Got Jesus in your Boat?

Text: Colossians 2:6-15

Focus: Stability in Christian living

Function: To focus on Jesus

Form: Bible Study

Intro:

Do you have any memorable sermons? I have one. A former pastor, speaking about two incidents with Jesus in the boat.

In the first instance, the disciples were crossing the sea of Galilee when the storm came, Jesus wasn't with them, Jesus walked across the water, they thought it was the angel of death, they became very frightened and Jesus saves them.

In the second, the disciples are again crossing the lake, except this time, Jesus is with them, but sleeping. The terrible storm comes again, they panic and finally wake Jesus because He is sleeping while they are dying and Jesus rebukes the waves, the sea calms down, and Jesus chides them for not having faith. Jesus' implication is if they knew He was there, they should not have been afraid. And even more than that, if they belong to Jesus, and Jesus has a purpose for them, they should know that they are safe.

He was good at this sermon. I know, cause he preached it several times.

He kept coming back to the times when we are convinced that we are in despair, when we are hopeless, when we see no way way out, all we have to do is remember, that if we are believers, we have Jesus in our boat and everything will be okay.

I know it seems simple. Some may say it seems simplistic. But faith is important. Sometimes, faith is a choice we make. Without faith, Hebrews 11 says, it is impossible for to please God. And we will be looking at Hebrews, and Faith in the month of August.

It was a memorable sermon because although it was repetitive, and simple, it was effective.

And of course, that really has nothing to do with this text. Except, verse 8 where he warns the church watch out for people who would take them captive, in their faith, to mere philosophy and empty traditions. In Ephesians 4:14 the apostle talks about how easy it is for us to be tossed about by different winds of doctrine. Our boat is being rocked back and forth.

Have you ever met a Christian like that? Every week, there is a whole new way to solve all the problems in the church, or in the world. If only people practiced the Sabbath, if only they better understood the presence of God, if only people understood the proper role of authority in the church, if only they allowed this group in, or if only they exclude that group. And then you got the 88 reasons why Jesus will return in 1988, remember that one? Or, remember Y2K? The end of the world was happening. Or the Bible Code, supposedly there is a numeric code hidden in the bible, and it has messages about the future. Of course, researchers have used the same computer program on books like War and Peace, the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and have found the same prophecies hidden in the code. You can make anything up using that numeric system. Remember the book “11:59 and counting?” A parishioner wanted me to get the book in 1985 and said, “pastor, it proves that Jesus will return before 1990.” I pulled out an older copy of it that I had and it said that Jesus would return sometime in 1981, or 1982 and, if you didn't believe it, you were probably not really saved. My dad, a very patriotic man, a veteran of WWII said to me once, right after the Berlin wall came down, “You know son, when I as a child, we went to prophecy seminars where we learned that Hitler was the Antichrist. And what better proof was there that he made the Jewish people get a tattoo on their forearms?” Then, dad said: “when you grew up, it was always Russia, Gog and Magog, the bear of the North, Meshcesh and Tubal, (all from Ezekiel), and now that Détente with Russia has happened, the Antichrist is either Iran or Iraq. You know son, I think they have figured out that a lot of money is made on making the Antichrist out of America's current enemies.”

The point is, we can run off in many directions, always thinking if we have just a little more knowledge, or some new principle, a better understanding of the spirit world, the most effective tool for evangelism, then, and only then will we be successful as Christians.

So, in that sense, here we are in this boat, and the storm of distractions is all around us, competing for our attention, pride, and passion and Jesus is in that boat wanting us to trust Him to calm the waters.

The disciples lost sight of Jesus and got tossed around by the winds and the water, and in our practice of Christianity, the same thing happens when we start focusing on anything but Jesus Christ and His Mission on this earth.

So, Paul says this to them, in verse 8 and Ephesians 4, keep focused on Jesus, remember what He taught you, do the things Jesus did, live with the same attitude that Jesus had, and you won't get caught up in whatever current fad is being marketed to Christianity.

I love verses 6 and 7 from The Message: ^6-7My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you've been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him. You're deeply rooted in him. You're well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you've been taught. School's out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.

What a great message to them, this group that kept saying, wait a minute, we need just a little more knowledge and then we will be ready to actually do what Jesus commanded us.

It is like saying to the preacher: “pastor, feed us a little more, we don't feel ready, feed us and then we will obey the Lord.”

It is almost like an excuse to say, “well it isn't yet my time...”

But God is saying to all of us, me included, just do it. You are ready. If you think you are ready because of your preparation, then you aren't fitting into my plan of faith.

I like to say, “remember David before Goliath.” Before he went into battle, the King gave him his armor. It was the finest armor in the land. Remember that King Saul stood a head taller than anyone in Israel, and David is just a boy. I can picture him in the armor, the helmet coming down to his breast, the shield resting on the ground coming up to his neck, the sword 20 pounds heavier than he can life. It must have been a ridiculous sight. David was wise, “I don't even know what I am doing with this, just give me my slingshot, because the battle belongs to God.

Look, we got Jesus in our boat and that is a sure sign of help. Just do it. The success of the mission is His concern.

Now we go down to verse 9-12.

This is what I mean when we say we have Jesus in our boat, Jesus on our side.

• In Jesus, all the fullness of God dwelt.

  • Jesus isn't an incomplete picture, he isn't “God light,” he isn't a subordinate being (and remember, the Colossians were struggling with the Deity of Christ).

  • Last week we read the song they sang about Jesus, how He was the Creator, the firstborn...

• In John 14, Jesus says, “it is good that I go away, because if I go away, I will come back to you...”

• We are indeed partners with God when the Holy Spirit is in us.

• Without arrogance, we speak for God.

• We are not God, but God is with us, and with us He is near to others.

Now we can go back to the boat. We are complete as long as Jesus is with us. And he explains the theology of why.

We were brought into His family, with His power and authority. There are two images of this, the first as the OT right of circumcision. It was a symbol that the Spiritual man superseded the physical, the fleshly person -the person who lives merely to indulge the flesh.

This is important to the Colossians. They were practicing this weird type of Christianity that commanded them to indulge in no pleasure whatsoever and they would be more spiritual.

He explains that first, the OT symbol of circumcision is indeed a symbol of placing the spirit over the flesh, but Paul says that the change doesn't come from body mutilation, it comes from God doing it inside of us.

Cutting out the tongue us not going to keep us from thinking of bad words. Cutting out the eyes is not going to stop us from lusting. Only the Spirit of God does that.

And the second image, the symbol that God changed for the church, a symbol that applies to both men and women was baptism.

Back into the water, and the boat rocking. In 1 Peter 3, Peter says, baptism's symbol comes from Noah and the Ark, the people of God saved through a a terrible storm that cleansed the world of evildoers.

And then he says, the symbol of baptism doesn't save you, but the work of God, how God changes your heart, that is what happens when we are saved.

In the midst of sin, of our own failure, of the fact that we will always struggle against a body that wants to do things its way compared to our Spirits that want to obey God, this storm of spiritual conflict that we are in that is rocking our boat, our salvation lies in Him, not us.

And that happened because God nailed sin to the cross and killed its power to destroy us when Jesus was crucified. 2 Corinthians 2:21 says it.

He became sin for us. We sang that song last week, Jesus Messiah. He became sin, who knew no sin...

Buried in baptism, the 1 Peter passage says. Noah was buried in the flood, and kept alive.

And in that process, we are forgiven.

The Colossians couldn't embrace the fact that Jesus was God and man at the same time because they knew in their own hearts their own failure to be perfect and they projected that on Jesus and said to themselves: “it couldn't be.”

I love the honesty in which they acknowledge their own sin, their own brokenness. There is a humility in that, but it didn't produce humble actions. Instead, it led them to this narrow self-righteousness that was and is impossible for anyone to maintain.

It is a hopeless existence.

So, we want Jesus in the boat. We have less of a chance of getting sidetracked if we keep our eyes on Jesus and keep on doing what He did, instead of our own thing. We can live by faith, trusting Him to help us overcome the struggles we have with ministry, and our own sinfulness.

And we cannot be saved without Him.

This last verse, “he canceled the debt against us...” He nailed our own “arrest warrant” to the cross. He disarmed Satan and his demons. Remember Satan's biggest tool against us is a lie. And when he tells us that we are still shameful people, he is lying.

When he says that to you, just say back to him, “no I ain't.”

God did it for me on the cross and there is nothing you can do about it

When those thoughts comes back into your mind: you are worthless, you are evil, you are an addict, you are stupid, you are a failure, you are a terrible person, you just say back to that thought, “it makes no difference what I was, even if some of that stuff may appear to be true. If I was bad, God now considers me the righteousness of Christ. If I was weak, or uneducated, or ignorant, God is my partner and He is smart and strong enough for the both of us.

Enemies of God?

Text: Colossians 1:15-23

Focus: Christ's power to save us.

Function: To help people see grace more and more.

Form: Bible Study.

Intro:

I have to tell you, for some reason I really wrestled with this passage. I try to follow the lectionary, not because I want to be old-fashioned, but because it keeps me focusing on all the bible, not just my favorite passages. Plus, it helps me keep faith with Christians across the world. That way, on Facebook, when one of my kids or friends talks about the sermon they heard that day, they can have something in common, even though they may be miles apart.

In 25 years of preaching, this is the first time I have preached extensively about the book of Colossians. It isn't that I haven't studied it, but it seemed to me, that this struggle the Church in Collosse was having didn't seem particularly relevant to our culture.

I know that people who get their kicks out of arguing with the Jehovah Witnesses, refer, especially to this passage, because it clearly says that Jesus wasn't created, but He is the Creator.

Don't be alarmed, I am not going to preach about how bad they are.

I will tell you the thing I disagree the most with them on and it isn't the traditional argument.

I always welcome them into my home. And it seems that their biggest recruiting tool is a discussion about all the hypocrisy they find in those churches that are not them.

I think it is very wrong to do what Hitler did to manipulate the masses. It is wrong to vilify another person, or group of people, in order to claim that you, or your group is better by comparison.

I believe that this is the true evil behind gossip and the reason a gossip has such a big mouth.

But, of course, the traditional dislike for them has to do with a lot of the reason Paul wrote this letter to the Colossians. Remember from last week. They were involved in this heresy that claimed that everything fleshly or earthly is evil. Therefore, they taught, Jesus could not have been “God/Man” because the man part of Him would have been flawed, based on the evil that has touched all things from this world.

The JW's also teach that Jesus was not God in human flesh.

But I don't consider them evil As a matter of fact, some of the most decent people I know belong to that faith.

But, tongue in cheek, they have to be good because the end result of that doctrine is that a person has to be good enough to make God save them. To them, salvation is earned, not given as a gift of God.

But we love John 3:16,17 For God so loved the world that He gave... God gives. And 17, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

Salvation is a gift, shout it out!

As a matter of fact, that is why the first 6 verses in this passage exist.

I finished last week with this thought that the discipline of serving God and others leads us into the refreshing and renewing work of the Holy Spirit. The more we use the gift, the more God's Spirit moves in us. Jesus called it living water flowing out of us. Water that doesn't move becomes stagnant. And as that happens, the bond with God gets stronger. That is what is Paul is experiencing.

Remember, he is correcting the Church on an age old trick of the Devil, -getting believers to pride themselves in how much better they are than others, even other believers.

And, he has a big parenthesis. He can't contain his excitement and he breaks out into the words of one of their Christian Choruses. Vs 14-20 are actually a song of praise that the early church sung.

The visible image of the God who up until this time had remained invisible.

The creator. And of course, that means that He isn't a created being.

In the Trinity, the agent of Creation is Jesus, the Son.

And then He talks of Spiritual matters. He talks of Spiritual power, ranging from human rulers, nations and kingdoms to angels, and of ranks of angels and a spiritual hierarchy of power on both the side of God's angels and the Devil's demons.

And the song goes on to say that the purpose of this creation focuses back to Him.

But to make it clear, Paul reminds them, in their own songs that they use in worship, we are now at verse 17, speaks of the fact that Jesus existed eternally in the past (remember, we will live eternally into the future, but God has always existed, God has no beginning as well as no end).

Jesus is the one who keeps it all together.

And then the song goes into the Church, Jesus is the head of it. We, if we are in the Church are His body.

He is the first one to raise from the dead.

So, Jesus began human life, and now He begins resurrection life.

He started the Church by raising Himself from the dead.

Jesus is first in everything because in Him, a complete picture of God can be seen. He had all the power of God.

And then the big part of Paul's gratitude in this song, God was pleased to reconcile the entire heaven and earth back to Him by the price of Jesus' blood on the cross. Verse 20.

God's own blood blood purchases peace for us with God.

And Paul wants to remind them that nothing else will work.

I love that song, it defines the core of theology about salvation.

Salvation is God's gift, we cannot add to it, if we try, we are looking at ourselves instead of Jesus. If we believe it, our response will be to follow in Jesus footsteps and start doing the same thing. Our good deeds are a result of our gratitude and faith in Jesus' mission and teachings.

Think of Jesus' last words in the book of Matthew, Go and make disciples of the entire world. Two steps: baptize them, and teach them what I taught you.

I love the atonement, but I worry that the Church only teaches baptism instead of making disciples.

I have heard people teach that on the mission field, providing food, shelter, medical care, education, and a way out of poverty is meaningless if they aren't saved. Therefore, they only do the one thing, get them baptized and saved. And the excuse is “how can we spend money on their physical needs and ignore the fact that they are going to hell?”

But Jesus spent three years on the teaching and demonstrating the importance of doing good to everyone we meet and only three days providing the sacrifice for our sins.

So, for three years, as the representative of God, Jesus taught people how to live and treat others. For three days, as the representative of man, He became the sacrifice for our sins.

Most of His ministry was teaching people how to love each other. Jesus expects us to do the same thing.

Understanding the atonement, and the cost God paid to save us is the most important thing. And if we believe it, we will live our lives like Jesus lived his life.

Peace with God causes us to live for peace with others.

So why did I struggle with coming up for a sermon in this passage. Look at the next verse. The song is over and Paul goes back to explaining to the Colossians the difference between God's view of evil in this world and theirs.

He says to them, “before you were a Christian, you were alienated from God, and it is proven by the way you were doing evil deeds.”

I remember hearing in theology class these words: “everyone who is not a Christian is an enemy of God.”

Now, they didn't teach that in order to make us feel like that group of people who merely need to feel better than someone else.

I always took it to preach to myself about forgiveness. If before I believed I was an enemy of God, and God gave His own life to save me, then I also should love my enemies and give myself for them.

Now my Bible College had strong Mennonite roots and that is the message they gave me.

But I came to find out that it isn't the message given everywhere. The message that many, even theologians, hear is this: “unbelievers are enemies of God.”

Now Paul uses the same term, about being separated from God two other times when he is explaining theology. Both are in Ephesians, chapter 2, vs 12 and 4, vs 18. But in those passages, he doesn't say the are evil people. He says, they are separated from God.

People are separated from the wonder of being in God's family.

It doesn't mean “enemy.”

But this verse says they are also evil.

So, as I was preparing this message, I thought to myself, “what if a Buddhist were in the worship service this morning and they heard me say that everyone who is not a Christian is an enemy of God and is an evildoer?”

I could picture that person stopping to listen to anything else I said and start questioning why I would say, that Gandhi was an evildoer.

I could see them stand up and say, “but I know better.”

I have heard a lot of unbelievers say to my face things like: “You Christians claim to be pro-life, you preach about being good and just to others, so you take a strong stand against abortion but at the same time, you are against making sure that the child in poverty who is not aborted has access to the kind of health care that will not continue to keep that family in poverty. You cry out against abortion but you are silent on a military doctrine that allows “acceptable losses of innocents and non-combatants” in drone attacks. You make it sound as if the only lives that have real value and meaning are fellow citizens.”

How do I explain to them the concept of Grace, brokenness, sin, salvation, the “God isn't finished with me yet?” How do I convey that the Christian life is a journey, a work in progress until I get to heaven?

And yet, here is this verse. I didn't write it. But I believe God did. I can't ignore it.

What is he saying?

Was Gandhi an evil man? Some would say yes because he didn't preach Christ and offered a different path to life.

But his deeds were very good. They weren't evil deeds. As a matter of fact, he learned to do good by studying the life of Jesus. He got the first 3 years of Jesus' teaching and missed the last three days of Jesus' gift of salvation.

And the reason why he didn't accept the last three days of Jesus' atonement was because the English called themselves Christian, called unbelievers evil, and used that to justify turning India into their colony.

If the Christians he met were actual disciples of Jesus, disciples who lived out the first three years of Jesus' teaching, then he would have believed in the last three days. His quote haunts me: “I would become a Christian if I actually met one.”

Do I believe that there are unbelievers who are better moral people than all of us? Well, than all of us, yes, but some of us, NO.

Even these people regard Mother Theresa, or Billy Graham as very decent and moral people.

So is Paul saying that everyone without Christ is evil?

So remember Paul's audience. He is preaching to a group that say that Jesus couldn't have been human, or he couldn't have been God because flesh is so evil.

He is telling them, think of how your lives changed when you first met Jesus.

All of a sudden, you started caring for others, you started giving away to people who hurt, you didn't hate people who were different from you, because inside of you is God's Spirit and He loves them.

Okay, he says, you believe that Jesus couldn't be God/man because all flesh is evil, well think of about this, about how Jesus can save people, even if they are sinners, God lives in them and changes everything.

Look at the next verses, I am going to read verses 22, 23 from the Living Bible: He has done this through the death on the cross of his own human body, and now as a result Christ has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are standing there before him with nothing left against you--nothing left that he could even chide you for; the only condition is that you fully believe the Truth, standing in it steadfast and firm, strong in the Lord, convinced of the Good News that Jesus died for you, and never shifting from trusting him to save you.

Stand firm in faith. Keep loving others. Keep doing good. Stop focusing on your former lives and the desire to live for ourselves instead of God and others. This is what happened when you first believed, so let it continue to happen.

I Don’t Understand the “K” and the “W!”

Text: Colossians 1:9-14

Focus: Being Like Christ

Function: To help people HUMBLY be obedient to God

Form: expository

Intro:

Title: “I don't understand the K and the W!”

• I asked a youth once: “what part of the word no don't you understand?”

• He replied: “The K and the W!”

• Of course you understand that he was talking about know is in knowledge.

• And it is a good question, why is there a silent k and a silent w?

• But, he was upset when I told him that I could explain the silent k and w.

• You see, the Greek word of knowledge is gnosis. And, it starts with the letter g, but the g is also silent, so the English transliteration kept the silent letter there as well.

• Having thought I “got him” in his answer, he then asked me: “what is the g silent in the Greek?

• And, I had no answer.

• And he said: “stop showing off!”

• Now this was a sort of play on words where he and I were trying to know, where the word: “know” comes from.

• It was a play to show off what we knew.

Now this text recounts a prayer that the Apostle has for this young church. He says, verse 9, that they were praying that these believers be filled with wisdom and knowledge of Christ, and he goes on to explain four benefits of that wisdom and knowledge that will help us live lives that reflect Jesus to a world that is dying.

How many know that knowledge, without wisdom is meaningless? If we know something, especially spiritual truth and it doesn't add to Christlike living, then we have failed to apply wisdom to what we know.

For example, showing off, to that youth, wasn't really wise was it? Because: the truth didn't help or change the problem. We were still conflicted with the original reason I had to say “no!”

But there is more. Knowledge, and the unwise abuse of it was a real problem in the Church at Collosse.

We are studying Colossians for the next 4 weeks. Brother Paul felt compelled to write the letter because a certain heresy had sprung up in the church there.

And the name of the cult, took its name from the Greek word “gnosis.” The cult, heresy, was a group of people who called themselves the Gnostics.

They believed that the more Bible knowledge you had, then you would be more saved.

Now, we teach that studying God's Word will be a great blessing to us. David said: I have hidden your Word in my heart, so that I don't offend you, Oh God. (Psalm 119:11)

Now, being “more saved” is the problem. My friend and I decided to skip school one day. His father came home unexpectedly and figured out we were at his house. We were hiding in the closet and he walked right to the closet, opened the door and pointed his finger at us: “What are you doing here?”

My friend said that we “kinda' skipped” school that day.

His dad, with the veins popping out of his neck said: “There is no kinda skipping, you are either there or you aren't”

And then the hammer of discipline fell on us.

You see, you can't be “more saved.” You can't be “less saved.” Salvation is a covenant that God makes with us when we trust Him. After that point, it isn't up to us anymore. Salvation, and living like Jesus wants us to live, is HIS job, worked in us, through HIS Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

Now, to be fair, there was a little bit more, or maybe even a major problem with this cult. When they talked about knowledge they were saying that we can only know Jesus by study. They denied that we know Jesus primarily by His Holy Spirit living inside of us. “You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.” And the reason they denied it was because they believed that it was impossible for Jesus to actually be God/Man in the same body. They considered Jesus to be just a well made angel, completely a Spiritual being, not human at all. They believed this because they saw how sinful humanity is, and for God's seed to have mixed chromosomes with Mary's egg would have meant that Jesus was born with a corrupt, sinful nature.

This particular group then, made Christianity into a whole different set of rules that we looked at when we studied Galatians. They believed that anything that was fleshly was evil. They believed that sex between a man and wife was a sin. They were a group of Christians who defined themselves by all the things they didn't do.

They were really a mixture of Christianity and Hinduism. The Hindu priest would go on an hundred day fast, and if he survived, he was supposed to be able to open up the spiritual world and see visions and give prophecies for the rest of his life.

So, for the gnostic Christian, the faith wasn't faith at all, it was again that old problem of human effort. The sin of making ourselves worthy of being called Jesus' disciples.

The more detached they became from earthly pleasures, the more spiritual they thought they would become.

Now, the person who has pleasure, money, food, sex, alcohol, power or prestige as their god isn't going to be a spiritual person.

But God gave us all those things for our blessing and enjoyment.

So, they were pretty sure they were on the right track because they would never be caught sinning again if they never did anything.

They lived Christian lives without any real risk.

You see, and he says this later, their rules had a kind of appearance of looking spiritual, but they really detracted people from living by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paul is a great teacher, he starts our where they are, and then gently shows them how they got sidetracked. Later on, his correction won't be as gentle, but he starts this teaching where they are.

He wants them to mix wisdom with their so called knowledge.

He teaches them that when we live Spirit controlled lives, this mixture of wisdom and knowledge will surface in our character and it will give us 4 benefits: 1). the ability and desire to continue the work of Jesus by doing good works. 2). The ability to keep on learning as they grow in Christ. 3). The ability to keep hopeful during trials and 4). the ability to worship God in all things.

1: The ability to do good works:

Verse 10: ¹⁰so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that God saved us, not as a fire escape from hell, but He saved us to do good works.

He wants us to please Him. He wants people to see Jesus reflected in the way we love others, they way we forgive others, they way we encourage others, the way we spend our money and our free time. There is no way we can make ourselves worthy of God's love. But, I love my daddy. I believe that in heaven, he can see me know. I want to “keep faith” with him. I want him to be proud of me.

We take this as a sacred privilege to be Christ's ambassadors to a sick and hurting world.

So Paul contradicts the Colossians' form of holiness. Their holiness was based on the sins or pleasures that they didn't do. None of that pleases Christ. He wants them to bear fruit with good deeds.

Being Holy doesn't start by obeying a list of don'ts, it is defined by doing good.

So, you can tell is you are truly spiritual by the good things you do, not the things you don't do.

1. Keep on learning. Again, verse 10, growing in wisdom and knowledge as we are doing good works.

When we are found being faithful to do the good works, we experience this kind of partnership with God. And then, the Holy Spirit begins helping us to see and do more and more.

For 3 years now, I have watched Dan Trego conduct bible study on Wednesday nights at the day care center in Tijuana. The first year we were there, although he was a believer, he had never been baptized and that year, he was baptized in the Pacific ocean.

This couple is faithfully doing the work of God, the good works Jesus did while on earth. They don't tithe. They give 100% of all they have to serve Jesus. Of all the money they make, they use as little as possible of it to live on and the rest goes to the ministry.

And you should see how he has grown in his bible knowledge and teaching ability. He has no formal theological education, but the wisdom and ability to teach about Jesus from the scriptures just keeps on growing every single year.

Because he serves by doing good, he is growing in wisdom and knowledge. And that is what this text says.

I had a pastor once who wasn't “feeding me” in the word. It was funny, because when we first attended that church, he was a great preacher.

What happened was one Sunday night, while I was assisting the husband of a woman who was giving us a gospel concert as a guest, the husband went up to the stage to sing a song with his wife and I was there to take over if he got called down there.

Right after I sat there, in the “drivers seat” of the soundboard the senior pastor was in my face, yelling at me because thy husband of that woman had the volume up too loud.

I took offense with the pastor and then his preaching got bad. I was pretty sure that God was judging him for his pride. Then, one day, while not at church where I should have been, God convicted me of my unforgiveness toward him. God showed me that pastors are human also, and if I expected perfection out of him, then I wasn't looking at Jesus.

In my living room, I got off the couch and on my knees and asked God to forgive me, and I forgave him. To this day, that pastor has no idea that this happened. And about the forgiveness thing, the pastor has no idea what happened. The “forgive 7 times 70 in one day” principle was far from being used up.

But you know what? All of a sudden his preaching got good again, and I was “getting fed” again.

You see what I am saying? When we walk in obedience, in this case, I had to forgive the pastor, God feeds us His word. That pastor didn't change preaching during that time. I changed. God changed me.

A lot of Christians leave churches because they are no longer “getting fed.” In 24 years, I have a pretty good track record, only 3 families have left my ministry “because they weren't getting fed.” Or only 3 that I know of. Generally, the reason gets back to me so it may be pretty close.

I see it happen, though. They get busy in their lives, too many things to do, so serving others gets lower and lower on their list. They buy a cottage, they take on a second job, it becomes convenient for them to go somewhere where all the work is done for them by the pastoral staff and for a while they grow, but then the same thing happens, they get dissatisfied and start attending somewhere else.

Listen, when we are faithful and obedient to love others they way Jesus loved them. When we do it physically, then God sends His refreshing Spirit into us and then we increase in wisdom and knowledge.

The Colossians had it backward, they thought the more they knew and the less pleasure they allowed themselves, the more spiritual they would become.

Too many Christians, especially Christians in our culture, keep waiting to obey God and serve until they get just a little more knowledge, skill, or free time. They expect the Church to provide that growth for them. But there comes a time when they just have to do it.

Your spiritual growth is not based on the quality of the ministry at your church, it is based on your obedience to God expressed in the way you serve others.

I can't grow this church. Only you can. I can't bring the anointing of the Holy Spirit here, only you can. And, it happens by our obedience to give our time, talent and treasure to the work that Jesus has called us to do.

God doesn't want us merely baptizing people and calling them “safe from hell.” No, He said: baptize, teach and make disciples. A disciple is one who reflects his teacher, in that case, it is Jesus.

3). Strength to endure. Verse: ¹¹May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience...

Endure everything with patience. What do we have to endure? (ASK) Our reaction can and should be, in the midst of trials, a certain hope that Jesus is with us.

That is living by faith. It isn't easy. I have faith for ministry, that God is going to take care of problems in the ministry. I believe that God is going to change hearts and draw people to Jesus, just like He is doing with us. I don't worry too much about the trials here, I don't worry about being liked, I only concern myself with doing the right thing and being faithful. God will always provide.

On the other hand, Kathy has faith for our family. This woman is a true prayer warrior. I am praying that God would destroy strongholds of satanic powers that keep nations, cities, states and people in bondage. Kathy prays that God would set free the family, the church people. If you have a pressing need and want prayer, seek her out as well. That woman has a direct line to God.

All of this comes by the Holy Spirit.

And finally 4). The Holy Spirit gives us worship.

It directly ties in to the last point about strength for trials. Don Wollery said: “why should I be afraid of dying, I am ready, I got Jesus in my heart.”

I love the way Peterson points out the benefit of salvation also for the here and now.

Look at the last verses from The Message: It is (the) strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy, thanking the Father who makes us strong enough to take part in everything bright and beautiful that he has for us. ^13-14God rescued us from dead-end alleys and dark dungeons. He's set us up in the kingdom of the Son he loves so much, the Son who got us out of the pit we were in, got rid of the sins we were doomed to keep repeating.

When he thinks about what God has done and is still doing in us, the body of Christ, the church, he breaks out in praise and worship.

We know we are saved. We know that the covenant for our salvation is based on God's ability to keep it, not ours.

But the Apostle also wants us to rejoice in the freedom God gives us from self-destruction. Rescued from dead-end alleys and dungeons.

This service of others inspired Christian living is true holiness.