospel fluency. So fluency is when you can speak a language without having to think about how you're speaking that language. Does that make sense? So I took Spanish classes in high school and in college.
I'm not fluent in Spanish. I took like years of this stuff. Not fluent in it. Like if we're ever I can say ¿Dónde estás la biblioteca? And Puerto del Baño, por favor. So if we're in a Spanish speaking country and I get lost go to the closest library and check their bathroom because that's all I know how to say.
And I honestly may not even be in the bathroom but I'll have permission to go there. Because that's what I can say. I can ask where the library is and I can ask for permission to go to the bathroom. I can say other things like the cake is moist but I don't know how often that's going to come up in a conversation. So I mean if I say it enough people might give me money to go away.
Like I don't know. But I can't. I'm not fluent. So what happens when I speak Spanish is I have to think English words. I have to then match that up with a Spanish word and then say Spanish words. And then when someone says Spanish words to me I have to catch the Spanish words match them up with an English word so that I understand what we're talking about.
That's not fluency. Fluency is what's happening right now in English where I'm saying English words and your brain's got concepts. Like you understand what's being said. And then you when you were talking to me would think concepts say English words. I would catch English words think concepts. We wouldn't have to line it back up.
Does that make sense? And so what he's saying is him we proclaim. We talk about Jesus and we talk about gospel fluency. What that means is is that's how we view the world. Through the lens of the gospel. It's Jesus that we see everything through that we point everyone to.
All the time. I've seen those commercials for night view glasses. Have y'all seen those? It's glasses that are yellow. And they act like they're somehow going to give you night vision. I love those commercials.
People give actors in infomercials a hard time. But you've got to know how to act in an infomercial because you're selling garbage. And you've got to pretend like it's good. So you've got to at least have some acting skill. But in those commercials I love it because they'll be like it's like look at how dark it is.
And then they put yellow glasses on someone and they're like I can see everything. Or they'll just show like looking at nothing and then they'll show sunglasses fall over it with yellow and then everything like lights up. And that's ridiculous. That's not how that works. It just makes everything yellow. And so I really want them to put the glasses on someone and then be like wow it's dark and everything's kind of yellow now.
But the truth for us is that that's what the gospel is. The gospel is our night view glasses. It tints everything. It affects how we see everything. It's how we communicate. It's how we think.
It's how we view the world. It's the gospel. It's Jesus. We point to Jesus in everything. It says him we proclaim warning everyone teaching everyone so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. So what that means is that the gospel is primary for us.
We point to Jesus primarily in everything. So when we gather with our community groups we talk about gospel fluency. What that means is when somebody confesses sin or when somebody's struggling with something we don't pop off with just good advice. We don't just look at someone and be like well if you ate better and exercised more you'd be happier. Maybe that's true. And that may be really good advice for 97% of Americans.
But we give gospel first. It's Jesus we proclaim. It's Jesus that we point to because he's our hope. We don't have hope anywhere else. Our hope isn't in diet and exercise. Our hope isn't in the best type of Job to have.
Our hope isn't in this technique for parenting. Our hope is in Jesus. So it's him we proclaim. So this works on a personal basis. This is what Paul's doing. He's proclaiming the gospel over his own suffering so that he can walk through life.
It's what we do. So what we don't do is this. We don't say here's the rule so follow the rule. We say here's the gospel so follow Jesus. Here's how the gospel applies. Follow Jesus.
So the Bible has rules. It has things that ways that we honor God ways that we live. Talks about generosity. I want everyone in this room to be ridiculously generous but not because that's a rule. I want the gospel to so penetrate our souls that we can't help it. That he who was rich became poor so that in him we might be rich.
That God left everything to be made nothing so that in him we could have everything. If that doesn't make us generous I want that to be what drives us so that we can look at someone else and go absolutely I want you to have some of this because I've already been given everything and my God became nothing and I know that everything doesn't terminate on me. My wealth is not for my enjoyment but it's been stewarded it's been given to me for you for this to move forward and for me to walk in light of the gospel. So yeah we want to be generous but because of the gospel yes we want to love ridiculously but because we've been loved but because we know that he's so loved us that he would die for us he would take our place so that we can love.
Of the gospel yes we want to love ridiculously but because we've been loved but because we know that he's so loved us that he would die for us he would take our place so that we can love. That's just how this works. It works in community it works with us
The y'allness of us that he's talking to. So when we have sin issues you know what that means? The gospel applies which is sin's a big deal so we address it we don't pretend like sin's not a big deal we talk about it
Openly and honestly but there's forgiveness we just assume Jesus is going to do what he does which is allow forgiveness bring redemption bring reconciliation we deal with sin issues as a church family we don't allow weirdness between people that's not okay because the gospel is true not because that's a rule
But because Jesus overcomes all of that so we talk to people we can disagree we can repent we can pray for one another we can forgive because we've been forgiven we just invite Jesus in all of it and it's him we proclaim warning everyone and teaching everyone so this is how
We talk to our friends who don't know Jesus I was working at Sears a buddy of mine asked me he said man I used to get married he said you got any marriage advice I said yeah but I'm going to have to talk about Jesus because otherwise it's going to be confusing as crap my advice only comes from Jesus so I got to talk
To you about him first he's like okay so we talked about it because that's how I view the world that's the only way that makes sense and I honestly have found that that's not a pushy way to talk to somebody about Jesus because I'm telling them true things about how I view the world the reason
A lot of us have a hard time talking about the gospel is because the gospel hasn't penetrated how we walk through life it's clunky and awkward so it's like this weird weapon that we carry and smack people with but it doesn't affect how we walk through life so that's why we only talk about Jesus we proclaim
Jesus we point to Jesus when we get together we're going to talk about Jesus when we gather in our community groups we're going to talk about Jesus and so before you ever heard people be like I just want to go deep I want to learn deep things from the Bible and I always
Grew up thinking that you became a Christian because you learned the gospel because you repented of your sin because Jesus died on your behalf and then you learned good deep Bible things what Paul says is that it's the riches of the glory of this mystery which is Christ in us
The hope of glory you want to learn deep things dig into the riches of the glory of this mystery dig and dig and dig and dig into the gospel you are not going to find the bottom that's not going to be tap dry it's not going to it's not ever going to run
Out that's what we dig into that's what we dive into and that's why we proclaim Jesus all the time it's how we view the world he works in among us all the time so we proclaim Jesus all the
Time that's us I want to point to one more thing before we wrap up tonight he says this him we proclaim warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone
Mature in Christ we're going to grow in maturity we grow in maturity in Jesus we grow in maturity in the gospel penetrating deeply into how we live life and here's the thing maturity in Christ is for everyone it's for everyone
It's not for a handful of people and then a bunch of other people gather together and there's some sort of a big religious organization that's not the goal the Bible does have elders and pastors and people that teach but we teach I spend time each week working on things to teach and to talk about the Bible because
We're called to equip saints and we want everyone to be mature everyone to grow in how the gospel applies to everything maturity is for everybody growth is for everybody that we would grow in our community groups that we would begin to proclaim the gospel to each other Colossians is going to talk about that later that we would teach one another we'd admonish one another we'd lead one another celebrate
Worship with one another and that we proclaim the gospel to each other and that we'd all grow in maturity let's do that as a church let's talk about Jesus so much that we all just grow up in maturity in Christ let's let's have this room of people know how the gospel applies to finances how the gospel applies to our time how the gospel applies to our friendships it's going to be awkward it's going to be clunky there's going to be some confusing conversations there
Are going to be times that we say hey that's really good advice but how does Jesus work here how do we proclaim Jesus in this situation and you're going to go how does the gospel apply to buying a dog it does and it's going to be awkward to try to figure it out and talk about it but it applies to how we spend our time and how we spend our money and how we view the world so it applies to everything and we're going to all talk about Jesus so much that we all grow in maturity and become
Mature in Christ and it's going to be really good and a lot of fun man's going to come back up here and here's what we're going to do we are the y'all that Paul's writing to we are the church we are a group of people that exist in relationship with one another and what happens when you have a bunch of people exist in relationships with one another is that things get frustrating things get weird and sometimes people get their feelings hurt and sometimes there's struggle and there's
Pain and in this room there are people that are going through some things and so what we're going to do is we're going to respond as Christians we're going to respond and we're going to proclaim Jesus into this situation we're going to invite the gospel to bear in our lives and so what that means is some of you in here may just be struggling with some life just may be difficult right now you just need some you need some church family to come around and to pray with you and to talk with you about how your hope
Isn't in this situation but it's in Jesus and how the gospel works to bring life and to bring rejoicing and suffering here so you're just going to invite some people to pray with you you're going to go sit with somebody you're going to go talk to somebody you're going to go open up a little bit some of us in here need to confess some sin we need to have the gospel apply so that we know that sin's a big deal and that forgiveness is inevitable for those who repent that Jesus forgives and that reconciliation and
Redemption happen when we invite Jesus in so some of us are going to move around the room we're going to talk to somebody we're going to confess some weirdness we're going to confess some how we've been upset or frustrated with something it's going to get awkward but it's going to be so good because we're going to invite Jesus to be a part of it some of us just need to pray we just need to talk to some people anybody who's playing an instrument right now feels like they need to talk to someone they're going to put their
Instrument down and they're going to go talk to a person we care way more about being church family and applying the gospel than we do about a baseline no offense Josh that's what we're going to do we're going to cut the lights off we're going to they're going to play some music we're going to pray we're going to talk to each other we're going to move around that little thing that just popped in your head that you don't want to talk about that's what you're going to talk about that person that just popped in your head that's the person you're
Going to talk to we're going to follow the Holy Spirit we're going to invite Jesus to be a part of this we're going to pray with one another we're going to walk with one another and we're going to proclaim him always only we're going to proclaim Jesus because he's our hope. He's our life. And he's how we walk through everything. I'm going to pray and then we're going to move. Real quick before I pray. If you're in the room and you don't know Jesus, this is open for you to repent of your sin and to have Jesus be your hope and have his death apply to your account. So you can tell him. That seems awkward or you have questions. You can talk to a human.
We'd love to proclaim him. Let's pray. God, we ask that we'd be a church family, that the gospel works in and around everything. That's how we'd view life. So that God, we'd be able to rejoice in suffering because we know the truth of where our hope lies. And God, I thank you that in your wisdom you've given us a for y'all. That each of the people in this room who have placed their hope and their faith in you, that you've extended your mission for those around them, for those that they would toil and struggle to proclaim you to. And God, I pray that we would, that we would proclaim Jesus,
Warning everyone and teaching everyone so that we might present everyone mature in Christ. Holy Spirit, I pray that you'd work right now. Show us who we need to talk to. Enlighten us into how the gospel works in and among us so that there can be forgiveness, so that there can be reconciliation. We're going to move around the room, God. We pray that your Holy Spirit would move around as well. Teaching us, leading us, in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
He's our life. And he's how we walk through everything. I'm going to pray and then we're going to move. Real quick before I pray. If you're in the room and you don't know Jesus, this is open for you to repent of your sin and to have Jesus be your hope and have his death apply to your account. So you can tell him.
That seems awkward or you have questions. You can talk to a human. We'd love to proclaim him. Let's pray. God, we ask that we'd be a church family, that the gospel works in and around everything. That's how we'd view life.
So that God, we'd be able to rejoice in suffering because we know the truth of where our hope lies. And God, I thank you that in your wisdom you've given us a for y'all. That each of the people in this room who have placed their hope and their faith in you, that you've extended your mission for those around them, for those that they would toil and struggle to proclaim you to. And God, I pray that we would, that we would proclaim Jesus, warning everyone and teaching everyone so that we might present everyone mature in Christ. Holy Spirit, I pray that you'd work right now. Show us who we need to talk to.
Enlighten us into how the gospel works in and among us so that there can be forgiveness, so that there can be reconciliation. We're going to move around the room, God. We pray that your Holy Spirit would move around as well. Teaching us, leading us, in Jesus' name. Amen.
Reconciliation
Colossians 1:21-23
Transcript
Well, g'day everyone. It is great to see everyone here tonight. My name is Raz. I feel like I don't really have to introduce myself because I just got a five-minute spotlight before, but I do have to defend myself because Chet called me out. This day we played putt-putt, I was the only person to lay down prone on the ground and do like a pool shot and score a hole in one. That deserves some credit, I think.
And so I may not be so good if you do it the conventional way, but give me some pool shots and I'll be all right. As he said, it becomes a healthy thing for churches to do as they continue to grow to be training new leaders. And so this is kind of what we're going to be doing tonight, and this is why I'm here. I've been in and around Mill City for a while. I've been leading a group with the West Columbia guys with Aubrey, and I've been on the teaching team for a while and helping out on Sundays as well and really just growing in a bunch of different ways on how to serve a church family and what it takes to run the church as it is from behind the scenes.
I'm currently studying in seminary at CIU. I pretty much wake up every day, read the Bible, study it, write a paper on it, submit it, and go home and sleep. That's pretty much my day every day. I enjoy it. It's really good. If you haven't tried it, maybe you should.
It's a great thing to do. We are, if this is your first week, we are currently in the middle of a series on the book of Colossians. So far, week one, we kind of looked overall introduction to the series. Paul is the author of the letter. He's writing from a jail, probably in Rome. He writes the letter to the church of Colossians.
He writes the letter to a group. He writes the letter to y'all. And so he uses the word you throughout the whole book, but pretty much the whole time he's doing it, the Greek word is the Greek word for y'all. It's a cool thing that the Greeks have that we don't have or that I don't have in conventional English, but southerners do, so it's great. We've got y'all. So it's a letter to y'all.
Week two, Matt taught that when we mature in Christ, when we grow in maturity towards Christ, we take knowledge, and that knowledge builds into action, and that action ends up turning back into more knowledge, and that more knowledge builds into more action, and that kind of pushes us forward towards Christ, and that's how we mature in Christ. In the third week, which was last week, we looked at the preeminence and the supremacy of Christ, how he is creator and supreme over all things. Everything was made through him and for him. He was before all things, and he has power over everything in creation.
This week, we're going to continue looking through the book of Colossians, but before we get there, if you haven't met me before, you're probably realizing that I'm not from Columbia, South Carolina by now. I am, in fact, from Australia, or as we call it, Australia, mate, something like that. It's not so much a fun fact about me as it is a warning, because everyone in America knows that dangerous things come from Australia. It's also a bit of a warning, because I tend to say things that make total sense in English-speaking countries, but this isn't an English-speaking country. This is an American-speaking country.
And so I might say things that mean everyone else in the world that speaks English would understand. Some examples might be, I'm not going to say any of these tonight, but except for now, chicken burger. I can see all of your brains just going, but it's actually a thing. You take a burger bun, put chicken on it, it becomes a chicken burger. Football. It's a ball, and you kick it.
It's football. You spend the whole game kicking it. You call it soccer, but you're wrong. Anyway, If I say anything, if anything comes out, it probably makes sense. You just have to think about it. In your brains, you can just join the dots.
Or if you're American, you can connect the dots. Whatever. Coming from Australia, we have a number of kind of unique cultural traditions, unique cultural things that we have that other countries just don't have. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them other countries should probably adopt.
One of those is this thing that we have called reconciliation. Reconciliation is a word that existed before we kind of stole it. It's a word that means whenever two groups of people get in a fight, or two people get in a fight, and then they come back together. That's called reconciliation. But in Australia, it has this very special meaning.
You see, back in the 1800s, when the British folk, the white people, they came in and they took over. They kind of pushed everyone away. They did that thing that they did back in the day. I don't know why it was a rule, but they took their flag, and they just kind of stuck it in the dirt, and that meant that they owned the whole country. For some reason, that was a legitimate enough reason. It was like, you guys, you're already here, but you don't have a flag.
I don't understand. Why didn't you put a flag in the ground? You could have kept it, but you didn't. So we took it, and now it's ours. I've been reminded recently that in case the zombie apocalypse ever becomes a thing, America still owns all that land up on the moon, because they were the first ones to kind of do that, just in case you're paranoid like that. Anyway, back in Australia, the leaders who kind of colonized the area, they were looking at the way that the Aboriginal parents were raising their children, and they decided that it was not good enough for society.
They decided that rather than allow Aboriginal parents to raise their own children in their traditional ways, they would regulate that. They would make sure it was done correctly. And so they introduced laws. One of them was called the Aboriginal Protection Act. It actually didn't protect them at all. In fact, it was this specific thing.
They regulated the lives of aboriginals, aboriginals being the natives that were there. I don't know if I mentioned that. And so we come to this low point in Australian history, the absolute most disabicable era of Australian history, and it's what we call the stolen generation. There was a period of time where for 50 to 60 years, they actually didn't allow Aboriginal parents to raise their own children anymore. They decided they were being such bad parents, such horrible parents, that they were raising their children to be tribal and barbarians. And they said, we can't have that.
So they just started taking them. They started taking the Aboriginal children and sending them to white families and saying, you guys raise these kids to be civilized members of society. And so it ended up being that it got quite hostile, as you would imagine. The Australian kind of settlers, the British people, the white guys, they pushed everyone out, they stole their children, and they alienated themselves from everyone else. By alienated, I mean they separated themselves from them. They pushed them away.
They were hostile. They were evil towards them. They separated themselves from the aboriginals. And that's where we started with this idea of reconciliation. Back in the late 60s, the white guys, they kind of came to their senses. They decided this was kind of out of control.
We had gone too far and that something needed to be done. And so a referendum was held. A vote was held. The Australian public decided that we would give the aboriginals all of their rights back. All of the laws in the Constitution that prevented aboriginals from having rights were taken out. And we started on this road of reconciliation, trying to fix the problem that we'd created when we'd ruined that relationship.
Now, National Reconciliation Week is like a holiday in Australia now. It's really fun. I remember when it started in 1996. I was in the third grade. It was great. It was incredibly culturally insensitive.
They wanted to raise awareness for the aboriginal reconciliation. And so what they did was they said to all of the elementary schools around the place, host big aboriginal reconciliation events in your schools. And so what we did in the third grade is we had a corroboree. A corroboree is like a traditional dance thing that the aboriginals did. It was like a party. And so in the school assembly, all of the guys in the third grade ripped their shirts off and painted themselves with aboriginal paint and did like this little dance thing.
It was incredibly culturally insensitive. It's not politically correct at all. But that was like the inauguration of, hey, we're going to be reconciled to these people now. Now, I don't know if it worked or not, but it did raise awareness. And so that's a good thing, right? Instead of looking back and being angry about the past that had happened, everyone in Australia agreed that looking forward to a reunited future, a reconciled future was the way to go.
And so that's kind of this nuanced meaning of reconciliation in Australia. And now tonight as we open up Colossians, we're going to continue through into a section that is all about reconciliation. It's not between two groups of people. It's not between like the aboriginals and the white Australian conquering folk. It's between a holy God and all of fallen humanity. If you've got a Bible, you can open up to Colossians 1.
We're going to be starting in verse 23. If you don't have a Bible, there should be some kind of at the end of the rows. You can pass them down to each other. If you don't own a Bible and you've got your hands on one of these looking ones, you can take that with you. We want you to have it. It would be great for you to have the word of God within your reach at all times.
So make sure you grab one if you don't have one. We're going to be starting in verse 23. But before we do, I'm just going to pray for us real quick. Father God, thank you that you stepped down from heaven on a mission to bring us back to you. Be with us tonight as we learn from your word. Work in us to create a people who strive to become more like Jesus in all things.
Amen. All right, two weeks ago, Matt, he taught on a passage just before this one. He taught on a passage in verse 9 and 10. As I said earlier, it starts off with knowledge turning into action and that action turning into more knowledge and that more knowledge kind of growing and snowballing into more knowledge and action and more knowledge and more action. And that pushes us towards Christ. That is the process in which we mature in Christ.
This weekend, and that's really good news. This week, our passage today, it would be similar except that we have this problem. We have a rather big problem. And this is our problem. Our problem is that we were alienated from God. If you look down, verse 21, it says, And you, which is really the Greek word for y'all, and y'all, the church that's meeting in Colossae, and y'all, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds.
When a group is alienated from God, their knowledge and their actions, they snowball in the same way. Except, instead of snowballing knowledge and action, knowledge and actions towards Christ, when you're alienated from him, you still have knowledge and you still have actions, but they're snowballing in a direction away from him. It says that we are hostile in mind. We have hostile knowledge. And it says that we're evil in deeds. We have evil actions.
And so our knowledge and our action, it still snowballs, but it pushes us further and further away from Christ. We are already alienated and we're becoming more alienated. It's a pretty horrible problem if you think about it, being alienated from God, being separated from the creator of the entire universe. That's a massive issue for us. I've got a photo of a kid, a little kid. He's pretty cute.
I don't know if any of you have seen him before. Some of you might have. There's a video of this kid. He went viral not that long ago. He's got sprinkles kind of on his face. I don't know if you can see that.
There's little red things all over his face. He's been eating some sprinkles. The original video was pretty long, but I've cut it down for us. We're going to watch it now. Check out what this kid does when he eats his sprinkles. What are you eating?
I think. You didn't eat anything? Yeah. I think. Are you telling me the truth? No.
You didn't have any snacks? Nope. Can you explain to me why the sprinkles are empty? Well, they're not empty. Did you eat those sprinkles? No.
I did not. Did you eat those sprinkles? No. I did not eat those sprinkles. Sprinkles. John.
You have sprinkles on your face. Oh, no. No. I did not eat sprinkles. All right.
He's pretty cute. I'll give him that. But he's digging himself a hole. He's fighting a war that he's never going to win. And it's a pretty big problem. You see, he's taken this knowledge.
He likes sprinkles. Who doesn't? He's taken this knowledge and he's done some kind of an action. His action being he went and ate some sprinkles. Even though he knew, knowledge, that he wasn't supposed to. Then his mom asked him if he did that.
And he said, no. He knew that he had, but his action was lying about the fact that he didn't. And then he lied again. And then he lied again. He told five lies saying that he never even ate the sprinkles and they were attached to his face. It's a pretty big problem.
He has alienated, whether or not he knows it, he's probably like three years old. He has alienated himself from his mother. It's a pretty big deal when raising a child to know that that child is willing to lie directly to your face. That's cause for concern. And he's alienated himself from his mother. Now, in our lives, when we have similar things, we've all done this before.
We've lied and then had to cover up that lie with another lie. And then someone called us out on that lie. And we're like, oh, no, that's not true either. And we told another lie to cover up the lie that covered up the other lie. And it snowballs like that all the time. We've done this before.
It's not new to us. And no one's been like, what? That's never happened to me. Because this is something that we generally accept as something that happens. But in our lives, it's usually something bigger than sprinkles.
It's usually something bigger that will cause more of a problem, that will alienate us more. When I was in Australia, before I came here, when I was in Australia, just after high school, I worked as an electrician for four years. And for four years, I worked with or for this guy called Joel. He wasn't my boss when I first started working as an electrician. But then as I continued to work as one, he started his own company.
I ended up working with him. So I was working with this guy, Joel, for most of the time that I was an electrician. When I first met him, he was deeply, heavily into drugs, alcohol, parties, that kind of thing. He would go a week at a time without sleeping. And he would go out at night, come to work the next morning, play with electricity, and then go back out that night. It was crazy.
I didn't know how he did it. I like sleeping for 10 hours a night. So I could never do that. But we ended up becoming friends. We ended up bonding in quite a few different ways. And over the years, he ended up taking some of the things that I was saying about Jesus.
And I had the privilege of walking him back through the doors, inviting him into church family, the church that I was serving at in Australia. And then we went for about a year, and it was really good, really smooth sailing. He was on the right track. For no real reason that I know of, one day he called me up and fired me on the spot over the phone. It was over something that I had done, but I had done exactly the way that he had told me to do. And for whatever reason, that reflected badly on him, and he wouldn't take the blame for it, so I ended up taking the fall for it.
Now, I don't know if it's the same over here, but the unions in Australia are pretty powerful. They don't let things like that happen. And so what happened was I ended up not working there anymore, but instead I was stuck in a legal dispute with him over all the money that was owed to me and over the fact that I was fired for no reason and this kind of thing. Now, at that point in time, it was about as alienated as friends could be, sitting on opposing ends of the table in a courtroom. It was pretty horrible. But here's the thing about human disputes, human alienation.
It has its limits. There's this kind of invisible scale that's sort of understood about how split up, how much distance there are between people. And so if we look at Joel and my relationship and think, yes, we understand that they are alienated, we understand that they are separated, but it's not that big a deal. It doesn't affect that many people. They might be alienated that distance on our arbitrary scale. They might be a span's distance apart.
The aboriginals and the Europeans back in the day, that was probably a bigger deal than me and Joel. On our arbitrary scale, they might be kind of a wingspan separated. That's more distance to cover to bring reconciliation. When we think about our problem, our being alienated from God, it doesn't really work on this scale that we've got. We were alienated from God in a way that would be like from here to Pluto and back and do it again 500,000 times. And you can compare that with the span and the wingspan.
It doesn't compare when we try to say, oh, I understand what alienation is because I've experienced it in the human world. We have this very serious problem. We are alienated from God. But Paul, he doesn't stop with this separation. He doesn't stop with you've been alienated. He continues.
He says, you are hostile in mind and evil in deeds. It's the difference between being separated from someone and just not caring anymore and being separated from someone and then them throwing bombs at you from afar. We're not just separated from God. We're actually evil in deed and hostile in mind towards him. We are his enemies. And that's a pretty big deal as well.
I don't know if any of you ever go to the movies and cheer for the bad guy. That would be weird unless the movie is one of those ones where you're back to front and you're cheering for the bad guys to get out of jail or something like that. Usually we go for the good guys. No one goes to the cinema. Do you call it a cinema? Theater?
Movies? Go to the movies. You go to the movies and you don't cheer for Voldemort or Darth Vader. You cheer for Luke Skywalker. You cheer for Harry Potter. Maybe.
But if you turned our relationship with God into a movie, you have the good guy, the holy, blameless, above reproach, merciful, loving, sinless father in heaven. And you have sinful, depraved, hostile in mind, evil in deed humans. If it were a movie, you'd go for the good guy. And you would be expecting at any point in time God to just crush everybody. That's how much it takes for God to crush us. It's a big deal that not only are we separated from him, we are hostile towards him.
We are enemies with him. And so we find ourselves with this problem that we're alienated from God. And we need a solution because this problem exists. And something that we tend to do is we try to solve our own problems. That's something that particularly men in general, they want to do. They see a problem.
They want to solve it. But that's not exactly how it works. We desperately need something to bridge this gap. But it's not possible for us in and of our own power to do that. Usually when relationships are broken in the human world, we will call someone up. We'll schedule a lunch meeting.
We might text them these days if that's how it's done. And we'll try to set in motion some kind of plan to get back on the right foot with these people. And then after that lunch happens or whatever it is, it takes years of backpedaling and kind of trust earning in order to truly reconcile a broken relationship. But that's not exactly how it happens here. Because when it comes to our relationship with God, our alienation isn't, fixing the problem of our alienation isn't something that's on us. Because it's all about Jesus.
And so here's our solution. Our solution is that we have been reconciled by Christ's death. If you read verse 22, it says, He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. When Jesus was crucified and killed, when he was sacrificed on our behalf, his sacrifice completely solved our problem of alienation. At no point in time does Paul suggest that maybe there's something that we as humans should do.
We should start doing. At no point in time does he say, follow these rules to get back into God's good books. At no point in time does he say that reconciliation is something that we have to achieve for ourselves. The solution is that we've been reconciled by Christ's death. Our sin, our hostile minds, our evil deeds, they separated us from God in a way that we can't undo for ourselves. Reconciliation was something that we absolutely needed.
We had this problem that we were separated. We absolutely needed reconciliation, but we had zero control over it to fix it for ourselves. Back in the day, the Jews, they knew that we had this problem. They knew that we were alienated. They knew that something was wrong in the world, but they thought differently about what the solution was. The Pharisees, they were a Jewish group that adhered very strictly to the law.
The law was technically biblical, but back in the day, they kind of perverted it. They changed it. They added things to it. The law they believed would reconcile them to God. By following the rules of the law, they could build these little baby steps that would get them back towards God, even though they'd been alienated 500,000 times the distance to Pluto and back. They thought they could do something in and of themselves to reconcile themselves.
And so they strictly followed the law, but they never wanted to break the law, so they invented new rules along the way to stop them from getting all the way to the law so they could never break the law because they didn't want to break the law. And so they come up with some very interesting things that they have to follow. An example would be Sabbath laws. We know what the Sabbath is. The Sabbath is a holy day that you're not supposed to work. It's the day of rest.
On the seventh day, God rested, and so we're supposed to imitate that and take time out as rest. But the Jewish people, they said that we weren't allowed to work on the Sabbath. But that wasn't strict enough. That didn't define it enough. We needed to decide what work was. And so over the years, as technology has improved and society has kind of progressed through history, we have to redefine and redefine what work is.
I lived in a section of Sydney called St. Ives. It's like a neighborhood called St. Ives. The elementary school that I went to was in St. Ives.
The church that I served at was in St. Ives. St. Ives is actually the densest Jewish population in Sydney. There's a massive synagogue there. And because there's a synagogue there, that's kind of the area that a lot of Jewish people move to because you're not allowed to drive a car on the Sabbath.
Driving a car counts as work. In fact, turning the key to unlock the door counts as work. You can't unlock the door of your car on the Sabbath. And so what they do is they all move into the area that the synagogue is in so that they can just walk there on the weekends. But some interesting cultural dynamics occur in St.
Ives because there's a lot of other things that they're not allowed to do on the Sabbath. They're not allowed to lock their own door when they leave to go to synagogue. They're not allowed to turn the lights off when they leave because operating a light switch counts as work. They're not allowed to push their pram. The baby carriage. What do you call it?
Stroller. They're not allowed to push a stroller to synagogue because that counts as work. And so interesting things would happen. They would make friends with their neighbors. They were very good missionaries. They would make friends with all of their neighbors because when they needed something done, the neighbor had to do it.
Sometimes they would pay it. If you need to shut your door and lock it, you need to get the neighbor to come over and turn the key for you. If you want the lights turned off when you leave, they've got to come and turn the lights off for you. Sometimes they would pay 13-year-olds to push the stroller to synagogue for them because they weren't allowed to do that kind of stuff. I remember playing tennis at one of my friends' house. He lived next to a Jewish family.
I was the guy who hit the tennis ball over the fence. I went over and knocked on the door. They weren't allowed to open the door to see who was there. They were like, open it. I was like, okay. Then I opened it.
Then I had to walk through, open the back door. I had to walk around, turn the light on. I had to open the fence, the latch gate, pick up the ball, throw it back over the fence. Then I had to close everything on the way back out because they weren't allowed to do any of that. As humans, we do these strange things that we think will earn us some respect from God. We do these things that will earn us our own salvation somehow.
I don't know why we do it, but we do. Adherence to the law is something that the Jewish people in St. Ives do. It blows my mind how strict and how nuanced and how small it gets. But at the same time, they have this belief that if they just do something, then they can create reconciliation for themselves.
Our world, it's not super different. If we set Christianity kind of aside on its own, Christianity is over there by itself. Every other major religion, every other major philosophy teaches some method of fixing yourself, making yourself better, saying a certain number of prayers per day, giving a certain amount of money, doing a certain number of good deeds, reading enough self-help books to fix your problems. Our world preaches this message that we can fix ourselves, and that's not at all what Paul is saying in this book of Colossians. The Bible that we have, it's not a list of rules that we can follow and that will earn our own salvation, that will reconcile us to God by following the rules.
That's not it at all. The Bible is here to point to the fact that we have been reconciled by Christ's death, that he has already done all of that for us, and we don't have to. As I said, when we fix alienation in our own lives, we start with a phone call, we start with a text message, we set up a lunch date, and we start this process of years and months of backpedaling to try and fix a broken relationship. That same guy, Joel, that I was telling you about, my boss back in the day, I don't know what God has been doing in his life. Whatever it is, it's massive. Even against the court rules that he's not supposed to contact me after the whole lawsuit thing, he ended up Googling my name, looking me up, finding me on Facebook or something, finding out what I'm doing with my life, and then he sent me this email.
It's great. It says, Hey, Raz, God has put it on my heart to make peace with you. I'm really glad to hear that you're doing so well and have stepped out in faith and are studying the Bible full time. I just wanted to apologize for anything that I have ever said over the entire time that we knew each other that was not of God or anything that may have offended or hurt you. I would also like to remind and thank you for being the one who reintroduced me to the church and walked me through the doors so that I could begin to learn the ways of God and have God change me from within. It meant, this was about a month ago that I received that email and I can't really explain how much it means to me to see someone who I knew to be so broken at the time come up with something like that.
It's a great story of the beginnings of human reconciliation. But here's the thing, human reconciliation, like I said, it has its limits. There's only so much that happens, there's only so much ground to cover when humans become reconciled. It's also a two-way street. Joel could have sent me that email and I could have ignored it, I could have deleted it, but it takes two to tango, so to speak. If we want to be reconciled with other humans, two people need to work together to fix whatever broken relationship has happened.
That's also something that Paul says is not the case with God. Paul says, the way it works with God is that reconciliation is completely one-sided. We have been reconciled by Christ's death. We've done nothing. Now, I'm not a pet person. I have to confess, I'm not a pet person.
I think pets are absolutely the worst. And I can see the devastation in some people's eyes already. All I have to say is that you're absolutely wrong and that you made a mistake if you have a pet. That's simply the rules. You shouldn't get them. You shouldn't get cats.
You shouldn't get dogs. Absolutely the worst choice ever. This is a photo of my sister and her pet dog. Aw. His name is Harley. He is a, he's a Kishond.
A Kishond is a dwarfed husky or as Matt likes to call it, a dwarski. He's cute. I'll give him that. That's about all he is. He, the thing about long-haired dogs like that in Australia is that it's like 90 to 100 degrees every day. The thing stinks 24-7.
I'm not even kidding. It just smells so bad. And my sister's two and a half years older than me. She moved out of home two and a half years before I did. The dog became the house's pet instead of her pet, which of course was never the plan. I never wanted to look after the thing.
I pretty much hated Harley since he walked through the doors. But it ended up being my responsibility, at least in part, to feed the dog, to make sure the dog was clean, and to make sure when it was dirty that it didn't come in the house. Harley got old, as dogs do. He developed a medical condition where he could no longer eat tinned dog food, canned dog food, I don't know what you call it. Moist food. He couldn't eat it.
He could only eat like the dry sawdust looking stuff. If he ate the canned dog food, now this is not polite to say, especially when you've got a microphone on, but I'm going to say it anyway, he would get hectic cases of doggy diarrhea. Keep in mind that this is a ridiculously hairy dog. Yeah. Am I right? Pets are absolutely the worst.
And so when my parents were out of town, when my sister was off and away, and it was my responsibility to deal with Harley, and he got his hands or his mouth or whatever on something squishy, and then he ate it, it would be my job to either clean up the mess that was made or keep him outside stinking until someone else came home to deal with it. I just hated the dog. I'm going home in two weeks and I'm kind of really thankful that he's not around there anymore. Sorry, I just had to say that. Okay, we can take that down there. I don't even want to look at him anymore.
Here's the thing about me and Harley. If reconciliation, and it didn't happen, but if reconciliation was ever going to happen between us, he was pretty much powerless to do anything. If reconciliation were to happen, which it didn't, it was completely my business to make that happen. I would have to do everything in that relationship to fix the problem. Now, I'm not saying that we're God's little pets and I'm not saying that he hates us, but the relationship dynamic is a lot more similar to that than of me and Joel, Joel and I. It's completely one-sided.
We have nothing to do with the fact that God reconciled us. He chose in and of his own power to do it all on our behalf. We did nothing. Our own efforts achieved nothing and no amount of law-keeping, rule-following, good deeds that we can come up with are ever going to do something on our behalf to reconcile ourselves to God. We had nothing to do with how we were reconciled, but our solution is that we have been reconciled. And so, now that we have been reconciled, we can look back in hindsight and see that distance, that separation that we had from God, that 500,000 times here to Pluto.
We can see that that existed before and we can realize and understand the length that God went to to pull us back towards him, to reconcile us to him. And as a result of that, we become a changed people. So what does it look like for us to be a changed people based on the reconciliation that we've been given? What does it look like for us? How do we live out that result? Well, here's the result.
The result is simple. We continue in faith. Look down at the second half of verse 22. It says, In order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister. As a result of what Jesus did, we have now been made holy, blameless, and above reproach. Before the solution, when we were alienated from God, we were alienated, hostile in mind, and evil in deed.
And then the solution occurred. Then Christ died on the cross, and we were reconciled to God. And now we're no longer any of those things. We're no longer alienated. We're no longer hostile. We're no longer evil.
We are holy, blameless, and above reproach. It's a massive transformation. It's a complete 180 degree turn. And so something happens. Something occurs externally in our lives when we are changed in such a massive way. We become a new people.
We're no longer alienated. We're no longer hostile. And so we continue to strive for holiness. We continue to strive for blamelessness. And we continue to strive to be more and more above reproach as we continue on. Our knowledge turns into action, turns into knowledge, turns into action.
We mature in Christ, and we get pushed closer and closer towards Him. As a result of the reconciliation we've experienced through Christ's work at the cross, we will live lives that continue in faith. And we don't shift from the gospel that we heard. That's why we call ourselves a gospel-centered community on mission. We don't want to be shifting from the gospel that we heard. And that's why we're gospel-centered in community.
That's why we rely on our community, on our church family, to make sure that we're staying gospel-centered because verse 22 and 23 say we never want to shift from the hope of the gospel that we heard. And yet, somehow, for some reason, we allow ourselves in little ways to slowly creep away from that. All the time. We do it all the time. Sometimes, sometimes we let our pride get in the way of the gospel. Sometimes we let pride creep slowly into our lives and start straying us away from the gospel that we heard.
Sometimes we think that we have some power in and of ourselves. Sometimes we think that if we do follow the rules, if we do keep the laws, that because I am a good person, God owes me something. We allow our pride to slowly make us start creeping and straying away from the gospel. And when that happens, we are actually at most in the need of the gospel in the first place. When that happens, we are in need of our gospel-centered community to breathe the gospel back into our lives. Sometimes it is not pride.
Sometimes it is more like shame. Sometimes we allow ourselves to think that we don't deserve reconciliation. Sometimes we think, God couldn't forgive me for what I have done. Sometimes we think, I am damaged goods. God couldn't love someone who has experienced all of the junk that I have had to experience before. Sometimes we let shame in through the doors and it redirects us.
It shifts us away from the gospel and we slowly start creeping away from it. And at times like this, that is when we are in most need of the gospel. That is when we are in most need of a gospel-centered community to breathe the gospel back into our lives. Sometimes, sometimes it is not shame. Sometimes it is more simple. Sometimes it is laziness.
Sometimes we think, I don't need to read the Bible today. I don't need to read it this week. I don't need to read it this month. I already know most of it. Sometimes we think, I'm kind of tired. I've got a big assignment tomorrow.
I don't want to do anything tonight. I'm not going to go to my community group. There's plenty of volunteers on a Sunday. I don't need to go there. I don't need to plug in in any way. I just kind of want to chill out, do life my own way.
When we find ourselves letting laziness in through the doors, we shift away from the gospel. And that's when we most need the gospel to be breathed back into our lives. In fact, in all of these cases, in each and every one of these cases, we find ourselves straying from the gospel, but we also find ourselves not living out the intended result of our reconciliation. reconciliation. We know that we were alienated, we know that we've been reconciled, and as a result of that, we continue in faith. But as we let ourselves stray from the gospel, we cease to do this.
It all relies on the fact that we continue in the faith, we continue not to stray from the gospel, and we continue to live our lives in light of the fact that we have been reconciled. It reminds us constantly that we are powerless to save ourselves. It reminds us constantly that we need to live in a community of committed believers who are willing and able to breathe the gospel back into our lives. It convinces us consistently that we need our gospel-centered community, that we need our church family in order to be living out this intended result. It's not a game for the lone ranger, because the lone ranger will allow himself to shift from the gospel, and then they will not be living out the intended result.
We need our gospel-centered community, we need each other to live out the results of our reconciliation. Now the band is going to make their way back up for us. But maybe you've been sitting here tonight, maybe you've been hearing all of this stuff about alienation, you've been hearing this stuff about reconciliation, and you think to yourself, I already know and understand this. I already know that we've been reconciled, and I already know that we should continue in faith. So what?
Well, how is that playing out in your life right now? How are you continuing in faith, stable and steadfast? Are you ever shifting from the gospel? How honest are you being with yourself about your shifting from the gospel? How honest are you being with your church family about whether or not you've shifted from the gospel? gospel? Can you identify any ways, even the small little ways, in which you have shifted from the gospel, and honestly, do other people know about them?
Maybe you've been sitting there thinking something completely different. Maybe you've been thinking, God could never be reconciled to me. I could never be reconciled to God. Maybe you're thinking, you don't know me, you don't know what I've done, God hates me and he always will. Well, you're right on one count. I don't know what you've done.
But I do know this. We are humans and we have very limited power. And as we learned last week, God has infinite power. He is infinitely more powerful than us. And so any power that you have to alienate yourself from him, any power that you have to separate yourself away from God, he is infinitely more powerful to bring you back to him. He is infinitely more powerful to reconcile you to him than you are to alienate yourself from him.
And if you haven't yet, you can put your faith in him to do that. You can accept the reconciliation that he has already accomplished for you and offers freely to you. If reconciliation to God is something that we so desire, which we should, then I've got news for you. Nothing that you are capable of doing is going to achieve it. Nothing that you are capable of doing will ever reconcile you to God. Because it's not about you and it's not about what you do.
It's all about Jesus and it's all about what Jesus has already done to reconcile us to him. Let's pray. Father God, I just thank you that though we were so alienated from you, though we pushed you away, that you reached down and that you solved our problem for us. I pray and thanks that you have reconciled us to you. Lord, I pray that as we go about our lives this week, that we can be remembering that it's all about Jesus, that we can be living out the intended result of that reconciliation, that we can continue in faith praising you and loving you more each week. Turn our knowledge into action, into knowledge, into action towards Christ.
We love you, God. In Jesus' name, amen.
Cosmic Jesus, Cosmic Gospel
Colossians 1:14-20
Transcript
Colossians chapter 1 verses 15 through 20 when talking about Jesus says this. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body of the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. It's all about Jesus. It's all about Jesus. Let's pray. God, we ask you to make much of your name tonight. We pray that you would show us that it's all about Jesus.
And help us to genuinely see that and to know that and to feel that as we study this text. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. How are we doing tonight? Good. This section in Colossians, we're in our third week of Colossians.
This section is one of the densest Christological sections. So it's just this real dense passage about Jesus. And so we're in our third week. We're going to go verse by verse through the book of Colossians throughout the summer. And so we've actually entitled our series Colossians. It's all about Jesus.
And so that's what we're going to see is Paul, who's in prison, writes this letter to the church in Colossae. He makes it very clear that it's all about Jesus. That everything and all creation, that our lives, that the way we live, the way we work, the way we relate to one another, the way we operate as a church is about Jesus. And so that's what we're going to walk through tonight. That's what we're going to look at. I get highly frustrated at the church.
I get very frustrated when I see this in myself, when I see it in just how kind of the American church works. I don't know much about other. I can't speak to other areas of the church, but I kind of have a good handle, I think, on the southern church and the American church. And I get really frustrated with human-centric Christianity. Christianity. When we make Christianity about us.
Now Christianity and what Jesus accomplished for us in the gospel is very good news for us. But at no point is it about us. My wife and her brother Sam, she's got an older brother named Sam, they grew up in the Edgefield, Johnston area of South Carolina. And the movie That Darn Cat, it's a movie that was filmed in Edgefield. I think there was an older version and they remade it with Dougie Doug. You may know him from Cool Runnings.
If you ever get the chance to see the movie That Darn Cat, don't do anything else with your time. It's just not good. I mean, as awesome as Dougie Doug is, it just didn't come out right. But the movie That Darn Cat was filmed in Edgefield. And so when they were filming it, she was little, her older brother was little, and they were invited to like, everybody can come, be in this movie, in this one scene. You just got to sign a waiver and then you can all be in the background.
It was like a fair or something. And so there's this one scene in That Darn Cat that every time we watch it, we have to pause it because as the camera is panning along, following the main characters, you can see this part of Sam's head. Just the top. And, I mean, that was his big breakthrough. He is now the top of the head model that you hear all about. He models, you know, hats and you can see the top of his ears.
No. And Anna was next to him. So her big debut was just messed up because she was a foot shorter than she needed to be. In some ways, if Sam would sit people down and say, I want to show you a movie that I star in. I want to show you a movie that's about me. And then watch the movie and then pause it at that spot and go, did you see the top of my head?
Told you. That's a little bit of what we're doing when we act like Christianity is somehow about us. We're taking this epic story of redemption that God works throughout history and we're turning it around and saying it somehow centers on us and it does not. And so what we're going to do tonight, we're going to walk through this section of scripture and we're going to see that it's all about Jesus. Always Jesus. Only Jesus.
All about Jesus. We're going to see that it's all about Jesus and that Jesus, as God, is for his own glory. That he rescues and redeems for his praise, his glory, his name. Okay. So we're going to see that it's all about Jesus and that he actually, even in salvation, is for his own glory, his own praise.
And then we're going to talk a little bit about how that's really good news for us. That in Jesus being for his own glory and in everything being about him, it's actually really good news for us. It's not about us, but it's good news for us. And so that's what we're going to talk about. But we're going to spend some time talking about Jesus.
And so this section of scripture is dense. Every line is, it's very potent. And so we're going to have to go through and we're going to have to dig in and try to take every bit that we read and talk about it. And here's what I want for us. Here's what I want us to understand. We're going to try to look at Jesus as he is.
As he is creator. As he is massive and magnificent. We're going to try to take that view of Jesus. I love in the book of Revelation, John, the apostle who knew Jesus in life, who actually in his gospel he wrote, the gospel of John, he just refers to himself as the one who Jesus loved, which my younger brother was asking me the other day. He's like, do you think that annoyed all the other disciples? Like, just to be like, and the one who was Jesus's favorite was there.
And like they're later reading it and be like, seriously, John, really? Like, but he knew Jesus, was very close to Jesus. And then when he sees Jesus, not as Jesus was as a Galilean peasant, as a man, but when he sees Jesus in his glory, he starts off with his, in the book of Revelation, he says, I was in the spirit. And he said, Jesus shows up and he explains what he looks like. And he goes, and I fell over like I was dead. John's like, I'm pretty sure I died.
And then he woke me up and was like, don't be afraid. And I was like, have you seen you? He doesn't say that. But that's, that's the Jesus we're trying to look at tonight. The, the, not Jesus as he was, Jesus as he was when he was a Galilean peasant, but Jesus as he is. Creator, God, sustainer, ruler of all things.
And so it's going to be hard for us. It's an uphill battle. And here's, especially with this being a dense passage, I want to show you something. This is a volcano. So that's a volcano.
That's an erupting volcano. I think it's in Hawaii. This is also a volcano. Not quite the same though. And as we walk through this passage, we'll be tempted to do that. We'll be tempted to take and have all this rich depth and magnificent, magnificence of Jesus.
And we'll be tempted to say, and here's this theological fact we can learn. And here's something else we can learn and just put in our brains. And, and yeah, we'll be talking about it, but we'll miss it. See, both of those pictures are of a volcano, but one of them has been robbed of its awe-inspiring gravity of its nature. And so as we walk through this text, we don't want to do this. We actually want to see this.
We want to see Jesus with the weight and the gravity that surrounds him. We want to see him as he is, highly exalted. And so we're still going to have to unpack the text, but, but don't walk through and just take in Bible knowledge and facts about Jesus and categorize them and, and miss the weight behind it. So what we're going to do is before we hop in, we're going to pray. If you're not a believer, I would invite you to pray. The worst thing is you think some thoughts towards someone who doesn't exist.
The best thing is you talk to the God and creator of the universe, and he hears you and responds. But for believers in the room, we're going to ask the Holy Spirit to show us this when it comes to Jesus. We're going to ask the Holy Spirit to impress upon us the weight and the glory of our God. And so I'm going to give you a second. You're going to pray that and I'm going to pray for us. And then we're going to hop in.
Amen. God, we ask as your people that you wouldn't let us miss Jesus's greatness. You wouldn't let us grow accustomed to studying your word and learning things about you to the point that we fail to see you. And so we ask you to do what only you can do. That's to open our eyes, open our ears, and open our hearts and overwhelm us through your Holy Spirit with the greatness, the glory of who you are. We ask, God, that you would show us clearly yourself tonight.
We pray this in faith. In Jesus' name. Amen. So verse 15, we're in Colossians chapter 1. It says that he is the image of the invisible God. So this whole section is going to say he over and over again, and it's referring to Jesus.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. So when it says image of the invisible God, in the Old Testament, God, the creator God, he makes everything. He calls the Israelite people to be his people, and he does not show up in a form. He doesn't have a body. He doesn't say, this is what I look like. And so all the other gods that other nations have around them have, you know, they have something that represents them.
They have totem poles. They have Asherah poles. They have carved images. They have idols. They have all this. And God says, you don't.
He says, I'm the creator of all things. He says, I'm the only God. And you don't sketch me out. You don't carve me up. You don't draw me down. You don't make an image of me at all.
Anything in heaven, anything under the earth, anything in the water, anything on earth, nothing. And so throughout the Old Testament, he's the God that they have no image for. I mean, that's actually still true for us. We don't depict God the Father. We can depict Jesus because he came and lived as a Jewish man. And so we kind of have an understanding of what he would have looked like as a Jewish man in that time.
Sometimes you see the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove because it says in Luke that he came in the form of a dove. But we don't depict Jesus. We don't depict God the Father. I was actually at a wedding yesterday in a Catholic church. Beautiful, beautiful church. And at the center, they had this stained glass of Jesus.
And above it, they had this stained glass of this old guy with a big white beard. I'm assuming that's supposed to be God. And we're not supposed to do that. The Sistine Chapel, the famous Sistine Chapel where there's this old naked white guy like touching naked Adam. I don't know who that old white guy is, but he's not God because we're not supposed to have any image of God. But what Paul is saying is something radical, something spectacular.
What he's saying is that Jesus is the image of God. And he's the image of the invisible God. So if you want to know how God treats people, how God interacts with people, how God has friends, how God deals with those who are rebellious, how God deals with those who are religious, who are moral, who are uppity, you look at Jesus. And you have a really clear understanding of how God interacts, how God loves, how God moves. And so he's the image of the invisible God. It says he's the firstborn of all creation.
Okay, so firstborn can mean two things. It can mean first in order or it can mean first in status. It does not mean here that he was the first thing created. Because what it says next is for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. And it keeps going. But he's not the first created thing.
He's firstborn in status. So this was a patriarchal society. So the firstborn male was the highest in status. And they would refer to other people as the firstborn, which just meant they were in charge of. So when it says he's the firstborn of all creation, it means he's over top of all creation.
Because by him, everything that was made was made by him. It says for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Okay, so heaven, all the stars, all the stuff you see in the sky, all the things beyond the stars that we can't see, all the visible things, and all the invisible things. So heaven where people go when they die that know Jesus, have been rescued by Jesus, created by Jesus. On earth, all the visible and invisible things, created by Jesus. It says whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.
Every political system that anyone has ever been afraid of, every regime that's ever set itself up that people have submitted to is underneath Jesus. It's created through him and for him. So the U.S. government, the CIA, Russia, Mexico, England, Rome, all of them submit to and are under the authority of Jesus. All of them. The Taliban, all of them, under Jesus. For him to raise up, for him to lower, for him to do with as he pleases, he rules over all of it.
And it also says visible and invisible. So it's not just earthly kingdoms, earthly dominions, but it's also spiritual ones. Every power, every spirituality, every aura, every spiritual anything under Jesus. It means all demonic powers. Satan and Jesus aren't at odds with one another like Jesus versus Satan. It's not how that works.
Jesus rules over everything. It's like Godzilla versus Bambi without legs or something. I mean, it's not even, it's not fair. Because he created and he rules over. His enemies operate only in what he allows them to. So it says that, For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.
All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. Everything. By him, through him, for him. He's before it and in him it all holds together. Everything.
Nothing is excluded in that when it says heaven and earth, visible and invisible. At that point it's like, Oh, what? Okay, no, yeah, you win. All things. I got it. And he goes through and he says it's by him, through him, for him.
And he's before it and he holds it together. That means it's all about Jesus. All of it. Take just a second. Look around this room. It is not overly impressive.
But it was all created by, through and for Jesus. The architectural thought process that went into it. The human ingenuity. Everything. The humans in here. Our similarities and our startling uniqueness.
By, through, for Jesus. Your ability to look around this room and have your brain process what you're looking at without having to force yourself to do it. Currently there's air being pushed out. Oxygen. That was made oxygen by trees. Which doesn't even make any sense.
I've got a science teacher in here. She probably just got annoyed by that. Oxygen. Oxygen. That was made oxygen by trees. Right now is being pushed out of my mouth over vocal cords into a mouth with a tongue that's manipulating noises.
Noises that you learned as a child that are shooting through the air landing in each of your ears and your brain is immediately processing what is being said. You're not having to think about it. You're not having to make it happen. You are automatically. Explosions. Of concepts.
And understanding. Are going on right now inside of your head. in your brain. In a chunk of tissue surrounded by bone. A chunk of tissue that is now thinking about itself. That's weird and Jesus is just getting started. Your brain thinks about itself.
Your brain named itself. Your brain comes up with things to protect itself. Like I think helmets are a good idea. Your brain is like yes I think so. Now your brain is thinking you know if I named myself why didn't I come up with something better?
Like laser power thunder thought muscle or something. It's too long but we'll come up with something good. All of it. By him. Through him. For him.
While we were doing this. While we were talking about this. You were inhaling and exhaling oxygen. You weren't thinking about it. Your heart. A chunk of meat inside wrapped with bones and flesh wrapped around it was pumping continuously.
Blood that was taking oxygen nutrients throughout your entire body. It's happening all the time. It was pumping life through you. Indescribable. Intangible. But we know it when it's not there.
And we know it when it is. Life. Life. By him. Through him. For him.
He's before it. And he holds it together. And it's all about Jesus. Every bit of it. Everything we do is about Jesus. All of existence.
All of creation. How we live and move and have our being. It's in him. Everything we do. When you go to the store. By him.
Through him. For him. You buy milk. The people that came up with the idea of how to package milk. Invented plastic. The guy who squeezed the milk out of an udder into a jar for you.
The ingenuity that came up with the diesel engine that brought it to you. And the idea for refrigeration. All of it. For his glory. For his name. For his praise.
Every bit of it. So, real quick. For fun. We're going to walk through and look at some things that he has designed. That he has created. That are by him.
Through him. And for him. For his glory. For his praise. For his name. That are just to give us a glimpse.
A hint. A shadow. Into his greatness. And his goodness. And his massiveness. This is the New England mohawk bird.
I actually don't know what the name of that bird is. But. But it was made by Jesus for his glory and for his name. I know that. That. Okay.
That's a micrograph. And all right. First of all, I've got some people in here. We're going to look at some stuff that has to do with like science. And I've got some people in here that are like doctors and science people and all that. If I say something dumb and someone looks at you because they think it was dumb, just do this.
Like, that was correct. Okay. The last time I was in a science class, I was in high school. So, but I did do some research. This is a micrograph, which is basically, they looked at it under a microscope, took some pictures, and then digitalized it so you could see it better. That is a dust mite.
Those exist in your carpet, in your couches, in your pillow. So when you go to sleep tonight, just listen very carefully. You'll hear them crawling around, partying, celebrating. But don't worry, they just eat skin cells, so that's not creepy. By him, through him, for him. That, those are, to take away the horrible image of the dust mite, those are baby foxes, by him, through him, for him.
That is the angel oak that is in Charleston, South Carolina. When the person took that picture, it was taking in sun's rays and popping out oxygen all over the place. A lot of good oxygen around that tree. That is a really cool looking fish. That's the Norwegian, spiky fish. By him, through him, for him.
For his glory, for his praise, for his name. Moment of silence for the Krispy Kreme. I'm just kidding. That is DNA. That's like a digital version of it. It's not actually DNA.
I don't think we have actual pictures of it. But DNA is in every cell in the human body. All of the DNA for all of the cells in the human body is in every cell in the human body. So if DNA filled up this room, each cell comes to the DNA and takes this much information so that it knows what it's supposed to do. But all of the DNA for every cell is in every cell.
But each cell knows what information it needs so it can do the appropriate thing. for his glory, for his name. Those are red blood cells and a white blood cell. It's pumping through your body right now, taking oxygen, nutrients, white blood cells fight off disease. It's part of your immune system. That's why they look so gangster. That is the human circulatory system.
That's where all the blood is going right now in each of us. except for it's not going to the feet or the hands of every female in this place for some reason. Those are negative 10 degrees right now. That's a sunset on the Pacific Ocean by Jesus, through Jesus, for Jesus. This is the Himalayan mountains. He carved them out to display his glory, to show his greatness, to give us a glimpse into who he is. All of culture, all of creativity, in the Old Testament, God makes man and woman and He tells them to go Edenize the earth, to go, He gives them the cultural mandate to go build the earth into what it's supposed to be.
All of that is to point to Jesus and to give Him glory. That is the horsehead nebula. Nebula are gases out in space. That's just floating around out there doing its thing. I took a picture of it with the Hubble telescope. The next one is the crab nebula, also just gases floating around out in outer space.
Just beautiful things that, as far as I know, have no purpose whatsoever other than to show off God's glory, His greatness, His majesty and His power. The next thing, we're not going to go there yet. Oh, what? We just, maybe we are. All right.
The next thing, I want to explain it real quick before we look at it. They took the Hubble telescope. They pointed it off at nothing. They just pointed it in an area of sky that when looking through the Hubble telescope was completely black. And then they took a picture and they opened up the shutter, which is how light comes into the camera of the Hubble telescope, for 11 days. So for 11 days, they just opened it up and received as much light as they possibly could.
They pointed the most powerful telescope out in outer space into nothing, opened the shutter for 11 days. And what they came up with was the deep field, ultra deep field. That's the picture it took. 10,000 galaxies. 10,000 galaxies when they pointed our best telescope into nothing. I'm going to read it.
Leave that up there. I'm going to read a passage. Short one from Isaiah 40. It says this, Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand? Do that real quick. That's the hollow of your hand.
90% Of the ocean is unexplored. We can't even get to it. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span? That's the measurement of a span. Enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains and scales and the hills in a balance. Every time I see something like that, every time I hear that the universe is expanding, we don't know how big it is, we just know it's getting bigger.
Every time I hear that, I think, well, Jesus' hand is bigger than I thought. Creator of the universe marked it off with his hand. 10,000 galaxies when we point into nothing. It's all about Jesus. Only, always, about Jesus. Just to give us a glimpse, to give us a hint at his greatness, his massiveness.
See, he created it all for his pleasure, his will. Let's read the next section here. So it's all about Jesus and it says, 17, And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. The church is all of those who have been rescued and redeemed by Jesus, by what he accomplished on the cross. Those who have placed their faith in him for salvation, for him to rescue us, not by our good works, not by our morality, not by our hard effort, but by his.
He's the head of the body of the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. So Jesus came to earth, this massive God, creator of all things, came to earth, existed as a human, and died. He humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross, and then he rose from the grave, which makes sense because I don't think death could handle it. But he's the firstborn from among the dead, meaning that we might would be raised from the dead as well, but he's first.
It says he's the firstborn from among the dead that in everything he might be preeminent, meaning he's before and over everything. That in the church he's the head and he's the firstborn from the dead, so that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross. You see, we have a cosmic God, and through the cross we have a cosmic gospel. You see, when God created everything in the Garden of Eden, our first parents rebelled against him, desired to be their own gods, and when they did, not only were we cursed with sin, not only are we broken and off and marred, but the earth was cursed because of our sin.
So that Romans 8 would say that the earth groans in pains waiting for Jesus to come back, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of sons of God. So you have sin of moral kind. The reason we lock our doors, the reason we have police force, the reason we have jails is because of humans running around being sinful and broken and messed up. And then we have brokenness in the earth so that what should have just given nutrients to the earth, what should have just given water to the crops now goes through and tears down and demolishes cities. We have hurricanes and floods and earthquakes because the earth has been marred and broken by our sin.
And so Jesus, in being after his glory, it says he reconciled all things to himself, making peace by the blood of his cross. That it wasn't just about us, but that it's about him and him reuniting everything that he created for his name, for his praise, and for his glory back to himself. It's all about Jesus. And in reconciliation, it is not about us. And when he made us right with himself, it wasn't about us, it was about him. It was about his desire to bring everything back in alignment with himself.
At this point, there may be a bit of... kind of taking those verses, just a few verses, and kind of pulling a lot out of them, trying to say that everything was about Jesus. Because we want to push back and say, no, no, no, no. It's because he loved us so much that he saved us. Yeah. He loves us. But because he's loving, not because we're lovable.
You have a roommate. You know people aren't lovable. Those foxes, maybe. Humans, not so much. So yeah, he loves us because he's loving.
And so for the praise of his name and for his glory and for his fame, he rescues and redeems. But I'm going to show my work. We're going to go through the Old Testament. All of it. I'm just kidding. We're going to go through some verses in the Old Testament that God declares.
We're going to look at one in the New Testament where God just declares this is about me. This is about my glory, my name, my fame. So here's what we're going to do. It's a good bit of verses. I'm going to read through them quickly. But you're going to have to kind of stay with us as we go through this.
They will be on the screen if that helps you. If that doesn't help you, then don't look at the screen. But we're going to run through verses where God clearly says this is about me. This is about my glory, my name, my fame. Ephesians 1, 4-6. Paul says this.
He says that he chose his people for his glory. It says, In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. That's where Jesus died on the cross and rescued us and made us into family. For love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his will to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved. It says he rescued us for his praise of his grace. God created us for his glory.
Isaiah 43, 6-7 says this. I will say to the north, Give up. And to the south, Do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth. Everyone who is called by my name whom I created for my glory. Whom I formed and made.
Glory just means to show off my worth and my greatness. It says God called Israel for his glory. Jeremiah 13, 11 says this. For as the loincloth clings to the waist of a man, and so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they may be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. God spared Israel in the wilderness for the glory of his name. So in Exodus, when the people he had just rescued from Egypt rebel against him, he spares them, doesn't destroy them for his name.
Ezekiel 20, 14 says it. I acted for the sake of my name that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out. God later, when he takes them into his kingdom and when he has prophets and they rebel against him, he makes them into a nation but he doesn't cast them off for their rebellion. Isaiah, I mean, 1 Samuel 12, 20 says this. Do not turn aside from following the Lord for the Lord will not forsake his people for his great name's sake because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself. Isaiah 49, 48, 9, and 11 tells us that he defers his wrath, that he doesn't destroy us when we deserve it for his name and his glory.
For my name's sake, I defer my anger. For the sake of my praise, I restrain it for you that I may not cut you off. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it. For how should my name be profaned? My glory, I will not give to another. John, 1 John 2, 12 says this.
I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name's sake. We're going to end in this one in Ezekiel. It's long, but it's good. Ezekiel says this. Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God, It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. In this section, he's going to talk about what he's doing in salvation, what he accomplishes for us in Christ.
So he's explaining that in salvation, he's doing it for his glory, his praise, his name. It says, And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations in which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God. When through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes, I will take you from the nations and gather you from the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleanliness and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.
And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. That's what he accomplished for us in the cross, that he sent his spirit into us, gave us a new heart, he doesn't make us better, he makes us new. It's what he accomplished for us in the cross and he says, I'm going to do this and he ends with this, it is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord God. Let that be known to you. God is for his own glory.
It is all about Jesus. He is the creator God and in salvation, in reconciling everything back to himself, he is for his own name, his own glory, his own praise. It's all about Jesus. All of it. Okay. So how is that good news for us?
How is it good news for us that God would be about God's glory? God's glory. First of all, we hear that and we're like, well, isn't that a little narcissistic? Who does God think he is? God actually has a very good view of himself. He thinks he's God.
And that question, when we're tempted to ask it, is a little bit like, okay, bro, who do you think you are? Honestly, if God was pointing to someone else, something else other than himself, he would not be God. If God created all things and then said, you know what? A really good thing to pursue with your life is? Money. Oh, go for power.
Power's the best. You don't want to praise me. You don't want to give me glory because power, I made power greater than me. Go for comfort. If God was pointing to something else, he wouldn't be God. And actually, in being good and being holy and being loving and calling us to himself, he's actually being very good and gracious to us.
So we look and say, okay, how is God, in being for his own glory, good news for us? Okay. God created everything and it rebelled against him. But in his goodness, he didn't destroy it because he is good and he is loving. He rescued and he redeemed to bring it back in alignment with himself because of his great name, his holiness. We're going to see how this comes together for us.
Here's what happened. Let's go back to 18. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him, through Jesus, to reconcile, bring back into a right relationship, to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. You see, we weren't reconciled to God.
We weren't in a good relationship with him. We were rebellious and separated from him. But Jesus, who all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, Jesus came and he lived a perfect life on our behalf and for his glory and for his name and in reconciling all things to himself, he bled out on a cross. You see, the creator of wood, of trees, of human ingenuity was laid out on a piece of honed wood specifically designed by creative humans to inflict the maximum amount of torture. See, the creativity of humans that he had created had gotten together and decided a great way to torture someone and to extend and prolong agony before death.
See, the hands that marked out the expanse of the universe were laid out on that wood and had a metal spike driven through them. Oxygen was pushed past vocal cords into a mouth manipulated by a tongue that shot through the air and entered into his ears and all that was designed to praise and glorify him was used to revile, curse, and bring him shame as he hung on a cross. The creator of oxygen had it denied his lungs as he hung gasping for breath. He who designed red and white blood cells and the circulatory system that pumps through all of us right now had his falter and fail him as his ripped open body poured his blood and his DNA out onto puddles in the sand so that the animals that were designed for his glory might come lick it up.
The creator of everything took our wrath to make peace by the blood of his cross for his glory and for his name and to show his magnificent love and greatness. That he didn't destroy us and he didn't tell us to earn it but he humbled himself and he stooped on our behalf. You see, if you saw a man stop and pick up a hurt baby bird your mind would not immediately think wow, that must be the best baby bird of all the baby birds. No, you'd think the man was good and gracious to care for something that couldn't care for itself. And so when we see Jesus stooping to rescue and to redeem we don't think wow, we must be so lovable.
We think wow, he must be so good and he must be so loving that this God who created all things might have a part of his creation rebel against him, hate him, run from him and that he instead of destroying them as he ought would stoop become one of them and suffer at their hands so that he could rescue them so that he could make peace by the blood of his cross. He is great and he is holy and we praise his name. So God is for his glory and he's for the praise of his name. That's what Ephesians says that he rescued us he adopted us as sons to the praise of his glorious grace. If God is for his glory if Jesus and the cross is for his glory and for the praise of his glorious grace he is not for your begrudging submission.
He's for your joy. If he's for his glory he's for your joy. If he's for his praise he's for our joy. He can get our begrudging submission. The God who measured out the universe can get you to submit to him but he's for his glory and his praise. So we start asking how do we respond to this?
The band's going to come back up and I want to unpack for us quickly how we respond how we look at this God this creator God this Jesus who made all things by him through him and for him that he's before all things and in him all things hold together and that he was willing to die to rescue us not because we were worth it but because he's worthy not because we're good but because he is and so there are these moments when I periodically be talking to someone and they go I just don't I just don't feel worth it I just don't feel like I deserve this there are these moments when we sit back and we think about the cross and we think I'm small I'm insignificant and I'm dark and twisted and off and I don't deserve this exactly see it's in those moments when we think that that we've actually gotten it right it's in those moments when we think I don't deserve this I'm unworthy absolutely that's why he's to the praise of his glorious grace that's why Ephesians 4 says that he rescued us for the praise of his glorious grace grace is that he gave us unmerited love favor unearned we can't morality God into owing us something we can't behave enough so that he has to give us life and joy and peace none of that but we can in those moments when we realize our lack of worth we can praise his grace we can praise that he rescued and redeemed us because he's good because he's holy and you see God being for his glory and being for our joy comes together in our praise of his glorious grace praise is joyous grace is good that we didn't deserve this and we didn't earn it but he gave it to us because he's good I like football I'll be watching football games sometime and something will happen I'll be sitting down and I'll just I just can't stay seated like I'll be at my house by myself holding nachos jump up after like a big hit because I used to play defense and just be like boom son you'll be at games sometime if you're in the stadium and someone will break a play and everyone just hits their feet and you just start yelling because you've been caught up in something beyond yourself and when he's after the praise of his glorious grace he's not after your begrudging submission he's not after you to be afraid of him and so you've been to him he's after you to be so overwhelmed by his goodness to have the spiritual synapses and receptors of yourself just be overwhelmed and flooded by that this God this creator God would rescue and redeem that he would love us when we're unlovable that he would those of us who don't deserve it who haven't earned it that he would give us unmerited grace and favor and he would rescue us and make us right with himself because of his own goodness and so we praise his grace with everything we have we praise him with all of our lives we praise him not to earn anything but because it's already been given to us not to put him in our debt because our debt's already been paid we just praise him with how we live with how we work with we stand and we sing we praise him because it's all about Jesus and he is for his glory have no doubt about that he's for his own glory but that means very much so that he's for our joy that we would be so engulfed in his greatness that we would cease to worry about ourselves we would cease to seek our own small glory and we be caught up in a greater story invited into something so much hugger so much bigger so here's what we're going to do we're going to praise his grace if you're in here and you don't know Jesus I'm going to tell you that he is after his own glory but he's not after your begrudging submission he doesn't want you to work harder he doesn't want you to go earn it he wants you to know that he's already accomplished everything on your behalf and that you can praise his name because he is good and he is loving and he is holy and he does redeem and he does rescue and that he did make peace by the blood of his cross and the rest of us are going to stand up and we're going to sing we're going to praise Jesus because it's all about Jesus we're going to praise his grace because he rescues and he redeems and we who in making much of himself invited us into a life that we can believe and poured grace upon grace upon grace upon grace upon us I'm going to pray and then we're going to praise God we praise your name Jesus it's all about you and I pray that through your Holy Spirit you would teach us how to praise you would teach us how to give you glory how to be so caught up in your glory that we are overwhelmed by joy Jesus you've created and made and hold everything together and you stooped and you died on our behalf and you poured grace on us so God we praise your name Holy Spirit move and show yourself to us in Jesus name we pray amen to
Maturity in Christ
Colossians 1:9-14
Transcript
You got to be strong to move the new podium. Goodness. Everybody give. Where's Charlie? Charlie, raise your hand. Charlie.
Charlie. Charlie made this for us. It is actually very beautiful. Well, I hope everybody's doing good tonight. Just wanted to say thank you for coming and worshiping with us. I know it's Memorial Day weekend, and so I hope you have taken some time to just rest and relax and spend time with family, but also to remember the sacrifice that people have made on our behalf so that we can actually have the religious freedom that we have together as a church family.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Matt Freeman. I'm one of the pastors of Mill City Church. And you're not usually used to seeing me in this context. I'm usually leading worship. But I am humbled and honored to share God's word with you tonight.
So if you've got a Bible, you're going to want to have it. We're not going to be putting the scripture on the screen because I want you to have a Bible in your hand. So if you've got one of the ones that we had by the door, that's actually going to be page 638. And I've got a couple of guys. Basically, they're going to walk to the front of the room and then walk to the back. And so if you need a Bible, just lift your hand up.
They'll be happy to hand one to you. And that's our gift to you. So if you don't have one, we'd love for you to take that one and keep it. Or if you know somebody who doesn't have a Bible and you'd like to take one with you, we've got plenty. That's what they're for. All right.
Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. All right. So last week we began a brand new series and it's entitled Colossians. It's all about Jesus. And so we're going to be spending the next 10 or so weeks, basically the entire summer, walking through Paul's letter to the church at Colossae.
And what's really neat about this is, first of all, Paul's writing to a relatively young church, a church that's about six or seven years old. So it's good for us to hear what Paul's writing to a young church. And he's writing to a relatively healthy church. So what we're going to see is that Paul is writing to encourage this church in the gospel. And he's going to do so in a couple of different ways. He's going to point them to the sufficiency of Jesus.
He's going to point to how they should be living out their faith in the context of community. And he's going to take some time to talk about how their actions are actually lived out, how they walk out their faith on a day in and day out basis. So I'm very excited to talk with you tonight. But before we do so, I just want to pray and ask that God would speak to us. If you would, let's bow our heads and pray. God, truly, I am unworthy to stand before your people and preach.
I'm thankful that your grace has covered me and has made me new. God, that I do not stand here in my own flesh. Holy Spirit, I'm asking that you would speak through me, that you would encourage your people tonight. In Jesus' name, amen. So as we're hopping in, I want to ask a question.
How many of you in this room, at a heart level, in some form or fashion, just wish you were better? Okay. I would say that most of us would follow. At some stage in the game, we just wish we were better. Wish we were a better dad. Wish you were a better wife, a better student, a better athlete, a better worker.
So you start thinking things like, if I could just get that promotion, if I could just set aside a once a week date night with my spouse, if I could just get my bench press up 15 pounds, if I could move from a B to an A, if I could move from getting $3 an hour, getting paid $3 more an hour. So I don't, in fact, I don't think there's anything that we do or anything that we experience, even ourselves, that we don't wish in some form or fashion was a little bit better. And I'll show you. All right, so let's say you go to a nice restaurant and you sit down and you start eating. What's the first thing you're going to start talking about?
Five other places. Kids, that's great. Ha ha, yeah. Five other places that you've probably eaten. So instead of appreciating the piece of bacon that's on your plate, you're going, oh, I've had peppered bacon before.
In fact, I've had beef wrapped in bacon. What is this? So at some stage in the game, we wish things were better. Another way to look at it would be if you are walking out of the movie theater and you said, that was the best movie I've ever seen. And it would have just been perfect if Mark Wahlberg would have been the lead actor. Yeah, you're right.
Nobody says that. That's true. Oh, Mark Wahlberg. And I know some of you are sports fans. Okay, so let's say you're watching Carolina play, and Carolina pulls it out in the last couple of seconds of the game. The quarterback throws a game-winning touchdown.
In fact, he threw four touchdowns in that game. But all that we can seem to talk about is the two interceptions he threw in the third quarter that might have cost us the game. Instead of realizing that he won the game, we always want things to be better. I do this. Some of you guys know that my wife Katie and I make pallet art. You can't tell, right?
I mean, there's not pallets anywhere. But I'm sure you guys are familiar with Pinterest. But Katie was on Pinterest, and she found this cool do-it-yourself project. She goes, why don't we try this? So we did.
We took a Sunday afternoon, and we took an old pallet, and we cut it down, and we put the boards together and basically just made a frame. And then we painted it and painted the South Carolina flag on it. And, of course, we painted the base color orange because we're Christians, right? And we hung it on the wall. And it took us about five hours to do it from start to finish, and we were really proud of it. Honestly, we were very proud of it.
But now that I look at it on the wall, I realize that it's gigrundous. It takes up like a whole wall in our man cave. And if you look at it, the boards are kind of cattywampus. It's not actually square. It's not the dimensions of a flag. And so we started to do more and more of them.
And I was like, okay, I want to get better. The next time I actually put the boards side by side, and I made sure it was square. And then it was still a slow process. I mean, I was hand sawing things, guys, like this. Okay? So I bought a Sawzall.
So I have a reciprocating saw so I could cut the nails and cut the boards. All along the way, I wanted my process to be better. And the reason we approach things in life like that is that we, deep down, we have a deep desire within us to actually be better, to accomplish something, to do something big, to make much of the lives that we've been given. And I would say that this is especially true for those of you in the room who are Christians. Christians, I'd imagine that some of you sitting there as Christians have had the thought, I wish I was a better Christian. I'm sure you have.
I'm sure you've had that thought. I wish I was a better Christian. I wish I read my Bible more. I wish my prayer life was stronger. I wish I had faith to submit my finances to Jesus. I wish I had boldness and courage to serve in Kid City.
I wish I could just tell my boss about Jesus and his people who are wired to do better, to be better, to search for more. Paul is actually going to be writing this letter to the Colossians, the section we're looking at. He's going to be talking about what it looks like to grow in maturity, to grow into maturity in Christ. So, again, if you've got your Bibles, we're going to be at Colossians 1, verse 9, 638 in the Bibles that we have by the door. Let's read this together.
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. So, that's the chunk we're going to be looking at tonight.
And if you're a note taker, our title for tonight, the title of our sermon is actually Maturity in Christ. That's what we're going to be talking about. And when you hear that word maturity, you're automatically going to associate it with growth. I think that's the thing we think about the most when you're putting maturity in your mind. You're thinking about growth. And that's going to come in all different forms and fashions.
Okay? So, you're going to see physical maturity like Mitch Stoiku, who has all of a sudden grown four inches in like four days. For real. I don't know what the Stoikus are feeding him, but he's ginormous now. So, you've got physical maturity. You've got emotional maturity.
I don't know if you guys got to see the kids playing around before they went back to Kid City. But we've got parents who are getting to teach their children to obey, to be able to control their emotions. So, that's fun. And they need your prayers. Thank you. I'm sure they're wanting that.
There's also like mental and intellectual maturity. So, we've got students of all ages in the room. We've got middle school students, high school students, college students, those that are doing postgraduate work, and some students that are in seminary. And what we're actually going to be dealing with tonight is spiritual maturity. And we're going to be seeking to answer one question. And I'm going to ask it in a few different ways.
That way, we can actually put a handle on it. The question we're going to try to answer is, how do we spiritually mature in Christ? How do we do that? How do we grow to be more like Jesus? How do we learn to follow Jesus more closely? And as you might have picked up in our first reading of the text, Paul's going to address this idea of growing in maturity in Christ in two different ways.
So, he's going to talk about the pursuit of knowledge. As he says, I want you to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. And he's going to talk about the pursuit of actions. So, how do we actually walk that out? And if you think about it for a second, we're going to lean probably one way or the other when it comes to those two ideas. The pursuit of knowledge to grow or the pursuit of action to grow.
You're going to grow in one of those two ways. So, some of you are like, okay, I want to read a book. I want to take a class. I want to go sit down and have a conversation with somebody who can actually help me grow, help me mature, tell me things. Some of you are like, nah, I don't want a book. I don't want anybody to tell me.
I just want to jump in and give it my best effort, and I'll learn as I go. I'll learn from my mistakes. I'll give you an example of how this plays out. Okay, so let's say you're going furniture shopping, and you're looking for a bookcase. So, of course, the first place you're going to go is Big Lots because you're classy because you want a good Big Lots. This is a true story, so I'll go ahead and give the spoiler.
So, Katie and I moved to Columbia, and we were actually looking for a bookcase. We went to Big Lots, and we got the $20 bookcase in a box. And the way that – I know, it's shameful – the way that Katie and I would build that bookcase would be completely different than each other, completely different. If Katie's going to build that bookcase, here's how it's going to go, and I can say this because she's in Kid City. Katie's going to carefully cut the box open. She's going to take the front that actually has a picture on it and set it to where she can see it.
She's going to pull out all the tools and lay them on a rag because she doesn't want to get the carpet dirty. She's going to take all the pieces and lay them out all over the floor so that she can see them and organize them by size, color, and shape. And then she's going to take the owner's manual, and she's going to read it three times to make sure that she's got it all done. And seven hours later, she's going to have a perfectly built bookcase that will actually hold books. Now, me, on the other hand, I'm going to rip this box up beyond all recognition. I'm going to find the owner's manual, too, and I'm going to unfold it so that I can put my tools on it.
I don't want to get the carpet dirty either. And then I'm going to find pieces as I go, and I'm going to put this thing together. And seven hours later, I'm going to have a bookcase, too, and it may or may not hold books. I don't know. I don't know. So Paul's going to address the church at Colossae in how they grow in Christ.
And he's going to talk about the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of action and how those are actually going to work together. And as people who are wired to actually be better, to do better, to strive for more, I want us to listen as to how we can grow in Christ. Let's jump back into the text, verse 9. And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.
So, the first thing that we're going to see in the text is actually our first point for tonight. So, if you're a note taker, this is going to be our first point. We grow in maturity through both knowledge and action. So, while we may have a propensity to lean one way or the other, what we're actually going to see is we're going to grow in both. We're going to grow in both knowledge and in action. And I love the way this verse starts off.
I love it. Jump back there with me. It says, And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray. Who? Who's praying here? What we looked at last week is that Paul and Timothy are actually writing this letter together.
And it actually, verse 3 that we looked at actually begins kind of the same way. They're talking about what they're praying for the church at Colossae. And what they're actually praying is that they would be filled with knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. They're praying for wisdom, understanding, and the knowledge of God's will. And it even qualifies it there. It says spiritual.
And that word spiritual is going to be of the Holy Spirit or from the Holy Spirit. That's a big prayer that Timothy and Paul are praying, that they may be filled with the knowledge of His will, growing in understanding and wisdom. And I love that. I love that. Paul and Timothy are imprisoned in Rome. They don't even know these people.
And in a jail cell of sorts, they are praying. They are laboring in prayer that they would grow, that they would be filled with the Holy Spirit, that they would grow in wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. And I just love that. And so if you're wanting to, that's a great prayer. If you're wanting to pray something for our church, if you're going, man, I actually want to grow in praying things for our church, that's actually a great place to start. And so that's what Paul's praying.
He says, I want you to grow in understanding, in knowledge, and in wisdom. Why? Why does he pray that? Let's keep going. As we're going into verse 10, it says, So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. Okay, so we see it.
He clarifies why he's praying that. So Paul and Timothy are praying that they would grow in wisdom, knowledge, and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. And the word that Paul's going to use there for to walk is literally going to refer to all of life. So Paul says, I'm praying for this so as to help you walk in all of life. And I think he's being very intentional there. He's using that word because he doesn't want them to grow in understanding, wisdom, and knowledge for knowledge's sake.
He wants them to grow so that it will actually affect all of their lives. How many of you have ever seen the show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? You ever seen that show? Okay, I was down on it when it first started. I didn't know if I was going to like it. But the premise of the show is that they take architects and attorneys and surgeons and they put them on this TV show.
It's basically like a game show where they're having to answer questions against elementary students based off of the standards that the elementary students are learning. And so you'll have an architect standing there and they'll say, okay, you choose a category. And he'll go, okay, fourth grade geography, fourth grade geography. Okay, sir, what is the capital of Wyoming? Idaho? Yes, Sally?
Cheyenne? And it's just a really funny show. And what that show is actually exposing is the fact that all of us, all the way through school, have learned things that we're never going to use again. Ever. I don't need to know what the capital of Wyoming is unless I'm there or I'm on that show. Those are pretty much my two opportunities.
But basically what he's exposing here is that we're not to learn things just to know them. It's that knowledge should actually lead to action. So what he's showing here is that this idea that we pursue either knowledge or action is not what we're going for, but actually that both of them work together as we follow Jesus. I want you to think about it like this. The more you know about Jesus, the more you want to follow him. And that leads you into action.
And by doing things, you actually learn in the process, which drives you deeper into action. You see how those work together? As you start to grow and know things, you start to do. And as you start to do, you learn more things. And it becomes a cyclical process. And what Paul is saying here is that knowledge should lead us into action.
And the group that we can look to that exemplifies this the best is the disciples of Jesus. I want you to think about this for a second. I want you to think about the disciples of Jesus. This was a ragtag group of numbskulls comprised of tax collectors and fishermen. And Jesus comes to them and he says, come follow me. And so they drop everything and they start following Jesus.
And Jesus teaches them and he trains them. So he helps them grow in knowledge and understanding. And then he sends them out. He sends them out two by two and they cast out demons. And they heal the sick. And then they come back.
So their knowledge impacted their actions. And they came back and they talked about it. And Jesus continued to pour into them. And then we see the disciples getting to be involved in things like the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus used them as part of that. So we see this cyclical process of knowledge leading to action, knowledge leading to action.
And we've read the Gospels. We know that the disciples don't get this right all the time. Peter, right? That's who you want to think about? Peter. So in the same chapter in Scripture, Peter says, you are the Christ.
And then a little bit later, Jesus has to say, get behind me, Satan. This is the same Peter that would deny Jesus three times. But what we see is they continue to grow. Even as they messed up, even as they screwed up, they continue to grow and mature in Christ. And when Jesus died on the cross and was raised from the grave, he gave him a new commandment. He said, go and make disciples.
And what we're going to see is these same disciples that were the stumbling bumbling as they followed Jesus, the same disciples that Acts is going to say in chapter 17 that they turned the world upside down. They turned the world upside down. So that's what it's actually going to look like for us. And the way that we do this as believers, the way that we grow in knowledge and action, is we do that in the context of community. That's going to be our greatest place to actually grow in these things. And remember, Paul's writing to a church.
He's writing to a group of believers. And so every time you see that word you, I want you to think about it not as you rugged band of individuals, but you in the context of community, you the church. What Paul's saying here is you can't live out your faith. You can't grow to maturity in Christ outside of living with other believers. We did a series back in the fall. I'm actually wearing the band from it called One Another, where we actually walked through the one another's in the New Testament.
We only did like seven or eight, but there are even more than that. And I'm telling you, you can't do one another's without others. See how that works? How those words work? And this is where I think I've seen our church grow a lot. So we see where it says, be hospitable to one another.
We see that in scripture. So as a church, that means we open up our homes. That means we host community groups in our homes and we welcome people in and we serve them a meal. And when guests come, we want them to feel welcome too. That's why we have a host team for our gathering, so that as people come in, that they feel welcome, they feel loved. We want to be hospitable.
We see where it says, forgive one another. We do that in the context of community. So that when someone in my community group, I say something that's offensive or hurtful because I feel conviction, I get to go to them and repent of my sin and ask for their forgiveness. And they get to extend that forgiveness and grace back to me because of what Jesus has done on our behalf. And we get to be reconciled. Scripture is also going to say that we should bear one another's burdens.
That means that if someone doesn't have enough gas money to get to my house to hang out with our community group, I'm not okay with that. That I'm going to step in and bear burdens. And I'm going to tell you, this is where I have seen our church grow. And I'm glad to be a part of believers like you guys. I've seen people bear each other's burdens like never before. And it's been beautiful.
And it's been messy. And we've gotten to walk through it together. I've seen car payments made. I've seen people go and buy groceries and take it to someone's house. I've seen a mortgage paid. I've seen rent paid.
I've seen power bills paid. And not just monetary things. Just giving of their time. People moving from place to place. When the Pabones were moving off of Fort Jackson, I saw our church family rally around them night after night after night to make sure that they could get out. I'll give you an example.
On Friday, I was driving back to my house. And this is the worst, okay? Because this happened a lot. I was rolling up my passenger side window. And I got it to the top. And I went, kick, kick.
I said, oh, no. And I looked. And slowly, my window began to fall into my door. And there it was. And I knew that storm was coming. I knew that storm was coming.
And I was freaking out. And I didn't know who else to call. I knew one person. If anybody would try to help me get it back up, it was Daniel Gillett. And so I texted Daniel. I'm like, dude, I don't know what to do, man.
Can you help me? And I knew Daniel. I was going to the northeast. I knew Daniel was about 30 minutes away. He was on the way. And he's like, come on, man.
We'll get it up. And so at 2.30 on a Friday, when he had multiple jobs to do, he and I were out there sweating together, not knowing what we were doing, pulling parts of my door up, using like little wooden shunts to put up in there to just block my window up. And 30 minutes later, the window was up. That guy, he bore my burdens. He did. And that's how we grow together as a church family.
I want you to think about it like this. I'm just trying to give us some handles. If somebody came to me and said, Matt, I want you to run a race, I would immediately say no because that doesn't sound fun at all. But if they came and said, Matt, I want you to run a race, but you can only pick one leg. I don't even know. Okay.
I like that one. I like that one too. I can't run without two legs. Okay. I've got to have both my legs. And the same thing is true as we grow into maturity in Jesus.
I want you to think about it as two legs that you have to have. You have to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. And that has to be put into practice so that as you grow in your understanding of who Jesus is and what he wants for your life, that leads you into action. And through those actions, you continue to grow in your knowledge of him. It's a cyclical process. And what I want you to understand is that we get to grow.
We don't outgrow the gospel of grace. We don't. We grow more deeply into it over time as we pursue Jesus and give our lives chasing after him. That's what it looks like. That's what it looks like. He's praying this prayer.
He said, I want you to grow in wisdom and knowledge and understanding so you can walk through all of life with other believers, bearing each other's burdens, loving one another, walking that out together. And he's going to continue. He actually qualifies how we're to walk. Jump back into verse 10. Verse 10. He says, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
So that's a game changer. He says, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. Guys, my nickname in our house is destructor. Guys, I'm clumsy as all get out. I can't walk a straight line. How in the world am I going to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord?
How are we going to grow in this together? He keeps going. Keep reading. So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. What an incredibly intimidating task. What an incredibly intimidating task.
Walk back through it again. It says, walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. Fully, not partly. Not sometimes. Not on our best days. Fully pleasing to the Lord.
Bearing fruit. Good fruit. In our lives as evidence of our salvation. And ever increasing in the knowledge of the God who holds the universe in the palm of his hand. And as people who are wired to be better, to do better, this creates a problem. Because we were tracking with Paul's prayer.
We were really excited about it. Yes. I want to grow in my wisdom and knowledge and understanding of who Jesus is. And I want to let that play into my actions so that I can follow him and I can walk in a manner worthy of. And that sentence starts to go. And what we start to do, as you hear that, you start to think, huh.
I wonder if I walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. I mean, I don't really think I do. Maybe I need to start doing this and this. I mean, I need to stop doing that. I need to stop doing that. And I need to do this and this.
And what we do is we start to pile up all these things that will actually help us walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. And as you're listening, you're probably starting to feel a tremendous amount of weight and pressure stack up. Because you're saying, yes, I want to grow in knowledge. I want to grow in my understanding of who Jesus is. Yes, I want that to impact my actions. But if I'm supposed to walk this out in a manner worthy of the Lord, I don't think I can do it.
And so you start thinking like this. Okay, all right, so what can I do to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord? All right, so I need to start listening to more sermons. I'll start listening to more sermons. So I'll listen to a guy like Francis Chan.
But maybe not just Francis Chan. I probably need a more intellectual thinker, a reformed guy, somebody like John Piper. But I don't just need Piper. I need somebody who's more of like a topical communicator who's easy to relate to. I need somebody like Perry Noble. So I need to be listening to all of those sermons.
And I need to make sure I'm doing my devotional every day. Oh, but before I do my devotional, maybe I should go check my email and see when the next Beth Moore series is coming out. Because I want to make sure I do that study. Got to be in that one. And when I'm doing my Bible reading, I need to make sure that I'm reading from the Pentateuch, from the history of Israel. I need to read from the Psalms and wisdom literature.
And I need to read from the New Testament. Every day. Twice, let's say. Maybe I should find out what the Pentateuch is. Who knows? But I probably need to start going to more conferences.
I probably need to go to a conference once a month. I can go to a conference about how to love Jesus more. How to be a better dad. How to help dads be better dads. How to be a dad of dads. Like God is a good dad.
Two dads of dads. Yes. Huh. But I know I work eight to ten hours a day. But I need to make sure I take some time to go by the homeless shelter before I go to my Bible study group.
Wait a minute. I need to spend time. I need to spend time praying. Prayer. I need to make sure that I'm praying for everyone. And he's not just talking to individuals here.
He's talking to a church. So how are we going to stack up as a church? We need to have a prayer calendar with everybody's name on it. We need to make sure that each one of our community groups is multiplying every two months. And we need to make sure that anybody who comes in our doors meets Jesus as soon as they walk in. Because the Holy Spirit is so present.
And all of a sudden, what we realize is that we'll never stack up. And on top of that, you start saying to yourself, I could be doing better. I could be helping people more. I could be making more time for Jesus. And the truth is, a lot of the things I said were actually good things. They were.
Reading our Bible is great. Praying is great. But what we do is when we're faced with this walking in a manner worthy of the Lord, we realize we can't do that. We don't stack up. There's no way I'll be able to do that. Yes, I want to pursue Jesus.
Yes, I want to let that affect my actions. But I just don't know how I'm going to walk that out. And if I can't do it, there's no way that the people around me are going to be able to help me do that. But the good part is that was only the first point. And so Paul actually keeps writing. So let's keep reading.
Verse 11. May you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And our second point tonight is going to be this. We are redeemed and reconciled to God in Christ. Everybody take a deep breath.
Let it out. So while Paul calls on the Colossian church to seek after Jesus, to pursue him and know more about him, to grow in our understanding of who he is, and to let that impact our actions as we grow in maturity, he's quick to remind them that it is not those actions that make them worthy of the Lord, but it is the work that Jesus has done on our behalf. And that's good news. So church, what I'm saying to you is that you don't become a better Christian. You can't. And that's actually good news.
And some of you might have just pushed back right there. Oh, no, no, no, I can get better. I can, I can be better. What I'm, what I'm telling you is you can grow in maturity, but you can't qualify your role. You cannot change your relationship to God on your own actions. And that's good news because Jesus has actually done that on our behalf.
This is what Paul's doing. He's actually encouraging them in the gospel. He's saying you get to pursue Jesus. And because you've already been qualified, he's already made you right with God. That's what this whole section is actually encouragement. Pick it back up in verse 11.
He says, may you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the father. So Paul's going to step in here with encouragement. He said, I want to encourage you to be strengthened with all power. What power? The power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power that exists in the hand of an almighty God who created the universe from his glorious might. And he's praying this so that in the midst of being in a culturally diverse area as a young church, they might be able to continue to endure, to be patient, to have joy all the while giving thanks to their father.
Why? Because it's already been accomplished by Jesus on their behalf. You see, the language here is not, look, look back at it. The language here is not what you do, but what he has done. Catch that because it's the most important thing you'll hear tonight. It's what he has done.
This is the past tense. This is what already has been accomplished. Paul says, it's not about what you do, but what Jesus has already done. Look at the verbs that it used. He says, he has qualified you, has delivered us, transferred us, redeemed us, and forgiven us our sins. It's already accomplished in Christ.
This life is going to be difficult. We're going to have our ups and downs as we pursue Jesus. But what Paul's encouraging him, and he's saying, you're already saved. This has already been accomplished on your behalf. You get to pursue Jesus. So let's walk through 12 through 14 to see how that encouragement continues.
Listen with ears, trying to hear what Jesus has already done. He says, beginning of verse 12, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And so as a people who are wired to be better and do better, we hear this and we go, no, no, no, no, I can do it. I can earn it. And what Paul's saying is, you don't have to.
It's already been accomplished on your behalf. And so I want us to walk back through these verses and see how Jesus was already better on our behalf. We talk about as a church that we want to be fluent in the gospel of Jesus. We want the gospel of Jesus to be so ingrained in our hearts that the only way we can speak to each other is to encourage each other in the gospel. That when we're having life issues, it's not just wisdom and advice. It's hope in the gospel.
It's truth in the gospel. And that's exactly what Paul's going to do here. He's offering them hope in the gospel. Verse number 12. It says, Giving thanks to the father who has qualified you. Who qualified who?
Did we qualify Jesus? No. It says that Jesus has qualified us. That's not based off of our actions. In no way can our actions, even on our best day, can they stack up and give us a better quality of relationship with Jesus than what Jesus has already done on our behalf. But not just that.
He didn't just qualify us. It says that he's to share in an inheritance of the saints in light. Not only qualified, but giving us an inheritance, an eternal inheritance, an inheritance that started when the gospel was proclaimed to Abraham, that he was going to make, that God was going to make Abraham into a nation, that they were going to be a blessing to the whole world. And we see the history of redemption go through the Old Testament until it gets to Jesus. We are part of that inheritance. Until we step into an eternity, it's an eternal inheritance.
And not just that. It says an inheritance of the saints. We talked about this last week. In no way would I ever qualify myself as a saint. Some of you are shaking your head yes. I agree.
What saint means is holy ones or consecrated ones. What that means is those who have been made holy. You get that? It's past tense. Again, we're holied ones. You're holied.
You're actually made holy by Jesus. He keeps going. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness. Did you do that? Can you do that? No.
But when Jesus went to the cross, Satan thought he'd won. He thought he had seen the Son of God dead on a tree. He thought it was over. But three days later, by the power of God, Jesus walked out of that grave, conquering sin, death, Satan, and hell on your behalf. And in doing so, it says he transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. Guys, as peasants, we don't walk into the presence of a king.
That's not how that works. The only way that you get audience with the king is you get invited in. It says you've been transferred into the kingdom by the king. The king has invited you in. He keeps going. The kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption.
The root word there is redeem. That means you have been bought with a price. The price of the Son of God that would give his life to shed his blood on your behalf. He did that. It's already been accomplished. And in doing so, it says the forgiveness of our sins.
He paid the penalty for the forgiveness of our sins. So in no way can you shove your 401k before God and say, this gives me, I've earned it, I've made enough money. But what this is saying is that Jesus has already accomplished this on your behalf. The price he paid was much greater than anything that you could offer to God. And that's actually really good news. That though we have done nothing to merit redeeming, yet God in his grace has given us forgiveness.
And so church, what I want you to feel is the burden lifted. That pressure that you mounted on yourself that says, I'm not good enough. I want to be better. Feel it lifted. Because what Paul is saying is, it's already been accomplished. You've already been qualified.
You've already been redeemed. So go and live this life pursuing Jesus. And if you're sitting in this room tonight, you're going, I want that to be true for me. And it's not. I want to tell you how. The way that you're qualified by Jesus, the way that you're redeemed by Jesus, is that you place your faith in him.
Is it believing and understanding who he is and what he has done for you. You confess your sins. You confess your faith in Jesus. You ask for the forgiveness of your sins. You place your faith in him. And you follow him for the rest of your life.
And if you want to talk a little bit more about that, I'd be happy to sit down with you after we're done tonight. But that is how you get to be qualified. And so to kind of sum up where we are, we looked at in point one that we're pursuing Jesus in both knowledge and action so that we can walk to live a life that is worthy of the Lord. And what we realize is we actually can't do that. We don't have the ability to. But the good news is we've already been qualified.
We've already been made right with God. So where does that leave us in terms of growing in maturity? It brings us to our third point. We are set free by Jesus to grow in maturity in Jesus. That's what it brings us. That's our third point for tonight.
We are set free by Jesus to grow in maturity in Jesus. And we like to say this phrase a lot. And I think it's very helpful in this situation. You may want to jot this down. Grace is not opposed to effort. It's opposed to earning.
Grace is not opposed to effort. It's opposed to earning. So what we're seeing here is that Jesus in his grace invites us into a relationship where we get to give much effort, but not in a way that earns our salvation, but because we actually already have salvation. So our attitude begins to change. Instead of I have to do these things so that Jesus will love me, it becomes I get to do these things because Jesus loves me. We actually want to grow in maturity through knowledge and action because of the great love that Jesus has shown for us.
And this is a cyclical process. That as you grow in knowledge, it's going to lead you into action, which will lead you into more knowledge and more action. that the gospel would actually impact our actions and that we continue to grow more and more in spiritual maturity. And we get to do this together. This gets to affect all of our life together. It's not because I know things about God and do good things that I get to be in Christ. It's because of what Jesus has done on my behalf.
I get to be in Christ. Therefore, I pursue him in knowledge and wisdom that lead to action. And it gets even better than that. So you're not just left on your own to have to do that. From the very beginning, he said that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in spiritual wisdom and understanding. He actually gives us the ability to do that.
I want you to understand this. Check this out. It says that he has give thanks to the father who has qualified us through the work of the son. And we are given the ability to follow him that we may be filled with his Holy Spirit. You see how that works? Salvation actually begins and ends with God.
We say we see the work of the Trinity all through salvation. And I want you to realize, as a church, this is going to be messy. And that's the best part. Are we always going to be good at this? No. There's going to be times where we mess up, where we make mistakes.
And in that, we get to repent. We get to ask Jesus to forgive us. And we move forward learning from the mistakes that we've made. You want to see somebody who's growing in maturity, who's growing to be more like Jesus? What do their actions look like? How do they relate to community?
What does their schedule look like? Where does their money go? Are they building intentional relationships with people who don't know Jesus? Because knowledge without action doesn't make sense. As we grow in our understanding of who Jesus is, it's going to lead us out, and that's going to impact our relationships. And that's why we as a church, we're wanting to read through the book of Colossians.
That's why as a church, we want to grow in our ability to read Scripture. We want to read the Bible. We want to pursue Jesus and let that affect our actions. We want to grow in setting aside time to intentionally have relationships with each other. We want to gather as a church family. We want to get together with our community groups.
We want to set aside time where our community groups are inviting friends who don't know Jesus to come hang out. We want to grow in serving other people. So be encouraged. You are free to actively pursue Jesus because you have already been qualified. So that when you're reading your Bible, you're doing so because you get to, not to earn God's favor.
That when you're praying, you're praying because you want God's will to be done, not to earn God points. You tithe and give your offerings, not to pay God off, but because he who is rich became poor on your behalf. And so I'm going to invite the band to come back up as we're closing up. Church, I want you to be encouraged tonight. I want you to know that you get to pursue Jesus wholeheartedly because of what he's done for you, because he has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sin.
That means as a church, we pray for one another. We confess and repent of sin with one another. We bring people into community. We make disciples. We're generous with our money, with our time, with our resources. It means we meet the needs of people in the church and outside of the church.
Why? Because of what Jesus has done on our behalf. Jesus has qualified us. Jesus was better on our behalf so that we could live a life not trying to be better, but instead giving much effort to grow into maturity in both knowledge and action as we follow Jesus because it's all about him. Let's pray.
God, I thank you that our relationship with you is not based off of our actions. It's not based off of how much we know. But God, it is fully based off of you. What you have done on our behalf, that you have changed us from the inside out. You've qualified the relationship. And so I pray that you would lead us in a life where we are free to give much effort as we follow you.
In Jesus' name, amen. Let's stand and sing as we respond.
Our Identity in Christ
Transcript
We're going to be walking verse by verse through this book of the Bible over the course of the summer. So we're spending the next 10-ish weeks in Colossians. And so I'm going to pray and we're going to hop in. We've got a good bit of stuff to do tonight to walk through and to kind of intro this series. And so I'll pray and we'll hop in. God, we thank you for the opportunity to gather as your people to study your word.
Pray that you would speak to us tonight, that you would move among your people, that you would draw us closer to yourself. And that we would see more about you and who you have designed us to be. Who you have made us through the gospel. And so God, we thank you and we praise you. And we just thank you for this opportunity to try to make much of your name and to learn what it looks like for us to follow you. We ask your Holy Spirit to be present, to be moving among us, leading and changing and pointing to yourself.
And so we love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. So we will be in Colossians chapter 1, verse 1, where we'll be starting tonight. We're going to do three-ish things tonight. First, we're going to talk a little bit about why the book of Colossians, about just kind of intro the book of Colossians and why we would study it verse by verse, walk through it.
Then we'll talk about some major themes that we'll see in the book of Colossians as we walk through it over the next 10 weeks. As we spend the summer hanging out in the book of Colossians, we're going to talk a little bit about what we'll see, what we hope to learn, what we hope to understand from it. And then we'll actually unpack the first eight verses and kind of see how Paul starts this letter off to the Colossian church and how he lays out kind of their identity and how we see that in his beginning of this letter. So as we saw in the video, Paul's in jail. He writes this letter to the Colossian church.
He writes a letter to the Ephesian church, which is very similar to the letter he writes to the Colossian church. It's longer, kind of unpacks some scenarios a little more clearly, whereas Colossians is pretty dense. And so we'll have to take it chunk by chunk as we walk through it because of how dense he makes it. One of the cool things about the book of Colossians, one of the reasons we're excited to look at it, is he's writing to a church that was fairly young and fairly healthy. From what we can tell, the Colossian church was doing OK. And the reason I say that is because when Paul is writing to a church that is not doing super well or that it's off in certain areas, he doesn't mince words and he's pretty clear about what he's talking about.
So book of Galatians, Paul starts off like this. Hey, I'm Paul. What the heck is wrong with y'all? And so he kind of jumps right in. In Corinthians, he's dealing with specific issues that they're dealing with and he addresses them very clearly. He says, you've got an individual who's doing this.
That's not OK. I always laugh when I see that a church is like Corinth Baptist Church because I'm always like, have y'all read the letter to the Corinthians? Because they were pretty messed up. I don't know if you necessarily want to line up with them. But in Colossians, he doesn't really do that.
When you read commentaries on Colossians, they're all over the place as to why people feel like he wrote the letter. And so you'll have people say that it was false teaching outside of the church that he was addressing. It was false teaching inside of the church because Paul does in this letter use some words that he doesn't use other places. And so it seems like he's addressing something. One, I've heard some say it's Gnosticism. Some say it's Judaism.
There was one commentary that said Paul's addressing Judaistic Gnosticism and Gnostic Judaism. What the heck does that mean? It's like the guy didn't want to make a decision. So he's like, well, kind of a little bit of both also and as well, too. And so when we look at it, though, because he doesn't come out swinging against anything specific, what we feel like he's addressing a relatively healthy church that was relatively young. So it's a fairly young church plant and they're doing pretty well.
And so I'm actually really excited that we'll get to spend some time here because in some ways, as Paul writes to this church, it is it's addressed to us in some ways because we are a young church plant just trying to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus and to be church family. We don't have any major issues. We don't have a building that's about to get repoed because we don't have a building. See how that works? We we don't have major issues with dissension or people causing problems or huge sin areas that we've got to deal with. Like we're we're doing OK.
We're learning what it looks like for us to be church family, for us to grow together, for us to follow Jesus well in the city. And so in some ways, I'm excited because I feel like Colossians is a little bit addressed to us. And Paul's just going to because he doesn't have things he's got to address. He's got a pretty clean slate to say, hey, here's what it looks like to follow Jesus. Here's what it looks like to be church family. And he's going to address some areas where they kind of maybe have gotten off.
But for the most part, it's a pretty clean slate. I honestly think he's writing to the Colossian church because he wanted to write to Philemon about Onesimus. And he was like, well, it would be awkward just to send that guy a letter. So I'll also send one to the church and we'll address some things they need to work on. But that's what we're looking at.
So we see Paul's in jail. He's writing this with Timothy. He's writing to the Colossian church. One of the things we hope to see. So there's a little bit of like, why would you go through a book of the Bible verse by verse?
That may be a question in some of your brains. It may be a, why haven't we done this sooner in some of your brains? And that's fine. Some people will argue that the way to get together and teach the Bible as good Christian people is through the Bible verse by verse. I would argue that that is a good way to teach the Bible. And we'll talk about why in a second.
I don't think it's the way. If I did, first of all, that's what we would have been doing all along. Second of all, the problem with that, the problem with people that come out and say this is the only way to teach the Bible is that when the people in the Bible teach the Bible, they don't do that. So when you read the sermons in the Bible, they're all over the place. Jesus will be like, I did this. And he just quotes two sections of Isaiah and just skips all the stuff in the middle.
Peter and his sermon in Acts 2, he's all over the place. He's like this, and we know this is true, and this from this passage, and this. Y'all want to meet Jesus? And people were like, yes. So it's hard to make an argument in my brain that you have to work through the Bible that way because the Bible doesn't work through the Bible that way.
The people in the Bible don't. But here are a few reasons why we do think it's good and healthy and helpful. One is for context. We often study the Bible, and we'll look at something in one. We'll look at something in Luke. And then the next week we'll gather together, and we'll discuss something in Corinthians.
And the next week we'll gather together and discuss something in Zechariah. And after a while, you just don't have a whole lot of context for where we are in the biblical narrative. And so it's helpful to stop and to just go verse by verse through a book of the Bible so that we have context. Because context is important. If I told you that I stood up and at the top of my lungs yelled, you slant-faced moron! Well, you might want to know what the context was.
Like, was I talking to a slant-faced moron? Was I at a football game? Was I at a candlelit dinner holding my wife's hand? Like, context makes a difference. It changes what we're looking at. And so as we read through Scripture, it's very helpful to know what came before it, what we're looking at here, and what's coming after it.
I'll give you an example. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I love that verse. Paul says it, though, right after he talks about being poor and wealthy, hungry, naked, well-clothed, well-fed. And he says, I've learned to, in all circumstances, be content. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
It had very little to do with his benchmarks or ability to win football games. It's a good verse. I like it. But what he meant was I've learned how to, in Christ, be content no matter where I am in life. And so it's helpful for us as we study Scripture to know what we're studying, where it lies, and what comes before and what comes after it. And so that's one of the reasons.
Another reason we want to do this is we want to grow as Bible people, as Bible readers. And so we're very excited for our church family to just be able to walk through a book of the Bible together over the course of the summer. I think it will be good for us. I've heard of a professor who would start off his class. He was an atheist professor. He would start off his class in college by saying, who here believes that the Bible is the Word of God?
People raise their hand. And he'd go, okay, who among you has read the entire thing? And then he'd go, I don't think you believe it's the Word of God. I think he's got a point. For people who say, I believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and then we don't spend a lot of time studying it, reading it, learning it, growing in it together. It's a little bit like, ah, something's missing there.
And so I think it's helpful for us as a church to just say, hey, we're going to just unpack this book of the Bible together. We're just going to walk through it together. Another reason we do this is Paul later, when writing to Timothy, when they're not in jail together, maybe they slipped each other notes while they were in jail together, but he definitely wrote him letters when he wasn't. So we have 1 and 2 Timothy later, when they're not in jail. Paul tells Timothy, who is a young pastor, I don't know if you all know this, relatively young as far as pastors go. Paul tells Timothy, who's a young pastor, he says, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.
And to devote yourself to these things so that everybody can see your progress. And so it's actually really healthy and good for us as a church who have young pastors to just say, we're just going to walk through a book of the Bible. We're not going to jump around. We're not going to try to come up with topics to discuss. We're just going to walk through a book of the Bible. And guess what?
One of my goals, and our goals as we lead as pastors, is for you to see progress. Not that we'd be great at stuff now, but that you'd see progress. That we'd move from like a D minus to like a D, and we could just be really excited that we have a D. So that's the goal. We're going to move that way. And so one of the reasons we think is that it's helpful for us to do that.
So before we hop in, I want to unpack three major themes that we'll see in the book of Colossians as we spend 10 weeks here. So three major themes that as we walk through Colossians, we're going to unpack and spend time talking about. And then we'll actually get into one of those, really kind of two of those tonight as we enter into the beginning of this. So the first major theme we'll see is that it's all about Jesus. It's all about Jesus. Everything.
Colossians is going to have some of the highest Christology in the Bible. And Christology is just how we understand Jesus. It's the study and theology of Jesus, and it's going to have some of the highest Christology where Paul just goes off on how amazing and massive and great Jesus is. How terrifyingly huge Jesus is. And then he's going to, as he unpacks Colossians, he's going to say, we do this and we're these kind of people because of Jesus. And we walk through life like this because of Jesus.
And so as we unpack the book of Colossians, we're going to see that it's all about Jesus. That he's the head of the body of the church and that we take our cues from him. We talk often about Jesus as a Galilean peasant. We think of him as a poor, homeless man who lived 2,000 years ago. And he was. So Jesus pre-exists in eternity past.
He comes to earth for like 33 years. That's what we just spent time talking about. That Jesus was a man who was a God who became man, who died in our place for our sins, and who rose again. He did that in about 33 years span. And then he exists. He rose, ascended into heaven in bodily form, and exists in eternity, future, forever.
He was a Galilean peasant who suffered for about this much of time. Creator. King. Everything exists in him, through him, and for him. And he made all things. And he will rule all things.
And so we often think of Jesus as a Galilean peasant. And he was. And he humbled himself for our sake. And we need to love that. And we need to grow to understand that. But we also need to realize he's high and exalted, massive and scary and good.
And so we get to talk about that. We'll get to see that it's all about Jesus. We'll get to see that we have a communal identity as we unpack the book of Colossians. We have a communal identity, which means that we exist in relationship with each other. One thing about a lot of the books in the Bible, and especially Colossians, every time you see the word you in Colossians, Paul is actually using the word y'all. The Greek word y'all.
So for us, we can use you as a singular you or you as a plural you. But most of us in the South would use y'all as a plural form of you. And so when you see the word you, he's referring to them as a people. One of the things that annoys the snot out of me is when I watch movies and they have someone pretending to be a Southerner and they just can't get it right. I was watching one where a guy was supposed to be from North Carolina and he called chicken barbecue. And I was like, nope.
Now, North Carolina does make vinegar-based barbecue. So they hadn't quite got it right. But they at least know it's pulled pork. But there would be movies where somebody would look at somebody and call him y'all, and it's an individual. And it's like, unless you're talking about him and his family that you know about, you wouldn't call him y'all. You'd call him you.
And if you were talking to a whole group of people, you'd call him y'all. And every time Paul uses the word you in Colossians, he's saying y'all. And so as we read through it, we'll say y'all some just to help us frame up our minds around that. Now, here's the other thing. When we hear y'all, we think of, yes, a collective group of us made up of rugged individuals. There's a bunch of us individually.
That's how we think about it. That is not how they would have thought about it. They would have understood themselves in community, as a team, as a people. That's how they thought about it. When we try to, the term for self-sufficiency in the U.S., there are certain cultures, when we try to translate that, we can't. They don't have a word for it.
The closest word in certain cultures is a form of a mental disorder where someone believes they exist outside of community. So they were trying to translate self-sufficiency, and they were like, I don't think you want to use this word because it's a mental disorder. We don't exist outside of community. And that's much closer to how they would have understood themselves. They lived and exist in relationship to other people. And when they became believers, they had a new family.
A lot of them would have been disowned by their family, but they would have had a new family. They would have been y'all. They would have understood themselves communally. The best thing we have to this would be maybe the military. So if Patton stood in front of his troops and said, we must take this land, and I need you to do it.
There wouldn't have been a guy in the middle who was like, I don't think I can do that by myself. Well, come on, Carl. That's why you're part of a platoon, which is a part of a company, which is a part of a battalion. When he said you, he meant the team, and they would have understood that. Just as if a coach stood in front of us and we were on a team, we understand ourselves in context of the team. And so when he says y'all, understand yourself not as a rugged individual who's a part of, but as a y'all, a team, a collective, a family, interconnected forever.
So we have a communal identity. The next thing we'll talk about, and I'm really excited about because we're awful at this, is we need a discernment radar. Discernment is basically the ability to tell if something is true or not true, good or not good. And so as Paul writes to the Colossians, it seems as if they have all of these outside influences, and he's helping them figure out how do we decide, how do we filter what we bring in. For the most part, you will see one of two operating systems for that among American Christians. There is no filter whatsoever.
Or if someone says it, and they were on TV, they got their own show, so they're probably pretty smart. The guy was holding a book. His name says doctor. Like, there's no filter whatsoever. It's just this person said it, and he had cool hair, and his wife looked like she lost a paintball match, but she's sitting on a throne. So I'm pretty sure we need to believe it.
No filter whatsoever. Or we only believe these 12 people who say things, and we're going to start our own little compound and our own little commune, and we're not going to trust the internets. Like, there's that. So our goal would be to be somewhere in the middle, to have a discernment radar, to actually filter what comes in, but to filter it well. And so we are bombarded by all kinds of other influences. We see thousands of advertisements, each of them preaching a false gospel to us, which says that you need this to be happy.
Your life is not complete without this. We have television shows that would say they promote no religion whatsoever, but they're promoting a worldview. Every movie you see promotes a worldview. We are bombarded with ways to think about life, ways to think about romance, ways to think about God, ways to think about our relationship with each other, ways to think about politics. We are bombarded, and we have to have a discernment radar. So we'll get to spend more time on that later.
We're not very good at it as a whole, but we'll get to spend some more time on it later. We won't spend much on it today. We're going to spend a couple weeks on it, and I'm really excited about getting into more of that, just mostly because we suck at it. All right. So tonight we're going to be looking at the intro of Colossians, and basically we're going to see how Paul frames up for them.
What we're going to do, so we're going to read through the first eight verses, and then we're going to read through the first eight verses, and we're going to read through the first eight verses, and we're going to read through the first eight verses. several times and unpack how Paul addresses this group of people. So we'll talk a little bit about what he says, but we'll also talk about how he understands them to exist because it's foundational for us as we grow as a church and as we move through the summer. All right, I'm going to pray again. We're going to hop in and talk through this stuff.
God, we thank you for the opportunity to gather, to study your word. I pray that you would speak to us, that you would lead us as we walk through Colossians, as we kick off this series where we try to study and learn more about you. We love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, Colossians 1.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and Timothy our brother. So Paul, apostle means sent one. He's specifically talking about those who had seen Jesus after death. So he says, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and Timothy our brother. To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father. When Paul starts writing this letter, he writes to them and the first thing we're going to see is that they have a gospel identity.
That they have a gospel identity. How he understands them to exist. So he's writing to the church and they have a gospel identity. He says, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae. Saints is the Greek word that means holy ones. So in the Bible, God is called holy.
So in the Old Testament, they say God high and lifted up and there's these angels next to him and they're singing, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And when Paul writes to the Colossian Christians, he says holy ones. And when he says saints, he doesn't mean like St. Patrick. He means all believers have an identity of holiness in Christ. That we are holy.
We're made right before God because of Jesus. So he writes to them first in their gospel identity. So he says, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father. We always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you. Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints. Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel which has come to you.
As indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing. As it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth. Just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf. And he has made known to us your love in the spirit. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to quickly walk through and see how Paul addresses them in their gospel identity, their communal identity, and their missional identity.
So his gospel identity. We'll just walk back through and I'm going to point out the areas where he's talking to them as a gospel people. To the saints and faithful brothers, that's verse 2. So he calls them saints, he calls them holy ones. In Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father. So he says our relationship now is that God, the creator of the universe, is our Father.
We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you since we heard of your faith in Christ. So they have faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel. So what Paul says to him is he says you're holy because you have hope laid up in the gospel. That your hope is laid up in heaven because of the faith that you have in Christ. So we praise God who is our Father because of who you are, who he's made you into.
And so through the gospel, Jesus died on our behalf. He took our sins. He rose again and he gives us his righteousness. So Paul understands them to have a gospel identity. He also talks to them out of their communal identity, that they exist in relationship with one another. So he starts off and he says to the saints and faithful brothers.
So that's the Greek word for brothers and sisters. What he's saying is siblings, those who've been made into a family. So that they have a communal identity. To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace and peace to you from God our Father. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints. They go hand in hand.
Faith in Christ and love for all the saints. He says we're praising God for this. We thank God that you have faith in Jesus, that he's allowed you to have faith in Jesus, and that you have love for all the saints. And that's how that works. I've met people before that say, man, I love Jesus. I just don't have much time for the church.
I just don't care about it. And it's like, that's not how that works. They're one and the same. Like, when we have faith in Christ, we have love for all the saints, all the other Christians, all the other believers. I was talking to a guy at work one time at Sears, and he said, yeah. He said, he found out I was a Christian.
He said, yeah, if I was a Christian, if I was religious like that, if I was a Christian, he said, I'd just keep it to myself. He said, I wouldn't feel like I need to go be a part of a church or go to church or whatever, hang out with other people. I'd just read, do my own thing, study or whatever, and then I wouldn't have to be around people. I said, that's cool. You wouldn't be a Christian. He was like, what are you talking about?
I said, well, that's not how Christianity works. I was like, you get reconciled to God because he pays for our sin. He fixes the relationship we have with him. But he also, because he takes care of sin, he reconciles us to each other. So I said, every relationship you've ever had broke down because of sin.
They sinned against you, you wouldn't forgive, or they wouldn't apologize. You sinned against them, you wouldn't apologize, or they wouldn't forgive. You slowly drifted apart because you're sinful. You hurt each other and wouldn't fix it. I said, but the gospel gives us the way to fix that. That God reconciles us to himself and to each other.
I said, so you get relationships, you get family, and you would get to walk through life being able to have the ability to reconcile and to forgive and have relationships with one another. He looked at me, and he was the quietest he'd ever been. He never shut his mouth. But he looked at me, and he said, I've never heard of it like that before. I said, yeah, this is how it works. I said, so you could have your own little private faith and not be a part of the church, but I'm not sure you'd be a Christian.
Because Christianity involves us and gives us church family. So, yeah, we grow in our love for Jesus, but automatically his spirit comes in and makes us begin to love one another and to grow in our love for each other. So, he talks to them out of their communal identity. He says that you have faith in Christ Jesus and love for all the saints. Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of this you have heard before in the word of truth the gospel, which has come to you. As indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.
Just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He's a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf. So, we have, he talks to them out of their missional identity. That they are, the gospel bears fruit and grows. Just what it does. He says the gospel bears fruit and grows just as it has among you since the day you heard it.
Like the gospel just moves. It grows. It bears fruit. And it changes people. And so he says just as you learned it from Epaphras, just as this guy came in and began to proclaim to you the gospel. That in Jesus you can have forgiveness.
You can have life. You get family. He says it bears fruit and grows. And so we have an identity that moves forward. That we can be met by Jesus. Our sin can be covered.
And we can have life in him. And the gospel bears fruit. It grows. It expands and it moves. And so more and more people get to be a part of it. And so when he talks to them, he talks to them out of gospel identity.
He refers to them as saints. He calls them brothers. He talks to them out of their communal identity. How they exist in relationship with one another. And then he says the gospel keeps moving. It keeps bearing fruit.
It keeps growing. And people keep learning the truth. The grace of God in truth. That we're sinful. That we're broken. And that we need Jesus.
And that we're met with overwhelming grace. That we don't have to earn it. And we don't have to be good enough. And we don't have to be smart enough. And we don't have to be moral enough. We don't have to keep it together.
But we're met with grace through truth. So, if you're a Christian in the room, you have a gospel identity. You have it. You're not seeking to earn it. You're not working for it. You have it.
You are a saint. You are holy. You are holy. You are holy. You are holy. You are holy.
You are blameless. You are holy. You are holy. You are holy. You are holy. Now, I don't know about y'all.
But I know humans. And I know y'all in this room. Holy isn't a super good descriptor for us. It just isn't. But it's not based off of us.
I remember when I was growing up, my older brother Logan. He used to lie. Oh. He'd lie. He's like four or five. He'd look at grown people in their face and just lie.
He was good at it, too. But you could tell he's lying. He's like four. His stories didn't make sense. But he would just lie.
I ain't never heard of that before. I ain't never seen that. I don't know that kid. Like, just, I mean, just lie. And my dad used to tell him, he'd say, Logan, there's going to come a day when you're going to need me to believe you. There's going to come a day when you're going to need people to believe you.
And if you keep lying, that's going to be a problem. If you lie all the time, swear and lie through your teeth at people, it's going to be a problem because you're going to need people to believe you. So we were hanging out with my extended family. And Logan basically, like, led a rebellion. Logan, he got all of our cousins, like 14 or 15 of them, and just led them in the most, like, heinous of crimes he could possibly think of as a four- or five-year-old. And so my aunts were livid.
I mean, they were ready to string him up. And so they had all gathered. And it was really funny the amount of anger they had towards, like, a five-year-old. And so they had all gathered, and they were standing there, and they were like, he did it. I know he did it. He got all them involved in it.
And, I mean, they had lost it. And so my dad's sitting there, and Logan's sitting there. And my dad looked at him and said, Logan, did you do that? He had. Everybody knew he had. And Logan went, mm-mm.
I didn't have anything to do with that. And my dad looked at him, and he looked at my aunts, and he said, Logan doesn't lie. And if he said he didn't do it, he didn't do it. My aunts almost lost it. And he stood in between them, and he said, he doesn't lie. That boy doesn't lie.
He wouldn't tell a lie. And if he said he didn't do it, he didn't do it. And Logan went and looked at my dad like, now, you and I both know that's not true. I mean, couldn't believe that that's what my dad did, that my dad stood in the gap and took the blame and was willing to lie and take sin and on my dad's integrity get him off. And there are times when Jesus looks and he says that we're holy and blameless and above reproach. And I look and I go, you and I both know that's not true.
That's not a good descriptor for me. That's not how that lines up. But we have a gospel identity. We have been made holy and blameless and above reproach because Jesus took our sin onto himself and he was crushed for it and he gave us his righteousness so that we stand before God as Christians who have placed our faith in Jesus holy, blameless, and above reproach as if we had never sinned and always done what we were supposed to. That there is no reproach, no complaint, no sin that can be levied against us, no condemnation, nothing. We're holy and blameless and above reproach.
And if you're a Christian in here, you have a gospel identity. You do stand before God holy. If you're a Christian in here, you have a communal identity. You've been invited into a family. It says that to the saints and faithful brothers, he says to the faith you have in Christ and the love you have for all the saints. So we have a communal identity.
We've been invited into a family. Later in Colossians, he's going to say that Jesus is the head of the body, his church. So he's the head, we're the body. We are interconnected and designed to exist in relationships with one another. We have been made into family together. You're in it.
If you're a Christian, you're in family. Just the way regular family works. You didn't get to pick them. You're in it. Jesus rescues and he makes us into family. And it is a beautiful, hot mess.
It is. Every holy person in this room is a part of your family. And we're holy because we have a gospel identity. We ain't keeping it together too good. We get to walk through life together, repenting and forgiving and getting on each other's nerves and celebrating together and growing together because we've been made into family. It's who we are.
In Christ, we are brothers and sisters. The Bible says that Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers. And Paul here says that God, our father, who's the God and Savior, God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he calls him our father and then he immediately calls him Jesus' father. And later he's going to say Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers. That we are family.
An eternal family. That will last forever. And that's our identity. That's who we are. And then if you're in here and you're a believer, you have a missional identity. You are sent on a mission with Jesus.
That Jesus in eternity past, when we sinned, when we rebelled against him, that they chose that Jesus would come, that he would be perfect on our behalf, that he would die for our sins and that he would rise again so that we might have life and hope and faith in him. And then he invites his church into that mission to share that, to spread that, to move that along. And we can't help but share it. I remember when I first found out that the gospel was actually good news. Like I always thought that the gospel was this. I thought it was that Jesus could save me from my sins.
I deserved wrath and punishment, but Jesus died so that I could not be punished, not go to hell, and that he saved me from my sins. And then I was supposed to learn how from the Bible to be a good moral person. To behave well. That's not really good news. It's like when your dad's like, I got good news. We're cleaning the garage today.
I don't see how that... I don't think you know what good news is. And so when I've got good news, Jesus saves you from your sins, and now you get to be a really good person and try really hard and be moral and keep it together. Ugh. When I realize that the gospel applies to everything, that I'm already holy, already blameless, I just get to follow Jesus? That the gospel applies to how I treat my wife and how I see my money and how I walk through life and that I've been given a family to walk through life together?
That actually became good news. And I love sharing good news. My wife and I, we run a pretty tight budget, but any kind of excess money we have pretty much goes to food. We thoroughly enjoy eating out. And when I find a good restaurant, I'm going to tell you about it. I actually base directions off of restaurants.
So people will be like, you know where Thomas Road is? And I'll be like, do restaurants. They'll be like, you know where Taco Bell is? Yes, I know where Taco Bell is. All right, well, you're going to go over there, you're going to take a left of Krispy Kreme.
All right, I got it, I'll be there. Like, that's how, if they say a restaurant I've never heard of, I'll be like, I haven't heard of that, is it any good? Like, we quit talking about directions. I need to know about this restaurant you know about that I don't know about. So I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to help you all out right now.
I'm going to share some good news with you all. If you've never eaten at J Gumbos, it's in downtown. It's open only in the middle of the day. So if you want J Gumbos at suppertime, you were wrong. You won't have it. But you can have it at lunch, and it is delicious.
My personal recommendation would be Jean Lafitte, or Jean Lafitte. If you call it Jean Lafitte, just to mess with them, they don't appreciate that. Although that is how it would be pronounced if you're, I don't know, not Cajun. But anyway, and then the other one is Egg Roll Station. Right down the road, super, super good Chinese food. Super, super sketchy.
So if you have a problem with that, do takeout. It's still delicious, and their egg rolls are great. So, but when I find out about good news, I can't help but share it. Like, when I find out about good restaurants, I can't help but tell people about it. You don't have to talk to me long for me to start sharing things that I enjoy and appreciate. And it's the same way with us, and when we begin to realize the goodness that is in the gospel for us, we can't help but share it.
We can't help but say, hey, look, I know you think that you're supposed to work this out on your own, and that you're supposed to be a rugged individual who gets everything done, and is super good, and super holy, and that earns your right. You're not going to. But you don't have to. You get to have faith in Jesus that he already accomplished that on your behalf, and you get to walk through life with a new family and a new identity. And we can't help but share it. And the gospel, it's just what it does.
It bears fruit and grows. So, this is us. This is who we are. Paul's writing to a church plant. He's explaining to them as he goes through the book of Colossians what it looks like for them to follow Jesus. But he starts off, and he kind of just lays out.
We see how he approaches them, how he speaks to them as to who he thinks they are. So, he talks to them about how the mission, how the gospel's moved forward among them. He talks to them about who they are in Christ and who they are in relationship to one another. And that's us. When we talk about being a gospel-centered community on mission, when we say that's what we want to do, we want to be a gospel-centered community on mission, we didn't make that up. We made it the way we word it.
But we see it here. We see it as how the Bible lays it out. So, it's just what we do. It's what Jesus does. It says here, I want to read verse 5. We started as a church plant in March of last year.
We just started meeting in my home. Just a handful of us. And then we actually got to watch the gospel bear fruit and grow. We got to watch it bear fruit and grow among us, personally, individually. And we got to watch it bear fruit and grow among a people. So, when Paul is writing this, he's saying, We also thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for y'all.
Since we have heard of y'all's faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that y'all have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for y'all in heaven, of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel which has come to y'all, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing, as it also does among y'all since the day you heard and understood the grace of God and truth. And that's what we've gotten to see. We've gotten to see the gospel move and grow among a people. And it's been beautiful. And that's who we are. That's who we get to be.
And so we began to multiply more community groups because we just want to live in relationship with one another, centered underneath the gospel, around the gospel. Jesus is the head. We're the body. We just follow him. And so we look to Jesus to see what it looks like for us to walk through life. And we live on mission, which just means that we get to invite people into the gospel and into family.
That's us. That's what we've gotten to do. And it's been exciting and it's been great. Sometimes I look at my community group and we're all over the place. Age-wise, thought process-wise, there are some conversations in my community group that just get downright painful. Because people are trying to talk to each other and they just don't connect.
It's like they have nothing in common whatsoever. We had a conversation about heavy metal music the other day. And that was just hilarious. Because a couple of the guys knew what it was. One guy didn't. And I stood there making jokes just to be annoying.
But I was really confusing people. And so that was a lot of fun. And after a while, our group just was like, well, do you like food? Yes. Do you like Jesus? Yes.
All right, cool. We can be friends. Like that's just how it works. That's how our community group connects. We are just a bunch of people brought together by the gospel. And we get to walk through life together.
In a minute, they're going to release some children from back there in Kid City where we try to put the gospel on their level. And they're just going to be like running laps around here. I'm pretty sure they teach them the gospel and then just inject sugar into their faces. Like I don't even know really what happens back there. But it's going to be a mess and it's going to be beautiful.
That's who we get to be. When my family gathers together at Christmas, there's a whole bunch of us. People knocking stuff over, but we're family. People getting on each other's nerves, but we're family. And that's what we get in the church. That's who we get to be.
If there's one thing we know from every Christmas movie we've ever seen is that life's better with family. That's all we know. You can have anything else you want, but family makes life better. And so the truth is for us as a church, we get a gospel identity and we get a new family. We get people to walk through life together with, through good times, through bad times, to celebrate, to enjoy life together. We get brothers and sisters in an eternal family that will last forever.
So we set aside time for it. We carve out time in our busy schedules. And it's going to be hard for us as Westerners, but we carve out time to be family. To hang out with each other, to share meals together, to laugh and do fun things together, to throw parties together. Because we care about it, because it's who we are. It's our identity.
So when we talk about being gospel-centered communities on mission, all we're saying is we're just going to be who we are. So that's how we operate. That's what we do as a church. So we gather together on Sundays as groups to talk about Jesus, to open the Bible and see what it says. The rest of the time, we're just community groups for people being church family throughout the week. And that's how we function.
I talk to people periodically because we're a church plant. And they'll be like, so what are you all going to do when you grow? So more of what we're doing, I guess. Like we're going to have more groups. We've got five community groups right now. We started as one last year.
We're praying that we would have ten towards the end of the year. That more and more people would hop into what we have in the gospel. That more and more people would be freed up by the fact that they don't have to be good enough. Jesus was good enough on their behalf. And that we get a family. We're not alone.
We don't have to do this alone. As we read scripture, sometimes I feel like that private that raised his hand to Patton and said, I can't do that by myself. We read scripture and we're like, man, that sounds really hard. Right. But it's not designed for us to do it by ourselves.
It's for us to walk together in relationship with one another. To have life together. To be in community. To be family. To be family. To be the body that God's made us into.
And so. If you're here. And you're not a Christian. Here's what I would say to you. Hop into a community group. Be a part of us as we walk through life together in relationships.
We'll get together and we'll talk about Jesus. And this is a great place for you to hang out and hear things about Jesus. But we'd much rather you got to see what it looks like among a bunch of people. We'd much rather you got to see what it looks like when somebody can't pay a bill. Somebody's got a flat tire. When somebody gets really annoyed with someone else.
We'd love for you to see what it looks like for us to be family. To tangibly walk out the aspects of the gospel. When we connect with one another. Love one another. Relate to one another. And have nothing in common other than we eat food and love Jesus.
So if you're hanging out and you're not a Christian. We would invite you into a community group. To come be a part of what it looks like as we're a gospel people. If you say, no thanks. I don't know Jesus and that makes me uncomfortable. And I don't want to go hang out at your house.
I would say, I understand that. And would welcome you to keep hanging out with us on Sundays. We'll play can jam. We'll go eat meals afterwards. Not at people's houses necessarily. We'll study and talk about Jesus.
And this is a really safe place for you to do that. Because we're not here because we're good and moral and awesome. We're here because we know we aren't. And Jesus is awesome. We don't use a lot of big words. Because we don't know a lot.
And the big ones we do use are Bible words. And we'll try to explain them. So we think it's a really safe place if you're not a Christian to hang out. A really good group of people to be around. Actually, when I moved, I felt like I was moving to plant a church. That God had called us to plant a church.
And after a while, I realized that Jesus was just saying, Ah, you can come be a part of what I'm doing. You can come be a part of the family I'm starting. You can come be a part of the people that you'll get to know and love and walk through life together. You can come be a part of that. And I don't know about the plant a church thing, but you can come hang out with my church. Be a part of my people.
And I was like, all right, Jesus, that sounds good. And I've actually gotten to see the gospel bear fruit and grow, and it's been wonderful. If you're hanging out and you are a Christian, we would say hop into a community group. Walk in family with us. Be who you're designed to be. So we have a gospel identity.
We have a communal identity. We have a missional identity. Hop in. Walk through life. Carve out time in your schedule to be in relationships with others. And that's difficult, and sometimes we have seasons of life where our schedules don't line up and work around it.
But figure it out. It's good for us. It's healthy. If someone's a Christian and they say, I want to hang out, but I don't really – I just want to do the Sunday thing. But with as much love as I can say, I don't think that's good for us.
I don't think that's – I think you're missing out. And I think it – we're not designed as a church to operate that way. So the way that we use our spiritual gifts, the way that we walk through life, the way that we serve and pastor and love and shepherd one another is only in our community groups. That's how we are. And so there are a lot of churches where service opportunities and being able to use your gifts take place other places, and you have that opportunity. But for us, we feel called to be this, to be in community throughout the week, loving and serving and inviting people into what we have.
And if you're a Christian in here and you're a part of a community group, hop in more. Pour into what it looks like to be in life with each other, to walk through life together and to live out the identity we have where we get to bear fruit and grow together as the family that Jesus has made us into. Paul says he's a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit. That we get to, as Jesus changes our hearts, grow in love for one another and grow as we walk together on mission. And so some of the things that we're praying through is we'll walk through Colossians, but we're praying that we would grow in what it looks like to be community.
That we would grow in the depth of understanding of what it is for us to be gospel people. And that we would continue to invite more and more people into normal, everyday life of us following Jesus. Messing up, repenting, growing, getting to see what that looks like as they walk with us as we pursue Jesus in obedience to him. And so that's our hope. That's our prayer. And we pray that we'll continue to multiply more and more groups of people who love Jesus, walk with Jesus, and follow Jesus in normal, everyday life.
And we pray, and we're going to sing and celebrate the fact that we've been made into Christ's family. God, I thank you that my identity is not based off of who I am, what I do, what I accomplish, how smart I am, how hard I work. I thank you that you have made us holy. That we are saints. And God, I thank you for as difficult as it is that we get to be a part of family. That we get to walk through life with a team.
That we don't have to be alone, but that we get to have successes and failures together. As the people that you've made us into. God, I pray that you would help us to grow in our understanding of what that looks like. To grow in what it looks like to invite more people into that. To open our homes and open our hearts and to grow in our understanding of who you've made us. So that we might move forward in what it looks like to invite more people into that.
God, we pray that you would bear fruit and grow among us. So the gospel, through your truth and your grace, would bear fruit and grow. More and more people would hop in and we'd have more and more growth and maturity. And repentance and love. God, we need your presence. May you help us to grow in our love in the spirit.
May we make much of your name. Help us to be your people. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. You've got to stand and sing with me.