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.