Sermons tagged with Transformation

We'll be right back. I don't know about you, but when you hear the word revival, we often think of reviving the city, which is what we prayed for, reviving the community, the people around us. God, let's see your spirit move and people come to know you in amazing ways. And that is what revival is, and that is the revival that God brings. But as Aaron alluded to in his prayer, he also revives individuals. He also breathes life into dry bones. And so if you are here this morning and your spiritual health, you personally, your soul, is in need of revival, God does that too. And as you sung and you prayed and sung for revival, just know that I have prayed for you this morning that God would revive our spirits, that God would breathe fresh life into us. And that I pray that prayer for myself often. So just know that though God does revive communities and cities, that he breathed life into us as well, and he revives us too. And if that's you, be encouraged this morning. I also wanted to mention before I jump in that the reason the church looks the way it does in the lobby is not just because it's summertime and we're encouraging you to go on vacation. You walk in, it's like, why are you here? You should be at the beach. But since you're not, here's some beach for you, which is also great. But tomorrow starts Summer Extreme. It's the first day of it. It goes for three nights, Monday through Wednesday. And we really hope that you'll come and hang out with us, even if you are not signed up to help or your child's not signed up to be a part of it. Just come see the madness one time and have a chance to kind of hang out with everybody. And I'll tell you this, there's a meal before it starts, which is my favorite time of night. And on Wednesday, I don't want to brag or try to make a big deal out of this, but I'm going to be cooking burgers on the Blackstone for everybody who comes. So come get a free burger. I'll put in a word for you right now. If Aaron and Julie can hear this, they're so mad at me, but I don't care. Come have dinner with us and hang out. All right. Now, as we look to finish the series in Peter, this week is part two of a two-part sermon that, you guessed it, I started last week. So I would tell you if you're watching online or catching up online or via the podcast or however it is you consume the sermons, I would encourage you to pause it here and go listen to last week's so that this week's makes more sense. Now, for those of you in the room who either you were here last week and you just forgot what I said, which I don't blame you. I forget what I preach about half the time. Or you were here this week, but you weren't here last week. Just by way of context, this is what we talked about so that we can arrive at verse 8 this week. It's a two-part sermon in 2 Peter 1, verses 5-8 that I said kind of gives us all that we need for life and godliness and points us in the right direction and tells us why we're running it. And it's a really, really important passage to me. And I hope that God makes it an important passage to you as well. So last week, we agreed that biblically speaking, the apex value is love. That's what we are to go for. We looked at Paul summing this up in Corinthians 13, where he says, now these three remain, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. And then we looked at Jesus's capstone of a new commandment. All the other commandments are fine, but I'm going to give you a new one that encapsulates all of them. Go and love others as I have loved you. Go and offer Christ-like love. And so we agree that we are supposed to pursue love as believers. But the problem is that telling a new believer to go and offer love as Christ offered to us, sacrificial Christ-like love, is like telling a crawling baby to go and run a marathon. There's some steps that have to happen along the way. There's some things that we need to build to so that we even have the capacity to offer Christ-like love. And Peter lays out those building blocks for us in verses five through seven. He says, for this reason, make every effort to add to your faith, knowledge, to knowledge, virtue, to virtue, self-control, to self-control, perseverance, to perseverance, godliness, to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, love. So there's these things that we have to build to before we have the capacity to love. And the encouragement at the end was to go and, like Peter says, make every effort. Go from here and make every effort to build towards the capacity to love others as Christ has loved you. That was the admonishment as we went last week. And one of the things that I love about the Bible and about the Christian faith is whenever we're told to do something, we should start doing these things, we should stop doing these things, we should embrace these virtues, and we should shun these vices, we're always in Scripture given a reason why. And the reason is never because God said so. And the amazing thing is, it very well could be. God can make the reason for everything he asks us to do because I said so. And we would go, well, you're creator God, you're all powerful, you're in charge of the universe. We are not because you said so is sufficient for us. let's go. Because God said so should be sufficient and yet still in his goodness, he never leaves it there. Whenever you look at what scripture asks you to do, at what God requires of us, you never have to look very hard for the why. Why does God want me to do that? Why is that what's actually best for me? It's always very clear in scripture when God asks us, when Jesus instructs us to do something, when we say why, why is that what's best for me? You can find that answer very quickly. And that's what verse eight does for us. So if we go, okay, I'm supposed to go from here and I'm supposed to go pursue, make every effort to have the capacity to love others as Christ loved me. That's what I need to do. I need to go pursue the capacity for Christ-like love. Why do I need to do that? Well, verse eight tells us why we need to do that. And I would sum it up in this way. I would tell you that this is the why. This is why it's best for us to pursue the capacity to love as Jesus did. If we pursue love, our deepest desires will come true. If we simply pursue the capacity to offer Christ-like love, our deepest desires will come to fruition. Now, I know that that sounds an awful lot like the health and wealth gospel that I tell you all the time that I hate and is not true. It is a trick of Satan. It ruins faiths and it shipwrecks Christians. It forces people to walk away from it when we have this idea that if I just go to God, everything's going to work out. I won't experience any tragedy. I'm probably going to make a little bit more money than I used to. I'm definitely going to get this promotion. If I'll just dedicate myself to God, then he'll give me the things that I want. And so I know that when I say, if we simply pursue Christ-like love, then he will give us our deepest desires. I know that sounds like I'm doing health and wealth, but I promise you I'm not, and here's why. First of all, what I'm saying is biblical. Second of all, I can say that if we pursue love, we will see our deepest desires come to fruition because I'm pretty sure I can guess what yours are. I don't know how you would word it or what you would say are your deepest desires in life, but I bet 1A and 1B, I bet for one, it's I just want to know when many years from now, when I'm facing death, when it is imminent, when I'm on my deathbed and I'm thinking back on my life, I want to know that I loved well. I want to know that I have family in my life who love me and are grateful for me. I want to know that in those waning years, I am surrounded by people who love me because I have invested my life in loving others. I want to know that I will love well. And so clearly, if we spend our life loving as Christ did, that will come to fruition. The other thing, 1B, that we all want to know, that we all deeply desire at the end of life, thinking back on life, what is it that we most want? I would be willing to bet that we all want to live a life that matters. That in our waning years, as we reflect back on the life that we led, that we will want to know and feel good about the life that we led. Did I invest it in the right things? Did I accomplish what I was supposed to accomplish? Did my life make a difference? Did it matter at all or will I fade into oblivion and no one will ever think of me or remember me again? Did I live a life that matters? I mean, this is what a midlife crisis is, right? And if you haven't dealt with one, it's coming. It's when you get in the middle of your life and your head's been down since you were in your 20s and you've just been making your path and making your way and figuring out life and getting independent. And then at some point or another, you pull your head up from all the work and you go, wait a second, I've built this whole life around myself. Is this even what I want? Is this the life that I wanted to build? And I've talked with enough people who were in their later years of their life to know that when you get to that stage, you think about, have I loved well and have I lived a life that matters? That's what we all want. We all want to live a life that matters. I remember when this really clicked for me. I was 18 or 19 years old, and I was at a Sunday night church service at my church. Remember when churches used to have Sunday night services? That's when pastors were good, man. We're lazy now. I go to this service, and there was a summer camp that we went to at my church called Look Up Lodge. And the director of that camp, the speaker of that camp, was a guy named Greg Boone. And we had invited Greg to come and to speak that night at our church. There was probably about 500 people there. And what Greg didn't know is that it was really a service to honor him because we were just grateful for the profound impact he had made on the youth of the church and the families of the church and the church as a whole. And so at one point or another, there was some boys up in the front that Greg had discipled, and I could explain the whole thing, but there's high school guys in the front of the room with candles, and everybody's got a candle in their seat. And Pastor Buddy gets up, and he says, if Greg Boone has touched your life directly through his ministry because you've been to look up Lodge and God has used him to impact you, I'd like you to stand up. And so me and all my friends and all the youth group leaders and parents and volunteers stand up. And before you know it, all 500 people are standing up. And then the boys walk down the aisle and they light all the candles and the lights are off in the room, but the room's totally illuminated. And Greg is able to visibly see the impact that his life has had in one space. And I remember in that moment, I was very moved by it. And I prayed, God, I don't ever need to see the room. I don't ever need to see the candles, but just let me live a life that could fill up one of these places. That's all I want. And I know that for my friends, it resonated with them too, because what you see in that moment is purpose. What you see in that moment is a life that mattered, that God was using, and that's a common desire that we all have. Now, some of you would never be as audacious to say, God, I want to know that I could fill up a room with the people that I've impacted. Some of you, our vision is as small as our family is, and that's fine, but the thing that we have in common, no matter how big or how small our vision is for what we want for our future, is that we want it to matter. We want it to count. And that's why I love verse 8 so much. Because it promises us that it will. It promises us that there's a way that we can ensure that our life will matter. That at the end of the day, when we're sitting there in the waning years of our life and we're reflecting back on a life lived, we can know that we know that we know that our life will matter, that at the end of the day, when we're sitting there in the waning years of our life and we're reflecting back on a life lived, we can know that we know that we know that our life was impactful and used by God. It can safeguard us against that fear. There's that, I love, it's a D.L. Moody quote where he says, one of the greatest tragedies in life is for a person to spend their life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. How do we insure ourselves against that? Verse 8. Other versions say ineffective or unproductive in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's really very simple. You want to live a life that matters? To know that we're investing it in the right things? Then pursue these things. Go and do what we talked about last week. Pursue the capacity to love as Christ loved. Pursue these things. Make every effort to pursue them. And when you do, you will build a life that matters. God will use that person in incredible ways. When we commit ourselves to pursuing the virtues laid out for us in 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. The promise is, if you commit yourself to those things, Jesus says, God says, Peter says, I promise you that your life will matter. And so the bottom line is, if we pursue Christ-like love, we can be certain that our lives will matter. And here's what I love about this truth is it's really just a focus on the fundamentals. We don't have to map it out. We don't have to think about the ministries that we're going to start or the people that we're going to disciple or the folks that we're going to share our faith with. We don't have to think about the things that we're going to build and this grand strategy for down the road. All we have to do is focus on the fundamentals. All we have to do is focus on these virtues, and God will use us as we pursue those. It reminds me of my experience, it feels like a lifetime ago, as a high school football coach. You guys may not know, but for three years of my life, from 2007 to 2010, I was a high school Bible teacher and school chaplain for Covenant Christian Academy in Loganville, Georgia. And it is every bit as fancy as you think it is. We had a cafe gym notarium that everything happened in. It was one of those schools. And the first week that I was hired, I'm starting out fresh. I was 26 or 27 years old, and I mean, I looked great. And we had a new science teacher named Coach McCready. Coach McCready is one of my favorite people I've ever met in my life. I love him very dearly. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam, and he was a tailback for Auburn in the 60s. He was the toughest man I've ever met. He's the only person I've met that I've been instantly scared of as soon as we started talking, and he was wonderful. So he comes to my classroom and he says, hey, Coach Rector. And I'm like, I don't even coach anything here. He goes, hey, Coach Rector, you got any experience in football? I said, no, sir. And he goes, I want you to come practice anyways, baby. I was like, okay. So I text Jen. I'm like, I got to go to practice. Coach says I have to go to practice. I'll be home late. So I go to practice and I'm out there watching the boys. They're practicing. They're doing whatever, and there's this guy off in the corner, and he's kicking a football, and he's not doing a very good job at it. And I've played a little bit of soccer in my life, so I said, hey, coach, I don't really have a lot of experience blocking and tackling, but I know how to kick things. You want me to work with that guy over there who clearly needs it? I can teach him how to kick things. And he's like, and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, Coach Rector, congratulations. You've just become my new special teams coordinator, baby. It came with a free shirt and the whole deal. It was great. And we get out there and I become part of the staff and we're talking about strategy and all the other things. And this team was terrible. They were awful. The previous year, they were two and eight. The team they beat was the same. They beat one team twice who was just, they had like three children running around out there. And this is rinky-dink small-time football. This is eight-man football. It is not a big deal at all, but it's the best we could muster in our private school league when we were two and eight the year before. And we also, from the previous coaching staff, inherited this big, huge playbook, right? Like a wristband with the flap and like 75 different plays that you have to call in from the side. And these kids are trying to figure it out and they don't know what direction to run. Their shoulder pads don't fit and the pants are too small. But we got 75 plays. And these really complicated, intricate defenses and the whole deal. And nobody knew what was going on, but it was very clear that the previous regime had focused heavily on strategy, right, and not so much on fundamentals because these guys were terrible at everything. And so Coach threw it all out. He said, we don't need any of these plays. And the quarterback's like, that's all I know, Coach. He's like, don't worry. You're not going to have to learn that much. And I'm not kidding you. We reduced the whole playbook. We had two defensive formations that each had one play, blitz or don't. That was it. That was it. And if you don't know what that means, somebody laughing will explain it to you later. That was it. Those are the two options. Everybody go for the quarterback or everybody kind of hang out. That was it. That was all you had in two formations. And then we reduced 75 offensive plays to 12. And coach said, and everybody was like, coach, don't you think we need more? We're going to get a little predictable. Don't you think we're going to need more plays in this? He says, nope. All we need to do is block and tackle, baby. We just need to teach the boys to block and tackle and we'll be fine. Everything else take care of itself. And that's all we did in practice. We blocked and tackled. We ran those 12 plays. And that first year we made it to the playoffs. And then the three years after that, Coach McCready won back-to-back-to-back state championships. You know why? Because he had a great special teams coordinator. But also because we just focused on the fundamentals. Let's just learn to block and tackle. That happens on every play in football, and the results will come. Let's focus on the fundamentals. And so to me, there's a correlation there between the way that he coached and the way that Peter is coaching us. Don't worry about strategy. Don't worry about the 75 plays. Don't worry about the future and your grand plans and your big vision. Don't worry about that. You just focus on faith and knowledge and godliness and brotherly kindness and perseverance and self-control and virtue and love. You focus on those things and God will take care of how he uses you. You focus on those things and God will take those people and put them to work. You focus on those things. Don't worry about strategy. Don't worry about how big the ministry is. Don't worry about what you're supposed to start or what you're supposed to stop. You focus on these characteristics and we are promised in Scripture that we will live a life that is productive and fruitful of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are promised a life that will echo in eternity because of how we invest it now. And what could be a better investment of a life than one that matters for all eternity? The other thing that I love about this passage is it's not the only place that promise is made. That, hey, if you just simply focus on these things, then I promise you you will be effective and productive. I promise you that when you get to heaven, you'll hear the words that every Christian longs to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. This isn't the only place that promise shows up. The other place it shows up that I can think of is in John chapter 15, when Jesus is talking to the disciples and he calls himself the vine and then the branches. And he says this, I am the vine, you are the branches, whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. It's the same thing. Don't worry about plans. Don't worry about ministries. Don't worry about all the things you're supposed to do. Don't worry about all the things you're supposed to learn. You abide in me. You focus on me. You stick with me. You walk with me. You abide in me. And I promise as you do that, the results will take care of themselves. You will bear much fruit. God will use you in incredible ways if we simply abide in Christ. And the question becomes, well, what do I do to abide in Christ? And that's such an important question. And I was actually reading this passage this morning. And what he says prior to this is, abide in me. And the way that you abide in me is to obey my commands. And what was Jesus' command? To go love as I have loved you. It was a singular command. How do we abide in Christ? How do we promise that we will be fruitful? We love as Christ loved us. How do we love as Christ loved us? Well, we go through Peter and we build these virtues. We make every effort. These two passages are intricately connected to one another and they promise us that we can live lives that matter. But here's the other thing I would tell you as we pursue these lives that matter in God's kingdom and for all of eternity, that if you commit yourself to these character traits, if you commit yourself to being able to offer Christ-like love to people around you, sacrificial, selfless love to people around you. God will change those desires about how you're going to matter. He will change your plans. He's got a different path for you than you do. I saw this meted out in my dad, who when he started in his career, his goal was to be a millionaire by the time he was 40. And somewhere in there, as he pursued these character traits and fits and starts, God changed his heart and his goal became, before I retire, I want to have given away a million dollars. It changes you. And where it changed me is really the rest of the story about the candles. Because the rest of the story is, I went and I worked at Look Up. I worked for Greg because I wanted those candles. And when I got to Look Up, I met a man named Harry Stevenson. Harry was the maintenance director at the camp. Harry unclogged toilets and cut grass and felled trees and cleaned up hair clogs from the girl campers. Harry had a very humble job. Harry, from my 18, 19-year-old brain, was doing very little to impact the kingdom. There would be no candles for Harry. Greg was the guy. Except that, Harry discipled Greg. When Greg didn't know what to do in his marriage or in his family or in his ministry, he went and he talked to Harry first. Harry was the one who welcomed us. Harry was the one who led a Bible study that changed my life forever. Harry was the one that recommended to me a book called Abide in Christ by Andrew Murray that's one of the best, most formative books I've ever read all about these promises. And Harry was the one that when I looked at him the very first time I met him short guy, balding, deep piercing blue eyes and a mustache. And the way that he looked at me and the way that he smiled at me, I could see it in his eyes and I don't know how to describe it, but I knew in that moment this man loves God and this man loves me. I just knew it. And I've not met very many people with those eyes. That when you see them, when they look at you, there's something else happening there. There's some other kind of grace there. And you know this person loves God and they love me. And I didn't catch it at the time, but I was reflecting back years later. And I realized life is not about the candles at all. It's about the eyes. It's not about the rooms that we could fill with the people that we've impacted. It's about what it's like to be in our presence as we are conduits of God's love. And somewhere in my life, I shifted from wanting to be like Greg to just wishing I was a little bit more like Harry. And I'm so far off from it. Frankly, it would be a lot easier for me to try to be like Greg. But God, in his goodness, has shifted my desires to want to be like that person that simply loves. And I promise you, I promise you, that when Harry is in heaven one day, the people who are going to come to him and want to hug his neck are legion. I promise you that his life has mattered in ways that will echo in eternity. And it's because Harry simply pursued these values and these virtues. And God has used him in incredible ways to love others all along the way. And one of my favorite things about our Christian faith, if you're here and you're a believer, about our shared faith, is that God in his goodness offers us the joy and peace of purpose. If you're a Christian, you don't have to wonder, why am I here? What's my life for? How should I invest myself? What should I do? What's the best investment of my time? Where should I put my efforts? We don't have to worry about that. We don't have to be frantic about that. We don't have to get to 60 years old and wonder if we're doing it right. We don't have to get to 80 years old and wonder if we're doing it right. We don't have to keep getting older and wonder if we've already done everything right. God tells us what to do. Pursue Him. Pursue love. Make every effort to have the capacity to offer the love of Christ to other people. And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you based on Scripture, based on 2 Peter, based on John 15, based on the promises of Christ that you will have a life well lived. So my prayer for you is that this passage in 2 Peter 1 would take hold in your heart and possess a place of prominence in your life. It's a passage that I come back to regularly. It's a passage that every time I read it, I smile. Every time I read it, I want to talk about it and I want to tell people about it and I want people to understand the truth from it. And so I know that not everything I've said over the last two weeks, we're just going to follow in lockstep. I know that we've got life and we've got to move on from here and you're going to forget the things I said, even if you thought that they were good. But my hope is that this passage has made enough of an impression on you that you'll revisit it again, that you'll come back to it over and over again, that you'll be affirmed. If I simply choose to pursue love, if I simply be who God has designed me to be. It's not about how I behave, it's about who I am. If I'll simply let God create, work me into who he wants me to be and love other people well, I will have no regrets as I fade into eternity. I hope that this passage can mean for you what it means for me and that God will bring you back to it with a more fullness of understanding as we go from here. And I hope and I pray that you all would be people who go live lives that matter and that they matter because you love well, because you've pursued him earnestly, because you've made every effort. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for the joy and peace of purpose. We thank you for taking the stress of the unknown away from us and not having to wonder what we should do or where we should go, but that you make it very simple for us. Help us to be people who pursue the capacity to offer love as you've offered to us. Make us, God, people like Harry, who when other people interact with us, they know that we love you and that we love them. Let other people feel your love as it channels through us. And God, for those in this room whose spirits need revival, would you please revive them? Even in this song, even as we close, I pray that we would leave here with more of a desire to be close to you than what we entered with. God, I pray that our hearts would be softened towards you. They would be softer than they were when they entered into this place. God, I pray that as we leave here, we would have a stronger desire to know you, to love you, and to love others than we did when we came through those doors. And I pray that your spirit would remind us of it and hold us fast to it, and that those desires would not fade as we do your work for others and on ourselves this week. It's in your son's name that we ask all these things. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, This morning's reading is from Philipp earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. All right. Thank you, Alex. Do you guys, just before we get started, have you guys ever experienced spending the better part of two weeks, really just most of all of your time of the last two weeks, to prepare a sermon on fasting, and then the person who's supposed to be singing decides she's going to say something that is far more elegant and far more beautiful than anything that you have to say about fasting? I don't know if you guys have experienced that, but I am currently resting within that experience, right, as we speak. But no, for those who don't know me, my name is Kyle. I'd love to meet you if I don't know you, so please come up and say hello. I'm the student pastor here at Grace, and as always, I am just so thankful for the opportunity to be able to just share a little bit of my heart for the Lord with you guys this morning. Last week, we began in our Holy Pause series, a series that we are going through through the entirety of Lent. Last Sunday, Nate basically gave an introduction to, hey, here's the background of Lent. Here's what Lent is. Here is why it's important. And here is why, Nate, we as a church feel like it can be important and it can be beneficial for us as a church to walk through Lent together, to give up something, to fast of something, to spend some time in devotionals written by the grace body together. And he did a great job. He did an awesome job. And so for the next few weeks, leading all the way up into Easter, we are going to be looking at a different spiritual discipline. And we're going to be just talking about and focusing on how might that spiritual discipline allow us and our hearts to be more connected to the heart of Christ. And so this morning, I have the joy of being able to talk to you guys about fasting. And so naturally, I'd like to begin by telling you guys my history with coffee. So for a long time, I've been around a lot of people who really like, who really love coffee. They drink it all the time. I think it's disgusting. I did think it's disgusting. Let me go ahead and say that because honestly, I'm not a big acquired taste guy. I don't know. Some people are great about like, oh, I should probably do this. I should probably drink this. I should probably eat this. It's healthy, whatever. So I'm just going to do it. That's not really me. You know, if I don't like something, I'm not really trying to eat it. I'm not really trying to drink it. And so, you know, I tried coffee and I was like, cool, there's dirt in this water. That's awesome. You know, like, and it's great. And then you also, you deal with like, for any of you guys, for every, all of us don't like something. And all of us have been promised by someone who does like that something, hey, I promise you, when you try this one, it'll be better. And I don't think I've heard that any more than I've heard it with everybody and their coffee. It's like, hey, guess what? Every other coffee in the entire land is garbage except for this cup right here. So why don't you go ahead and give this a try? I was like, okay, cool. It's still dirt and water. Like, as you guys can see, I prefer my water without dirt. But what made coffee a little different is because I was like, man, it smells so good. You know, like with vegetables, it's like vegetables smell as gross as they taste. You know, they smell gross, they taste gross. There's no reason to consume vegetables, which is not true. I'm actually coming around on those, so you guys should be proud of me. Like, no need to applaud, but I mean, I'm eating some vegetables now at the ripe age of 28. But for coffee, it just smells so good, man. And like, when I would go to my grandparents' house and my granddad would make coffee or my brother would make coffee in the morning, I'm like, gosh, that smells so good. Like I know it tastes like garbage, but man, it just seems really nice to be able to make some coffee in the morning and then just sip along with it. And as we all know, it's fun drinking hot drinks with friends, you know? And not only that, but there's only a number of times that you can go to a cool coffee shop and everyone's ordering their fancy black coffees, and then you order your fancy brown hot chocolates that you don't feel a little bit embarrassed. And so at about 26, I decided I'm going to try to give coffee a shot. And honestly, those are goofy, funny reasons. But the real reason is because I realized that my health needed it. Because if I had a long car trip, if I woke up early in the morning and I need to get energized and get going for the day, or if there was a time where I needed to stay up late or whatever, I mean, from high school on, what I turned to was Mountain Dew. I mean, just absolutely pounding Mountain Dews so that I could stay awake for whatever I needed to do. Like, if you look at the marketing data for Mountain Dew, Kyle needing to stay awake always increased heavily the sales of Mountain Dew. There was like this innate sense of me, I need to keep them in business because I have to wake up right now. And honestly, as you guys know, Mountain Dew is straight up poison. Not only is it disgusting, but it is poison and it is terrible for you. And so at some point I looked in the mirror and I said, Kyle, it's time to get off the Mountain Dews, brother. And so I decided to turn to coffee as a healthier alternative. So I drank it a little bit, and as you acquire tastes, as you start eating or drinking something more, you start enjoying it a little bit better. You start liking it a little bit more. And so that was happening. I would go on a trip, a long trip, and I'd maybe get a couple cups of coffee. And I wasn't drinking it real fast. I didn't love it, but it was what it was. And so obviously my family was elated. They all love coffee and I always just roasted them about it. And now they are allowing me to roast coffee. Because for Christmas, because they were so excited, they got me a Keurig thing, coffee maker. And so I was like, well, you know what? If they're going to make me this, then why don't I just start drinking it? Like, you know, I was kind of just drinking it when I needed it because it's like helps me stay up, gives me some good caffeine, all of that stuff. But maybe if I start drinking it more often, then like these other people who really do actually really like coffee, enjoy the taste, all that stuff, maybe, just maybe, I'll feel the same way. So I started making it more on my own. Well, fast forward into quarantine. And in quarantine, I don't know, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a big rules guy. If you give me a rule, I'm just going to say, okay, I'm going to follow it. So like early quarantine was like, hey, you should not leave your front door. Like you should not go outside at all, if humanly possible. Like there was a time where it was, like, banned to walk on sidewalks. Like, it was insane, you know? And so, being a single guy who lives in an apartment alone, I was just not doing very many things. I mean, I was, like, you know, we would do our streams, and I would FaceTime the kids or whatever, but mostly I'm, like, watching TVs, and I'm playing TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm, like, watching TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm playing Xbox, all that stuff. But there is literally nothing to do except for those two to three times a day where I was like, you know what I could do? I could make some coffee right now. And so for all of you who know Keurigs, you know, you walk over and you got to turn it on because you got to heat up that water. So you got to turn it on first. And as you're heating it up, sometimes you have to add water. That was like a joyous occasion when I got to even add the water to it. So you'd add the water, you'd heat it up, and then it would just drizzle down. And all this whole process, getting it into the cup, takes like five minutes. And then you got to blow it. And that was another thing I got to do. Blowing the coffee because it's too hot, you know. And then for about five more minutes, it's still too hot to like just chug down. So you drink it, you know, you sip it or whatever, and that was 10 to 15 minutes where I felt like I was actually doing a thing, and it was joyous, but all that to say that as I started doing that, I started really liking coffee a lot. I enjoyed it a lot more. I started drinking a lot more. As stuff started opening up, as we came back into the office, I got a membership over at Panera to where I could get free. And so I'd stop by, I'd grab a free coffee, head over here, maybe get iced coffee for lunch, whatever it was. And it was like, great, this is awesome. I'm finally at the place where it's like, ah, it's not just something I have to do because I need it. It's like, I don't even need this anymore. Like, I don't really feel the caffeine doing much. It just tastes good. So I like doing it. Well, fast forward again to a few months ago when I was set to preach on a Sunday. And on Monday, I had an ear infection. And it didn't feel great. So I went to the doctor, got an antibiotic. Next morning, take the antibiotic, head over to Panera, get like a scone and a coffee and do that stuff. About an hour later, I started feeling super sick. I felt terrible. My stomach felt awful. I didn't know what was going on. I was like, is this COVID? You know, like first the ear infection, now I have COVID. This is awful. And I went home. And as I went home, I'm like, well, I do at least feel a little hungry. And so I start eating. And as I start eating, I start feeling better. So all you guys now are now, all you parents are now nodding. You're like, yeah, you just need to eat more when you take antibiotics, dummy. And that was it. Literally the only thing that made me sick was the antibiotic. But as any of you know, if you get sick around something that you eat or something that you drink, you're not really excited to eat or drink that thing the next day. And so on Wednesday, after I had just survived two ailments, on Wednesday, I do not at all want scones. I don't want any coffee. I had no taste for coffee anymore, which had become foreign to me to not have a taste for. And I go about half the day, and ailment number three comes as my head starts pounding. Like it hurts so bad. My eyes are just like, like it just, I don't want, I don't want my eyes to be open. It just, all of it. And I'm just like, am I dying? You know, like I just, because it's now three times where I have no idea what's going on. It's the third different type of sick I was or whatever until I finally realized, as all of you veteran coffee savants know, is my body had grown so accustomed to having that coffee that when it didn't have it and when that caffeine intake didn't come, my head was pounding because my body was trying to let me know, Kyle, we need this. And it was the first time where I'm like, oh, my coffee intake has not been healthy. Something that I thought was like good, and I thought was actually a healthy alternative, and therefore I was doing something smart and right, had turned into something that I was completely abusing. Something that literally was giving my body a negative, painful reaction if I went a day without it. And the crazy thing was, I had no idea. I just thought I liked coffee, so I was drinking it. But until that first day that I didn't have a coffee that morning, I had no idea the hold that it had over me and the hold that it had over my body. And if you'll permit me, I'm going to pause there. I'm not going to finish that point because I want to backtrack a little bit, and I want to talk a little bit more about Lent. Wednesday is when Lent started. If you guys have joined us in our devotionals, you know that. If you've joined us by deciding that you want to fast of something and replace that with focusing on and loving Jesus more and growing closer to Him, then you know that Lent started Wednesday. Here's my trivia question for you. Do you know what that Wednesday is called, the first Wednesday of Lent? Ash Wednesday, yes. Points to everyone who said that. Congrats. I saw all of you, so I've made a mental note of everyone who has points now. It's called Ash Wednesday. I'm not going to take the time to talk to you about all of the history of Ash Wednesday and to tell you all about the service of Ash Wednesday, but I would say if you've never been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, it's worth it. Check it out next year. Obviously, it is come and gone at this point, but check it out next year because it is really interesting and it's a cool service to be a part of. But Ash Wednesday partly derives its name from the words of God in Genesis when he says, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. If you've been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've heard that repeated over and over. And if you've ever seen someone who's been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've probably seen them with a cross drawn with ashes on their forehead. And when that cross is drawn on their forehead, they say, from dust you came, and to dust you shall return. The point of an Ash Wednesday service, and the point of Ash Wednesday is this. It's to remind us of our humanity and to remind us of our mortality. That just as one day we're here, one day we'll be gone. That one day our bodies will return once again to Ash just as they came. One day the things that we have, everything that we've built up in this life, the good things, the bad things, the neutral things, all of the things one day will pass away and they will return to dust. And as that reminder is set in, we kick off a 40-day fast. And that 40-day fast, as we talked about last week, and as Nate talked about, and as Carter read about, comes from the 40-day fast that we find in Matthew 4, from Jesus. Before Jesus sets off on his journey and on his time on earth where he is ministering and he's healing and he's loving and he's serving, he spends 40 days fasting in a desert. And after those days, Satan comes to him. And when he does, he tempts him. He tempts him three times. And the first one is he basically says, Jesus, I know you're hungry, and I know that you can turn that rock right there to bread. So why not go ahead and do so? You're super hungry. Just do it. The fast doesn't, it's not that important. It's not that meaningful. And Jesus's response, I think, is within the same vein as the response of Ash Wednesday, the response of God to the people of, dust you came and to dust you will return. And in Matthew 4, he says, man does not live on bread alone, but by every word spoken from the Father, from God. And I believe that those two reminders are coupled to remind us, one, not only that one day we will be gone, not only one day we will return to dust, but to remind us that while we're here, what ultimately is the most important and the most beneficial thing that we can intake is the word of God. And as we transition, obviously Jesus says this, but then Jesus, we know, goes on. He lives a life and he goes on and he takes the cross for us. And when he does so, what that means is now we, our souls, our hearts, get to rest upon the knowledge and the truth that Jesus did this for us, that we are freely able to experience a relationship with our Creator and our Father because He died and was raised to life for us. And so through Lent, we take time. We fast, we give something up. With the whole and sole purpose and mission of setting our hearts a little bit better on the Father, setting our hearts on the things above, taking to heart the reminder that Jesus gives when he talks to Satan by saying, hey, as much as our bodies need food, that much more our souls need the word of God. But as Paul writes, as a lot of us know and a lot of us see, and as Paul writes, this is something that's gone on forever. There are a lot of people alive. There are a lot of people around that have missed this truth, have missed this goodness of God, have missed this good news of Jesus as our Savior, because they're ignorant of the fact that it's offered to them. And they're so, as he taught, I'll just read it. As Alex read out of Philippians 3, the first half of what he read is talking about, and he refers to these people as enemies of the cross. It literally brings him to tears to talk about that these enemies of the cross are people whose stomachs are their gods and also whose minds and hearts are consumed by earthly things. There are people around that have not been able to experience the truth and the joy of the realization that we have this Jesus Christ who came to live and to die for us. And if they live their lives ignorant of this fact, if they live their lives not being able to recognize and understand and come to know this Savior for themselves, then they end up being an enemy of the cross. And while I don't read that and I don't want to talk about that scripture to say, hey, all of you guys who are Christians, if you ever allow yourself to care more about earthly things than about heavenly things, it means you're an enemy of the cross. That, I don't think, is the point, because if our hearts belong to God, then our hearts belong to God. But I do think that if we allow distractions to enter in, if the worldly becomes our ultimate, if it becomes everything that is in front of us, everything that surrounds us, what I do think happens is we hold God and we hold Christ at arm's length. As God and as Christ is trying to bring us into their embrace, trying to rain down the blessing and the joy of who they are in a relationship with them, we become so consumed by the things of this world. Our belly becomes our gods, our minds and our hearts are set to the earthly things, and we hold God's promises, and we hold the Word of God at arm's length. And so the goal of fasting is to shift that. To paraphrase Brad Gwynn's devotional from Wednesday of the Grace devotional, he talks about fasting as basically we have these things, these things that get in our way, these things that distract us from the goodness and the glory of God, we find and we take hold of those things and we replace them with the presence of Jesus, submitting to him and letting him sustain us. And I know that fasting seems and is maybe a bit of a big step to take, you know, like, hey, like, if there are distractions, if there are things that are around me that are distracting me, then I'm just gonna, you know, switch it up. I'm just gonna, like, you know, just let God take over that. But why I would argue that fasting might be the best and ultimate way that we are able to eliminate distractions and things getting in the way of us and God is because I don't really think that we understand the way that distractions take us away from God. I don't think we really understand the full scope and the full grasp that these things, these things of the world, these distractions that are all around us, the full grasp that they have on our lives. As an example, I would say most of us would probably say that at times we allow our phones to be a bit of a distraction. We pull them out. It's very easy to scroll, to continue to be on them, all that stuff. And when we do so, ultimately, we're saying, hey, Lord, I don't, like right now, I just want this to be my time. But I would contend that most of you aren't making that choice in your head. I would say that for the most part, you're not like, man, you know what, God? You're not worth my time right now because I got to check Instagram again. I don't think we're making those decisions. I don't think we're trying to be maniacal about like, God, you're not getting this amount of time. You're not getting this ride home because there's a podcast to listen to. I don't think any of us are making those decisions, but those decisions get made for us because they're so readily available and because we're so used to them. The author David Matthews says it this way. He says, That's about the best quote I'm going to read today, so I'm going to read it again. I had no idea it was a negative. I had no idea I was addicted to it. I had no idea that my body literally needed it or else it was going to go haywire and really turn on me while I'm trying to write a sermon. I had no idea of any of those things until I took a day and I didn't drink it. In the same way. Look at the distractions of our life. I bet a lot of you guys gave something up for Lent. I bet if you gave up your phone, you probably grabbed your phone a lot of times and was like, oh. Or if you gave up social media, you grabbed your phone and looked and couldn't find the Instagram app a lot of times. I actually last week decided to fast from food, to take a day with no food. Honestly, I don't know if I could tell you that I've done it before. I hate to admit, but it is what it is. And I don't know about you guys, but in my life, I never allow myself to experience hunger. I mean, if I'm at home, I'm eating. I've got snacks in between if I need. When I'm here, when I'm at church, I'll eat breakfast and then I get to church, I'm like, I could eat something. Julie's got Fig Newton stocked. I can have a Figgy Newton literally whenever I want a Figgy Newton. And so one, we love Julie for that. Shout out to Julie for being the realist MVP for always having Fig Newtons for me. But I say all that to say that literally, like, I just, I have built a life that never allows my body to need food, never allows my body to actually hunger for food, because I just scratch it before it gets there. And so when I fasted, you can imagine that my body was not thrilled. I was really hungry. My stomach hurt. My chest hurt. My body got like actual achy, actually achy. And I was astounded as I thought about because I was fasting after doing a lot of research. And so luckily I was kind of aware of what I should be looking for, and I was astounded at the thought that we're called to hunger for the Lord in that way. When we are called to hunger and to yearn for God, it is a literal hunger, a literal yearning for God. In the Beatitudes, it says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is a literal hunger, a literal life support thirst for God. I don't think I even knew what that felt like until I took time to fast from food. If we're honest, outside of food, I would say there's a thousand other things that we could fast from as well that would give us similar experiences. So I would say that food is far from the only thing that we turn to that distracts us from God's glory. As Pastor John Piper says about fasting, he says, fasting reveals not only food's mastery over us, but also televisions, computers, phones, or whatever else we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. Every single thing that conceals the weakness for our hunger for God. That's the point of Lent. To find that one big thing, to find those 10 small things, to get rid of them, to replace them, to realize the hold that they have on our body and to somehow shift our mindset and to shift the way that we live of like, instead of every time I grab my phone, it's every time I look here and say, God, I'm just going to pray for this person now. I gave up social media for Lent. I gave up social media and I kind of just gave up, I told my small group, like excess. There's, I would say, zero seconds in a day that I'm not like intaking. In the morning, I wake up, I play Wordle very well. And then post-Wordle, I scroll Instagram, I scroll Twitter, I do all that stuff. And then as I finally get up after I've laid in my bed for an hour looking at my phone, I go and I make breakfast. And when I make breakfast, like, I can't just be making breakfast until I have the TV on, because obviously. I make my breakfast and I eat it while I'm still watching TV, then I get in the car and I turn on a podcast. And then for the rest of the day, it's all of that. If I'm sitting, I'm working, every single time I take a quick second, like if my hands move away from my computer or something, then boom, boom, got it. Got to go to the bathroom, got to grab my phone. Like literally like, I know we've all done it before. I know we've all gone to the bathroom and then go, oh, and then run back. It's like, hey, I promise you it's not like a physical necessity to have your phone. Like you can still go to the bathroom without it, which I guess I promised you. I don't even remember the last time I tried. But every second of every day is consumption for me. And almost none of that consumption is being consumed by Christ. And if you're like me, there's a lot of those things. And then I have the audacity at the end of the day as I take stock of the day or those times where I get a little bit mindful of what's going on. And I have the audacity to say, well, I didn't spend much time with Jesus today, but I was pretty busy. I think we all have that. And not that we're always lying to ourselves. There are days where we are so busy. But fasting allows us to realize that there are a lot of natural reactions that we have. Natural times that we turn to so many other things that make the shield around us to where we hold God's promises and we hold God's truths and we hold the joys of Christ at arm's length because we're so invested into these small little things. And these trivial distractions have just become so a part of our day we don't even realize them. Until we take some time where we don't deal with them. Until we take time where we cut them off and we begin to turn our affections to God instead. John Piper continues and he says, fasting remedies by intensifying the earnestness of our prayer and saying with our whole bodies what prayer says with our heart, I long to be satisfied in God alone. So through fasting and through that prayer, that intense prayer that follows with our whole hearts and our whole bodies, we allow Jesus to rightly adjust our priorities. And as Katie Davis reminds us in Thursday's devotional from Matthew 6.33, we're reminded to seek first God's kingdom, seek first God's righteousness, and then we allow him to fill in all the details. And we allow him to faithfully provide for us, just as he always has. As the Lord becomes more and more part of our days, as our fasting continues through Lent, and the Lord becomes ever and ever present in our days. As our hearts experience his glory and his goodness more and more, our hearts begin to grow closer to and to resemble his. We're better able to worship. We're better, excuse me, we're better able to find rest in him. and our hearts are more tuned to see and to sing his grace. That's not it. Because as Gary Green reminds us in Friday's Lent devotional, that as Isaiah 58 talks about, which I'm just going to step away for a second. Gary Green's devotional was awesome. He talks about a set number of verses within Isaiah 58. If you didn't take the time to read all of Isaiah 58, I don't think that there's anything better written about fasting than Isaiah 58. So one, thank you, Gary, for letting me realize how awesome that is. Two, that's your homework assignment. Go home and read all of Isaiah 58. Let me come back over here. In Isaiah 58, as Gary reminds us, our hearts begin to reflect Christ not only inwardly, but outwardly. Our natural posture becomes one of love and of service for the people around us, and especially, especially those that are in need. The orphans, the widows, the sick, the homeless, the oppressed. The people who live, the people whose lives are in hunger of the luxuries, are in hunger of the needs, that we are taking a small amount of time to give up. The last time I got to preach, I was asked to simply answer the question, why should our lives be consumed by Christ? And the answer that we arrived at is because Christ's life is consumed with us. Not only in the past where he literally lived a life, lived a perfect life, took on the cross, and died so that we could have a relationship with him, and so that we don't have to settle for dust we shall return as our ending, but we now have a soul that is able to enter into a perfect eternity. Not only did Christ provide that for us in the past, but he is now living, sitting on the right hand of God as our high priest. And he's praying for us. And his whole goal, every second of every day, is to draw us closer and closer into the love of God and to bring us further and further into this perfect redemption that he offers us. And when we fast, we get to experience that just a little bit more. And I don't know if I know any other better reason than that. So will you bow with me as we pray. Lord, fasting is weird. It's a little bit foreign. It takes on many meanings. It takes on many definitions. But Lord, ultimately, fasting allows us to rid ourselves of distractions, to see and understand need a little bit better, and to allow us to witness you a little bit more. Lord, I just pray that anyone who has embarked on fasting through Lent, Lord, that you bring them strength and you allow them to see your goodness just as you have promised that you would. For those who are pondering, Lord, I pray that you would work in their hearts and maybe offer them too. And Lord, if anyone in here says, you know what, I want to take it to the next step. I want to try a food fast. Just to experience a little bit more of you. And Lord, I pray that you give them the strength to do that. Lord, we are so thankful for your goodness, always and forever. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. That was great, Kirk and the band. It was really good. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So if I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. And sincerely, thank you for being here on this cold holiday weekend. It's really great to look out and see faces, ones I hope will be smiling and not yawning here shortly. If you're wondering why is Nate limping around and on a stool, well, to much of your glee, I have gout again. So I know the worst part of gout, which is very painful, is not the pain. I can limp around for a couple of days and really not fuss about it very much. It's you. It's the jackals here, the hyenas that circle my pain-ridden corpse as I have to admit things like this. But that's what's going on. And I'm only telling you now because I'm referring to him as Uncle G. Uncle G's come for a visit. He's going to show up later in the story this morning. So it's important that you have this preface right now. We are in the fourth part of our series in Colossians, where we've moved through the book of Colossians together. And admittedly, it's portions of the book of Colossians. We've not moved through the whole thing. We've just kind of moved through and selected the things that seem to me most relevant to grace. And I've really enjoyed being able to do this in ways that were unexpected. I've really enjoyed this series. And so what we've been through so far is to look at this church in Colossae and acknowledge that they were a church that existed with some pressure. They were doing a good job. They were loving God well. They loved one another well. And in that way, I felt like they were similar to grace, but they're also similar to grace in the pressures that they were facing from within and from without. In the culture in which they sat, there were pressures for them to skew legalistic in their practices and in their theology. And then there was pressures for them to skew liberal in their practices and in their theology. So Paul's goal is to write them and encourage them to stay true to the true faith. And so how does he do that? Well, he does that in the opening chapter and for us week one by painting a soaring picture of Christ and who he is and focusing us on him. And then he lets us know that we are actually our brother's keeper, that the spiritual health of the people around us who we love and care about is your responsibility as one of God's children. And so we carry that together to try to bring everyone to spiritual maturity. And then last week, we talked about this idea of living as a new creation, as focusing on Christ, daily letting His love and His grace and His mercy and His compassion wash over us and so put to death in us the things that would have us behave as our old self or the bad, less healthy versions of ourself. And so this week he finishes up the letter with what's commonly referred to as the household codes. And they show up a couple different places in Pauline epistles or in Paul's writing. Okay. And so we're going to be looking at those this morning and I'm going to start start to read the passage. And immediately you're going to think to yourself, oh boy, this is a sticky one for 2022. What's he going to do? I'll tell you. But let's read together and then we will look at the meaning of the passage together. I'm picking it up in Colossians chapter 3 verse verse 18, and I'll read through the very beginning of Colossians chapter 4. Read with me, if you will. Paul writes this, For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. All right, there's a lot there and a lot of dynamics covered there. The dynamic covered between husband and wife, between father and children, and then between master and slave. And some versions have the word bond servant put there. And really that's an attempt of the editors of that particular translation to soften the original text and say, no, no, no, it didn't mean slave, it meant bond servant. And that's intellectually, okay? So as believers, we should encounter what it says in Scripture and deal with it with honesty without trying to artificially soften it. So the word there is slave, which is problematic, and we're going to refer to that in a second. But as we read this passage, and as you hear it, my anticipation is that you would expect me now to break that down. What does it mean? Wives, submit to your husbands. What you going to do, sucker? That one's pretty sticky, right? In 2022. And then we read the rest ones, and then there's the problematic things for Christians about provisions for masters and slaves and the whole deal. So what are we going to do with that? Well, the answer is we're not going to talk about that. All right. I'm going to talk about something else. Now, why am I going to talk about something else? Well, two reasons. The first one is the one that you're assuming right now, because I don't want to. I don't want to do that. That's too much work and too much effort and too much thought and too much parsing out all the words. And honestly, I don't think it's what Grace needs to hear most right now. So we're not going to camp out on gender roles in the home, okay? We're just not going to do that. Second, I think that there's a bigger theme here to these verses that is super important to us, that is very relevant to us, and that is worth camping out on. Before I just jump to that, though, I will say this to fight back just total cowardice on my part about the first verse, wives submit to your husbands, gender roles in the home, things like that. I will tell you two things, and only these two things, and I will not offer much explanation. If you want more, talk to me about it. Email me. I've never once turned down a lunch opportunity, especially if you're buying. I've never once done that. I always respond to emails. So if you want to talk more about this and these themes, I'm open for that. That's just not where I want to camp out this morning. But since we're there, I will say these two things. I will say it is my personal understanding and belief based on not just this scripture, but myriad passages, that in the structure of marriage, God has chosen to give men the tie-breaking vote. But it is also my belief based on other passages, particularly Ephesians 5, where men are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it. That men are to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our wives, and therefore, though we have the tie-breaking vote, it is our holy responsibility to use it as little as possible so that when it is used, it can be trusted. Okay. The other thing that I will say about that on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is we cannot just pluck that verse, wives submit to your husbands, out of context and understand it at face value. We have to put it in the context in which it rests. And the context in which it rests is in the following verses, there's a lot more provisions about how slaves are to behave and how masters are to behave towards slave than there is about family codes. So if we're going to contextualize and culturalize the instructions about masters and slaves, then we can't just do it to one part of the passage. So the whole passage is best understood with the nuance of the culture going on around it and with some good academic study, not simply plucked out of context. We cannot understand verse 18 in a way that we would not use to understand the passages that follow. That's what I'll say about those two things, or about that thing, those two things. Now, to the bigger point. There is something going on in this text that I think applies to all of us right now and is a far more relevant sermon than just how do we parse out these particular things. And to get to that point, we do need to understand the cultural context in which these things rest. These are, again, household codes, where Paul is saying, in light of the gospel, in light of Jesus and who he is, in light of the provisions that I'm giving you, in light of putting on a new self and how do we live this Christian life, how are we to organize our lives? And what we need to understand is these codes that he gives out here in these verses, these instructions, and the ones that we find in other Pauline writings, like Ephesians, are given in a Roman context. These cities are Roman cities with a Roman heritage. And those cities and those cultures are incredibly patriarchal. They are man-centered. The man of the house, the father, the patriarch of the family, is a king of his little fiefdom. Now, they're little pathetic kingdoms. I mean, there's nothing to be proud of, but he is the king. The wife is the property. She is subservient to him. Everything is built around him. Everything focuses on him. Everything exists under his direction with no question and with no questioned authority. The wife is someone that is there for use or not use, for purpose or no purpose, and she can be cast aside just as quickly as she is added into the family. The marriage covenant is a marriage contract, and he can terminate it whenever he wants. She can terminate it never. Children are accessories to the marriage. They are future heirs. They are not little people. They do not have rights. The rights that they have exist under the authority of the father, and they have no more rights than he wants to give them. Slaves, likewise, have no rights. They exist under the rule of the man of the house. They exist under the rule of the master. They have no one to appeal to. They have no other authority. He literally is the king of his small kingdom. That's the way that the Roman culture and society was set up. As an aside, can you imagine the abuse and misogyny that went on in that culture, where a man is in charge with unquestioned authority of all of the people in his life. Thank God we have figured out how terrible of an idea that is. My heart breaks for the women and children that were in that culture. And all of that makes Paul's writings incredibly radical in the time that they were received. He says, husbands, treat your, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. More on top of that, in Ephesians, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church, laying himself down for them, giving himself up for them, which is totally radical to the Roman view of wife as accessory. It's a completely different train of thought. I can't be harsh with them. I have to consider them. I have to be nice to them. I have to listen to them. Yes, man, it's called being a human. You have to do all those things. And then it says, do not provoke your children to anger, which is not something that a Roman father would ever consider. He doesn't care if he makes his kids angry. He doesn't care if they don't like him. He doesn't have to. They're just there as accessories to the marriage. And one day there'll be heirs. And one day maybe they can contribute to the wealth of the home. But right now I don't have to care about them, Which, having a nine-month-old, I understand that mentality sometimes. John likes to play a really fun game of, hey, I'm going to kind of cry all day, and you just figure out how to make me stop doing it. Fun. Let's go, buddy. But children were accessories to marriage. They had no rights. And then slaves, I don't need to explain to you how much they could be mistreated. We know the crimes over the centuries. And so for Paul to come in here and say, hey, masters of the house, you treat your slaves, paraphrase, treat them however you want, but God's watching you. And however you treat them is how he's going to treat you. However you judge them is how he's going to judge you. The mercy that you apply to them is the mercy that he will apply to you, which again is radically different than what's happening in the rest of Roman culture. So Paul is telling the church in Colossae, if you want to be believers in light of Jesus and the fact that he is now in your life, your family needs to look radically different than the families that are around you. And bigger than that, he's telling them this. He's telling them that right now, your family life, your life is centered on the man. It's centered on the father. It's centered on the husband. It's centered on the master. He needs to be decentralized, and Christ needs to become the central figure and tenant in your home around which everything revolves. And he's primarily addressing the man here because the rest of them are under no auspices that they are the focus of the home. They don't need to reorient how they expect others to treat them. They need to reorient where they put the father of the home and put Jesus in the center of that. So what's going on here is radically different than everything in the Roman home. And this is the larger theme, I believe, of the household codes that we find in Colossians and in Ephesians, which is to say this, that Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. That's the point, I think, of this passage, the larger point that is more applicable and important for us to consider this morning, that when we become believers, Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. So to these cultures, to these families that were entrenched in this patriarchic, unhealthy culture in ancient Rome, Paul says your life needs to look completely different. You need to completely reorient your family and household life around Jesus and not around the Father, not around the man. It's got to look radically different. And I actually, in those notes, I said Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives. And I don't know why I did this. I intentionally softened it a little bit when I turned in the notes on Thursday. But in thinking about it over the weekend, it's not invites, it's insists. Jesus demands that we would radically reshape our lives around him. And it's so much so that I would say that our lives after Jesus need to look a lot different than our lives before Jesus. Our lives with Jesus as Lord of our lives by necessity will look a lot different than our lives without Jesus as the Lord of our lives. And if those two versions of ourselves and our lives and our priorities look pretty similar, there's probably a problem going on there. And the problem is this. I think we often attempt to fit Jesus into our lives rather than reshaping our lives around him. We often attempt to find ways to kind of shove Jesus into our life in this predetermined shape in a way that he will fit. And we're more interested in making Jesus fit into our life than we are about reshaping our life so that Jesus takes it over. There's kind of two illustrations I would use here. The first is pretty simple, but maybe it's the one we need this morning, so I'm just going to leave it in. But it's as if we become a Christian and when we become a Christian, Jesus is going to move into our house and he's going to now live with us. He's now a part of our life. And so a lot of us probably have a guest room. And when we realize that Jesus is going to be moving in with us, we're like, well, I got to update this thing. The thread count is too low for Jesus. So we go and we get the finest Egyptian, we get 800 or more thread count for Jesus is what he needs. And we get all the best things and we make sure that there's a good charger. We don't give him the one that's chewed on or frayed. We give him the nice charger for the nightstand. And we buy, maybe we buy a new small TV and we put it over there and we hook it up to an Apple TV and the whole thing and we go ahead and we cover his Apple TV subscription because it's Jesus and he probably wants to watch Ted Lasso. And so we kind of set up everything for him, right? And we're ready. And then Jesus moves in. And he says, look at this guy, this is a nice guest room. And we're like, well, yeah, I mean, you're moving in. So we wanted to make sure it was up to your standards. And he's like, well, no, I mean, I'm taking the master. That's your room. I think some of us just prepare a nice guest room for Jesus, and then everything else stays the same. Another way to think about this, that I actually wanted to do a visual aid illustration of, and so I need to beg your forgiveness and your imagination, because I'm going to invite you to imagine this illustration with me, since I'm not able to do it. And here's why I'm asking you for your forgiveness. I was not able to do it because I had to go get some materials and prepare it, and I had a couple afternoons where I probably could have, and I just didn't. I'll do it this weekend. And then over the weekend, you know, we had a kid get sick, and some unexpected things happened, and my old buddy Uncle G came to visit, and it's not really a time to be walking around stores, and I just didn't have time to do the things that I needed to do. So I failed you as a pastor. I did not budget my time wisely, and I sit up here illustrationless. So if you'll accept that tepid apology, then I will invite you to use your imagination, because here's what I wanted to do, okay? Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get like a big block of like modeling foam, if that's even a thing that exists, and get a square one, and then have a board with a big hole cut out of it, and say the foam block represents Jesus, and the board with the hole in it represents us. That's our life. And what happens is we take Jesus, the square, and we try to fit it into the circle, and it doesn't work out. And so we're faced with a choice. I can reshape Jesus according to who I think he ought to be and to what my life already is and just kind of shove it in there and make it work, or I can change my life. And what most of us do, all of us in different ways, choose to do is we choose to reshape Christ according to who we already are and just assume that he probably is too. And we remake Christ in our image and then we make him fit the life that we've already chosen to live. And there's a bunch of examples of how we do this. I'm just going to give you a couple this morning. When I was thinking about how is it that we do this, what are practical ways that we kind of reshape Jesus in our own image to make him fit into our existing life, the very first thing that occurred to me, as touchy as it is, is politics. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, and everything in the middle. I don't know if libertarians in the middle or if it's like over here on the other side of Republicans. I don't know where that belongs, but all of the parties. I have known people who just assume that because this is my political affiliation, certainly Jesus agrees with me. Certainly because this is the most important moral value for me, it's also the most important moral value for Jesus. And sure, my party doesn't champion some of the causes the way that it talks about in Scripture, but we cover the important ones the exact same way that Jesus wants to. And so I know that my political party is the right political party. And further, the other political party, those people are not even Christians. They think they are. They're stupid. And if they went to my church, my pastor would tell them. No, I would not. I would not. I'd tell them in person, but not corporately like this. And it's funny to chuckle at, but what's really disappointing to me, and I've seen it more and more, if we don't think that this is true, is the fact that I have seen a lot more Christians change their faith than change their politics. I have seen a lot more Christians who are, they are clinging to their political party, they are clinging to their social justice paradigm, to the way that they think about cultural issues and the way that they think about political issues and then be met with places where it seems to clash with their faith and one of them has to give way way, and it's not their politics. It's not their faith, rather. They choose their politics. I've seen a lot more Christians adjust their view of who they think Jesus is according to what their certain politics should be. And I've seen very few believers, just being honest, I've seen very few believers who change their politics in light of the Jesus that they learn about. And I think that that's a big problem. Another way we do this is with our time, right? We become Christians and we see that Jesus makes certain demands of our time. Jesus says, I'd like to meet with you every morning. I'd like to meet with you every day. I'd like to meet with you in prayer. I'd like you to study me. I'd like you to get to know me. I'd like to spend some time with you. And our response is, listen, Jesus, I do too. I want to spend time with you. You seem great. But I'm sleepy, okay? So I'm not going to set that alarm. Jesus, listen, I want to spend time with you too. But it's the playoffs, all right? So I'm going to be up late. Jesus, I know that I need to prioritize church. I get it, and I'm going to. But it's football season, and I'm going to be tailgating. You know what happens at tailgates. So I'll see you during basketball season, Jesus. And he says, hey, I'd like to spend this time with you. I'd like to do these things. I'd like you to reprioritize your life. And we're like, I will, but not right now because there's other things that I'm doing. I'd love for you to connect with people in small group who can encourage you and push you towards me. Jesus, I'm gonna, but right now I'm just kind of tired. And so even though we know that he places certain demands on our time, we just decide we can't give those right now. Sometimes we reshape Jesus by hanging on to just blatant sin in our life and just excusing it away and being like, listen, I need a Jesus who accepts me as I am. I just need someone who just takes me in as I am. And listen, Jesus does love you as you are. But he also tells the adulterous woman, after he loves her as she is, to go and sin no more. He balances grace and truth. But some of us just hang on to sins that we have in our life, figuring it's not that big of a deal, and Jesus couldn't possibly mind. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm drinking too much. I know I'm drinking. It's not healthy. I'm starting to hide it from people. This is not very good. But Jesus has bigger fish to fry, so I'm just going to hold on to this one. Yeah, maybe I regularly look at stuff I don't need to look at, but it's better than actually cheating. So I'll just hold on to this one for a little while. Maybe, and this one's personal, maybe I drive like a jerk. Maybe it's possible that I bought a nondescript Honda Accord that does not have the church sticker on the back of it so that I can continue to drive however I want and not make anyone think poorly of the church that I lead. Maybe I sometimes can drive in such a way that the pastor of a church ought not drive, but certainly Jesus has bigger fish to fry than that. And so I just hang on to it like a dummy, like it's okay to just weave through traffic with my six-year-old in the car. He says, Daddy, you drive fast. Like, yeah, no, I like driving fast. But we have these things that we just allow in our life as if Jesus doesn't call us to repentance. And I know that last week we talked about let's just focus on Christ and that will kill the nature in us that wants to sin. And that's very true. But on the same hand, we are called to repentance, to walk away from the sin that Jesus shows us in our life. And so very often we handle it casually and we just allow it in our life as we just move on. And Jesus says it has no place there. And we're like, well, this has a place in my life or you don't. So come on and make some space for it. Another easy example I think of is our sexual standards. Scripture's, I think, pretty clear. Sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage is classified by Scripture as sexual immorality. And Scripture teaches against sexual immorality. But we go, yeah, I mean, I got loud and clear. Makes total sense. Jesus, I get it. But it's 2022. Come on. We don't really still mean that, do we. And for each one of these examples, as we talk about shaping Jesus to fit our politics, just trim off a corner of the block and to fit our standards on sexuality and trim off a corner of the block, and to fit into our schedule, and for his goals to fit in with our goals, and for his priorities with my life to fit in with my priorities of my life, and just trim off portions of Christ until he became a rounded circle that was able to fit into our pre-existing life. And I think that this is what so many of us, including me, do to Christ. As we look at the rough edges, we look at the things that don't fit into how we've already organized our life and our priorities, and we say, certainly you don't mean that, and certainly you understand it can't fit. And so we change our Jesus rather than changing ourselves. When what we need to do, and I was gonna have another fresh square and another fresh board with a square hole in it, is not change who Jesus is, but fundamentally change who we are. Fundamentally reshape our lives for the standards of Christ. Not clinging to the things that we used to cling to, not prioritizing the things that we used to prioritize, but opening up our life to Jesus and saying, Jesus, what's in here that doesn't fit? Show me the parts of my life where I need to make space for you, but Lord, please don't let me insist that you reshape yourself for me to have the audacity to say, well, now I'm willing to include you in my life. And so that's the question I wanted to invite you to this morning. What is it that we have in our life that we refuse to reshape? What are the things that we are clinging to? Political thought? Sexual purity? Blatant sin in our life? Our time? Our goals? Our talents? What is it that we're claiming to where we're kind of keeping Jesus in the guest bedroom? We're kind of saying, you just stay over there. When you fit into my life, I'm gonna let you come in. When you don't, I'm gonna expect you to change. What are the places in our life where we're asking Jesus to change who he is instead of being willing to allow him to change who we are? That's what I'd like us to prayerfully consider as I close here in a second. Is to say, Jesus, where are you not fitting? And how can I change to accommodate you and quit insisting that you accommodate me? As I read through this radical reshaping of the Christian family in a Roman context, I can't help but think that the most important thing for us to draw out of this passage is our very human tendency to reshape Christ in our own image and our refusal to be reshaped in his. So this morning, let us open ourselves up in prayer to where we might need to reshape our lives around who we know Jesus to be. And let us further pray that as we pursue Jesus and know him more and learn more about him and he becomes more real to us, that different aspects of him are opened up to us that then demand that we make more space for him. And let us be generous and quick in making that space. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you, God, for grace, for all that you're doing here, for what I think is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy as we move forward and maybe, maybe finally begin to think about what a post-pandemic world looks like and what grace might look like in that world. God, thank you for Colossians and all the truth that's found in it. I pray that we would be people who are focused on you, who radically reprioritize our life around you, God. We give you permission to reshape us in your image and we repent of trying to reshape you into ours. Give us courage and honesty and integrity this week as we examine our lives and ask where we need to make space for you. And God, when we do that, I pray that we would be met with your grace and with your peace and with your joy. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, 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. And 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. 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, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.