Multiplying Disciples & Churches

Good morning.

Our scriptural reading for today is Colossians 1, 1 through 14.

My name is Greg Douglas, and I serve on the Connections team, and I have the privilege of reading God's Word in our gathering this morning.

Again, the scripture is Colossians chapter 1, verses 1 through 14.

Colossians 1:1–14

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, and Timothy our brother.

To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Just as you learned it from Epiphras, our beloved fellow servant.

He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of this will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience, with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

This is the word of the Lord.

Amen.

Thank you, Greg, for that wonderful scripture reading.

And good morning and welcome to this particular gathering of the Harbor Church community.

If we haven't met yet, my name is Trevor.

I'm one of the pastors here, and we're so glad that you could join us this morning and look forward to meeting with you soon.

Um, you chose a great Sunday to join us here at Harbor because today we're kicking off a brand new sermon series to the book of Colossians that we're calling It's All About Jesus.

We're super excited about that.

Uh Colossians is one of my favorite books, and I'm eager to dive in with you.

But before we get to the text, there's two things that you should know about Harbor Church.

First, is that we exist to multiply disciples in churches throughout Sarpee County and the world.

If you're unfamiliar with those terms, a disciple is simply someone who believes in and follows Jesus, and a church is simply a gathering of disciples who are working together to make more disciples.

That's a little bit simplistic of a definition, but the basic idea of what a church and what disciples are.

And our goal is not to be the biggest church in Sarpee County.

Our goal isn't to have the biggest facilities, our goal isn't to have the most seats, our goal isn't to have the biggest congregation.

Our goal is to make as many disciples as we possibly can.

And we believe that the best way that we can do that is by starting churches, not just in Papillion, but through all of Sarpee County.

And we chose to plant Harbor Church here in Papillion because Papillion is the geographic epicenter of Sarpee County.

And we believe that if we can establish a church here in the Papillion community, then we can establish churches in any Sarpee County community across our county.

So our hope is that we would be able to establish a church here by God's grace and then be able to plant churches in Gretna and Bellevue and La Vista and Springfield, maybe eventually as far south as Louisville.

And we hope and pray that you would join us in praying towards that end.

That you would join us in praying, not just that more people would be added to Harbor Church or their church would grow, but that more people would catch a vision for multiplying disciples and churches in our communities.

And we hope that when the time comes that you would answer the call to join one of those teams in your community, should the Lord be gracious enough to allow us that opportunity.

So we want to multiply disciples and churches throughout Sarpee County.

But we don't want to stop at Sarpee County.

We want to plant churches all across the world, whether it's Kosovo or China, Spain or South America, we want to be a part of what God is doing to make his name great in all the nations.

And we believe that the best way to do that is by planting indigenous local churches, sending people across the seas to help raise up pastors in local contexts who can preach the gospel and make disciples.

And we pray that you would be praying with us towards that end as well.

And that maybe, just maybe, the Lord would call some of you to extend his kingdom in the earth through global church planting as well.

We don't know what that looks like.

We don't know how we're gonna get there, but we're trusting that the Lord has called us to this vision and we are going to pursue it with everything that we have.

So that's the first thing that you should know about Harbor.

The other thing that you should know about Harbor is that we're pretty ordinary people.

There is nothing super impressive about me or my co-pastor Ryan.

There's nothing super impressive about this church community as a whole.

In fact, if you're wanting to be impressed, you should probably go to a church down the street.

They probably have better pastors, they probably have better preaching, they probably have better facilities, they probably have better coffee, they probably have better parking and convenience.

There's lots of places in Sarpee County that you're going to get a better experience probably than what you're going to get at Harbor if you're looking to be impressed.

But we're actually okay with that.

Because at the end of the day, Harbor Church is not about me, it's not about you, it's not about Ryan.

Harbor Church is all about Jesus.

In fact, we hope that you walk out of this place this morning, kind of going, eh, I guess those guys are okay.

It's not a bad church, but they're not super impressive.

What I hope you walk out of here doing instead is saying, But that Jesus, now Jesus, he's pretty incredible.

Because Harbor Church is not about us, it's about Jesus Christ.

And at the end of the day, if you don't know us, you'll have missed nothing.

But if you don't know Jesus, you'll have missed everything.

And so it's important you understand that Harbor Church is all about Jesus.

And to that end, I want to introduce you to my friend, the Apostle Paul.

And Paul was a man with a vision just like ours.

Before he met Jesus, he was a persecutor of the church.

He hated Christians and he devoted his life to doing everything he could to put an end to the early movement called Christianity.

He was incredibly religious, but spiritually dead, far from God and incredibly moral, but completely lost.

And then on his way to this place called Damascus, where he's going to imprison and persecute more Christians, he met Jesus for himself.

Jesus literally appears, knocks him off his high horse, humbles him, and he spends the rest of his life devoting himself to multiplying disciples in churches.

He has an unrelenting passion to make Jesus known to as many people as he can, in as many places as he can, as long as he can, in whatever way that he possibly can.

And for Paul, who was one of the greatest church planting missionaries of all time, he adopted an incredibly simple vision to multiply disciples and churches.

And he developed an incredibly simple strategy.

Find the next unreached region, move into the most strategic city in that region, start a church, and then send out other people to start other churches throughout that region as well.

And that's exactly what we have here in the book of Colossians.

So Paul wrote 13 books of the New Testament.

Of those 13, 10 are either written to churches that he personally planted or to pastors that he personally trained up.

And one of the things that makes the book of Colossians unique is that it's one of only two letters that Paul wrote to a church that he did not personally start.

And as we just heard from that scripture reading, it would seem, as far as we can tell, that what happened was that Epiphras heard the gospel from Paul, probably became a believer, spent some time in Paul's ministry, and then went back to his hometown to share the gospel with those that he knew.

And out of that came the local church called the Church of Colossae.

And so perhaps this book is a little bit like Epiphras being a college student who's hearing the gospel at a college ministry on a college campus, who goes back home to his hometown, starts sharing the gospel with other people, and lo and behold, out of that disciples are made.

And out of those disciples comes a local church.

And so Paul is writing this letter from prison to a church that he's never been to, filled with new people who are believing the gospel of Jesus Christ for the very first time.

And he's writing to do two things.

He's writing to celebrate their faith in the gospel, and he's writing to pray for their growth in the gospel.

And so that brings us to our big idea this morning, which is that when disciples in churches are multiplied, we should praise God for the advance of the gospel.

And we should also pray to God for growth in the gospel.

Okay, it's a super simple outline, but it's a really dense text.

So we're gonna dive right in with that first point there, looking at Colossians chapter one, verse three through six.

So if you have your Bible, go ahead and turn there and look with me at that section.

Where it says, We thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel which has come to you as indeed in the whole world, it is bearing fruit and increasing as it does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

So the key word here in this text is that word, the gospel.

The gospel can simply be understood as the good news that God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And the key phrase here in this particular passage is that phrase, bearing fruit and increasing, which means that as the gospel message is preached in different cities throughout the world, people are hearing it, they're believing it, and it's completely and radically changing their lives.

So Paul is celebrating the fact that the good news of Jesus Christ has made it to the city of Colossae, that they've heard it and believed it, and now it's beginning to change and transform them as well.

At one point, they didn't know Jesus.

Now they do know Jesus.

And Paul is super excited about that reality.

But Paul doesn't just thank God for the Colossians in a general way, in a vague way.

He thanks God for the Colossians in a tangible and specific way.

In verse 4 and 5, he says this since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

So when we boil that sentence down, we see that Paul is praising God for three specific things.

He's praising God for their saving faith.

They believe the good news about what God has done for them in Christ.

He praises God for their sincere love.

They are wholeheartedly committed to the welfare of believers in their local church and in the churches throughout their region.

And he praises God for their secure hope, their confidence that it's not in temporal earthly realities that fail and fade, but that their hope, their confidence is in eternal heaven realities that are permanent, meaningful, and unchanging no matter what.

And these three qualities can kind of be thought of a little bit like a litmus test for the Christian life.

If you're witnessing to somebody or you're discipling somebody, or you've got somebody in a group with you, and you're trying to figure out where are they at in terms of their relationship to Jesus, you can just ask yourself those three questions, right?

Do they possess saving faith?

Are they trusting in Jesus Christ and no one and nothing else to make them right with God?

Or are they looking to something else to make them be okay?

Do they have a sincere love?

Do they have a genuine, wholehearted interest in God's people through the local church and believers and other churches everywhere?

And do they live with a secure hope?

Do they get their sense of confidence and meaning and identity and joy from eternal things?

Or is it fluctuating because they're building their entire life on that which is fleeting and eternal?

These qualities, when we see them in a person's life, should cause us to praise because they're evidence that the Holy Spirit of God has made somebody new, that they've really trusted in Jesus, and their lives really are bearing fruit and increasing to the glory of God.

And at the same time, if you look at your own life and you're not quite sure where you stand with the Lord, you can ask yourself those same three questions and begin to get your bearings on how you need to respond to the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And if you look at your life and you don't see evidence of saving faith, you don't see sincere love, you don't see a secure hope, then the invitation to you is the same invitation that was extended to the Colossians to acknowledge that you're a sinner separated from God because of your sin, and that God can bring you near to himself to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It is to receive and believe the gospel.

And so that's part of what Paul is praising God for in the Colossians life, that they've heard the good news of gospel and that they have believed it, and it is actually bearing the fruit of saving faith, sincere love, and secure hope in their lives.

One of my greatest joys as a pastor at Harbor is that when we get together as a staff team, the first thing we do every single time is we celebrate what we call evidence of grace.

We sit down in a circle and we just begin to celebrate all the ways that we've seen God at work in and through you here in the Harbor Church community.

We celebrate the way that people are serving, we celebrate the way that people are discipling, we celebrate the way people are leading, we celebrate the way people are moving towards each other in ways that we didn't have to ask.

And we just look over our church community and we say, where do we see evidence that the gospel is advancing into the lives of our church community where we see it bearing fruit and increasing?

We look over our church community and say, hey, where do we see evidence of the gospel advancing through us into Sarape County and bearing fruit in the lives of people who do not yet know Jesus?

And this is super simple practice, but every single time it stirs our affections for Christ.

It increases our dependence on the Holy Spirit, and it causes us to worship God the Father in a way that reinvigorates us for the work that He set before us as a church community.

It's been a priority for us since we started at Harbor, and uh something that I would highly commend to each one of you as well.

When you sit down for your daily Bible reading and prayer, might I suggest starting with evidence of grace?

Just identify a couple ways that you've seen God at work in your life, bearing fruit and increasing the gospel.

When you sit down with your family or your roommates, or you invite somebody over for dinner, might I suggest starting with evidence of grace and celebrating what God is doing in and through your family or your roommate situation?

When you gather as a harbor group, maybe it's appropriate from time to time to set aside some time to just celebrate evidence of grace in your group.

Where are you seeing growth?

Where are you seeing change?

Where are you seeing understanding?

Where are you seeing life where before things seem dormant and the spirit awakening new faith?

It's a simple practice, but I'm confident that it will cause you to praise God for the advance of the gospel in your community, in your family, and in Sarpee County.

So that's one of the things that Paul praises God for, but he doesn't stop there.

Look what else he praises God for in verse 7.

It says, just as you learned it, referring to the gospel from our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit.

So if the first thing that Paul praises God for is new converts, people who have come to faith in Jesus Christ, then the second thing that Paul praises God for is faithful messengers, people who are sharing the good news of Jesus Christ through ordinary means in their everyday life.

See, it's a little bit like Ryan said to us last week.

If people don't believe, they can't be saved.

But people can't believe if they don't hear, and people won't hear unless someone preaches, and people won't preach unless they are sent.

Because faith comes from the message, and the message goes forward through faithful messengers.

Now, there are two ways that you can kind of think about the way that the gospel goes forward, the way that the gospel advances.

You can kind of think of that in a formal way, and you can think of that in a more informal or casual way.

Formally speaking, a person is sent as a messenger when a church affirms them, sets them aside, and then sends them out for a strategic purpose like church planting or missions work.

And that's exactly what happened with Harbor Church.

Uh, Gavin and Chris, co-lead pastors at City Light Omaha, recognized and affirmed God's call on me and Ryan to be co-lead pastors of a new work here in Sarpee County.

They affirmed what the Holy Spirit was doing in our lives through assessment and a year of development in their church community.

And then they sent us out with a team of a hundred people to start a new church community here in Papillion.

And that's the most obvious way that a messenger gets sent out with the gospel.

That's the one that we're kind of most familiar with and the one that gets the most attention.

But the other way that the gospel advances is just casually, through ordinary people like you and me living their everyday life with gospel intentionality.

And actually, that's exactly how I found my way into ministry when I was in college.

I went to college at Northwest Missouri State in Maryville, Missouri, and uh with to play football there.

And within the first two weeks, I injured my back.

I injured my back so bad that I could hardly make it to class and was in constant pain.

Nobody could figure out what was wrong with me, nobody could figure out how to heal me, uh, nobody had any solutions for me.

And so I spent all of my time either in the dorm room, in the training room, or in the classroom, most of it by myself, depressed and discouraged.

Like, why would God bring me two hours from home, drop me here, and leave me all by myself?

And uh because I didn't have any friends and I didn't have time to make any on the football team, I just spent most of that time reading my Bible.

I'd recently become a Christian, didn't know much of anything about the Bible other than it was about Jesus.

And so I picked up the New Testament and I just started reading.

And that was the first time in my life uh that I actually ended up reading the Bible cover to cover.

And what happened as I read the Bible is I was astonished by the story of redemption that was written on the pages of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.

I began to be enamored and inspired by the personal work of Jesus Christ, realizing it's not really about me.

It's about what God is doing across the world and what God wants to do right here in my college campus.

And so I mustered up some courage to ask my football coach if I could lead a Bible study on the football team, desperately hoping that he would tell me no.

But I went to him and I said, Coach, I think that God wants me to start a uh Bible study on our football team.

And he said, That's great.

I've been praying for God to raise up some spiritual leadership on this team.

And I thought to myself, no, that is not what you're supposed to say.

You're supposed to give me an excuse to go back to God and say, why I couldn't do this.

Uh but he said yes.

And so fearfully, timidly, I began leading Bible study on my college football team.

And at first, nobody showed up.

It was like me and one other guy that I paid to be there.

You know, like, hey, I'll buy you lunch if you'll just show up at the Bible study for me, please.

Like, I'm dying over here.

And uh faithfully, little by little, by God's grace, more and more people started showing up.

And Bible study led to post-practice devotional, and post-practice devotional led to pregame chapel.

And before I knew it, God by his grace was converting teammates to Christ.

And uh that ministry was growing and the gospel was advancing as people who are not going to church, who are not involved in campus ministries, who had never heard about Jesus, were hearing the gospel from some 18-year-old college football player who had just read the Bible for the first time, like 10 minutes before.

Right?

I had no theological education, I had no ministry experience.

I couldn't find most of the books in my Bible.

All I knew is it's about Jesus and trusting what he's done for you on the cross.

So I started there and I just looked to see what happened.

And God was incredibly faithful to use that experience.

Because God delights to do extraordinary things through ordinary people who are simply willing to live their lives as faithful messengers for Jesus.

Now that was the case for me, and it would seem, as we read the book of Colossians, that that was the case for uh Epaphras as well.

Now we have, to my knowledge, no extra biblical record of this guy.

Uh we don't have any real sense of who he was or where he lived, other than the fact that he probably started this church.

All of our like knowledge of him, as far as I know, comes scattered through little references throughout the books of the Bible as he gets like honorable mentions in Paul's letter.

And that's kind of about it, right?

He's an asterisk in most books of the Bible.

And yet, it seems as if God used him to start a church in his hometown.

Maybe just by leading a harbor group that turned into something more than what he expected.

And who knows?

The more Lord might actually just want to do the exact same thing through you.

What if the next church plant in Sarpie County is actually sitting in your living room?

What if you're eating together and reading the Bible together and praying together this week and months or years from now, that becomes a new church?

Because the gospel advances through faithful messengers just like you.

And when it does, we should praise God for it.

So before we move on, I want to ask two questions, and we'll shift to our next point.

And that is, first of all, who's your Epaphras?

Who's the person that shared the gospel with you for the first time?

What did they say?

What did they do?

What was their way of relating to you and interacting with you?

What are their habits and their practices that convinced you that Jesus Christ should be taken seriously, that nudged you towards faith in Christ, that brought you across the line of faith so that you, for yourself, would personally trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ for your salvation?

I want to encourage you, don't overcomplicate evangelism and discipleship.

Just ask yourself, what did that person do with me?

And then turn around and go do that with somebody else.

I'm confident.

In that little faithful step of witnessing, you'll see God do incredible things.

But also, secondly, who are your Colossians?

Who are the people in your life right now who are unsuspecting that maybe you've overlooked or haven't considered as your mission field?

It could be a family member, it could be a neighbor, it could be a roommate or a fellow coach or a teammate, somebody that you just rub shoulders with every day, and it doesn't seem like much is happening, but actually you have the opportunity to be a faithful messenger in their life by simply living differently and answering honestly when they begin to notice the change that Jesus has made in your life.

Because perhaps you are the exact person that God wants to use to bring the next person to faith in Jesus Christ.

So when disciples and churches are multiplied, we should praise God for the advance of the gospel.

And when disciples and churches are multiplied, we should also pray to God for growth in the gospel.

Look with me at verse nine.

Now, that is a mouthful.

Uh so let's go ahead and break it down because Paul does not like to use commas or periods, and uh he's an English teacher's favorite student.

So let's try to break this down and uh look at five statements here that Paul makes.

First, he says the knowledge of God's will, uh, which ultimately comes from the Bible, how God has revealed himself to us.

Second thing he says is spiritual wisdom and insight, which simply comes from putting your faith into practice.

The third thing he says, there is a God-honoring life, wholly pleasing to the Lord.

And that happens when your life starts to look more like Jesus in your character and your conduct.

The next thing he says is good works, which put the beauty and worth of Jesus on display for other people to see.

Not that good works earn you salvation or bounty points with God, but that they are a means by which see that people see that Jesus has actually changed your life.

Martin Luther says that God doesn't need your good works, your neighbor does.

And so we do good works so that other people would come to know Jesus.

And then the last thing there is knowledge of God, which is ultimately what happens when we become aware of God's activity in your daily life, and you grow in your understanding of who He is and what He's doing.

And so what we could say then is that these things are kind of progressive, right?

The knowledge of God's will leads to spiritual wisdom.

Spiritual wisdom leads to a God-honoring life.

A God-honoring life is a life of good works, and good works are the evidence that you ultimately know God.

Now that's still maybe a lot to wrap your mind around.

So let me distill it even further down to just two words.

What Paul is describing here is spiritual maturity.

That's what he's getting at here, and that's what he's praying for.

But notice also the repetition of Paul's key phrase.

In the first half of the section, Paul celebrates the fact that the gospel is bearing fruit and increasing throughout the entire world.

In the second half of this section, he now prays that the gospel would continue to bear fruit and increase in the Colossians' lives.

So he's praising God for the advance of the gospel because the Colossians have heard it and believed it, but he also praised God for their growth in the gospel because he wants them to be spiritually mature.

To borrow from Paul's analogy, he's essentially saying that we should celebrate when gospel seeds get planted, but we should also pray that those gospel seeds would grow.

Because you don't plant a seed just for the sake of planting seed.

Like your job's not done when the seed is planted in the ground.

If it doesn't bear bring up a tree or a plant and produce fruit, it does absolutely no good, right?

You want to plant the seed in order to produce the fruit.

And the fruit that we're after is not merely the fruit of conversion, though that's important, and we want to see that too.

It's ultimately the fruit of spiritual maturity.

Because the thing that we often miss is that this fruit of spiritual maturity doesn't come just from gospel proclamation, it also comes through prayer.

Paul isn't just proclaiming that they need to be spiritually mature, Paul is praying for their spiritual maturity.

He's laboring for them on his knees in prayer.

One of the things that we said during our core team training phase a lot was that prayer is not the thing you do before the work of ministry.

Prayer is the work of ministry.

And we try to remind ourselves of that often because at the end of the day, we can plant the seed, but only God can make it grow.

And if the Apostle Paul, who has a better church planting and gospel proclamation record than any of us in the room, feels the need to get on his knees and pray for spiritual maturity, then we should for sure be praying for spiritual maturity as well.

We should pray for spiritual maturity in ourselves.

We should pray for spiritual maturity in our spouses, in our roommates, in our friends, in our children, in our harbor group, in those we're leading to the Lord and those that we are laboring alongside.

Because spiritual growth is ultimately from God.

And prayer is the way that happens.

So, of all the things that you pray for in a given week, how often do you pray for spiritual maturity?

Where does that rank on your prayer request list?

Does it even make the list?

For Paul, writing to a church full of new believers, the very first thing he felt the need to pray for was their spiritual maturity, that they would grow in the gospel.

And if it was important for the apostle Paul to pray for spiritual growth, we better believe.

It's got to be essential for us to pray for spiritual growth as well.

But gospel growth isn't just about gospel fruit, it's also about lasting fruit.

Look at me at verse 11.

It says, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.

So addition to, in addition to praying for spiritual maturity, Paul also prays for faithful endurance.

He's asking God to strengthen the Colossians so that they might endure with patience and joy.

Why?

Because the Christian life is hard.

Following Jesus means forsaking the world, swimming upstream, being counter-cultural, and living your life differently than the people around you.

And that usually for most of us comes at a cost.

Biblical convictions about gender and sexuality might lead to criticism for your coworkers or pressure from the corporate office.

Honoring God with your body might limit the selection that you have when it comes to sit looking for a spouse.

Putting God first might create relational complexity in your family or in your friendships.

Prioritizing your commitment to the local church might mean saying no to some of the best athletic opportunities for your children.

It might mean reducing potential in one area of your life to maximize it in another.

And I'll be honest, that last one is by far the hardest for me as a parent.

As a former Division II college football player, I would love for my children to be great athletes.

That's why I coach them, that's why I spend time with them, that's why I play with them as much as I can because I just love sports, particularly football.

And uh it's too early to tell.

I'm not gonna be one of those parents who makes false, wild predictions about my kids.

But there's potential there, and it could be cultivated in some significant ways.

But following Jesus for us means that Sunday mornings are a non-negotiable.

We do not do sports on Sunday mornings, period.

And that's a challenge for us as a family.

Because guess when a lot of people are playing sports these days?

Right now, on Sunday mornings.

But we don't do sports on Sunday mornings because the most important team for us is Team Jesus.

Jesus is the most important coach my kids will ever have, and the church is the most important team that they will ever be a part of.

Because at the end of the day, it's the only team that when it's all said and done, it's ultimately guaranteed to win.

Because the victory that Jesus has won is an eternal victory.

And every other victory that my kids could be a part of is ultimately only and always temporary.

And we refuse to prioritize the temporary over the eternal.

It's just not worth it to us.

So following Jesus for us as a family has cost us significant athletic opportunities because some of the elite teams and some of the elite leagues and some of the most competitive sports out there are practicing four or five nights a week and playing on Sunday mornings, and we've just said we're not doing it.

Because Jesus for us takes precedence over everyone and everything.

And the reality as a parent is that that's led to some really hard conversations.

That's led to some real tears where we've wept together over the current state of our culture and how we go about church and sports.

And it's led to some real personal, significant loss for me and for my children.

But to us, the only way that we can teach our kids that life really is all about Jesus is to make everything, especially our Sunday mornings, all about Jesus.

So I can tell you from personal experience that following Jesus isn't easy.

It comes at a cost.

And it can be really easy to get bitter, and it can be really easy to complain, and it can be really easy to just give up and give in to whatever the culture is doing at the moment.

Paul knows this, and that's why he prays for patient endurance.

He prays that God would fill their tank with the spiritual energy they need to continue following Jesus, even when it comes at a personal cost, because he knows firsthand that following Jesus isn't easy.

And so maturity and endurance, that's the kind of growth that Paul prays for.

And then at the end, verse 12, he explains why.

Take a look with me at verse 12, and then we'll wrap up our time together.

It says, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, he's delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

So Paul gives one massive reason why he's praying for spiritual maturity with kind of four different words qualifying that statement: qualified, delivered, transferred, and redeemed.

So let's take a look at each real quick.

First, God has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints, which means which is the Bible's way of describing ultimately heaven.

Like children who at an appointed time receive their father's inheritance, distributed to them as a gift, when we become Christians, putting our faith in Jesus Christ, we are adopted into God's family as his sons and daughters, and now, because of Christ, we're qualified to receive the very same inheritance as Jesus Christ, God's own Son.

But these riches aren't earned or achieved by what they do.

We do, they're received by faith in what Jesus has done for us.

God qualifies us through faith in Jesus Christ.

We do not qualify ourselves.

Second, it says that God has delivered us from the domain of darkness.

The Bible teaches us that there is a very real and present evil in the world.

It's referred to as darkness.

And it teaches that apart from Christ, we belong to the darkness.

We're held captive by Satan to do his well, and we are prevented from knowing or following God.

But God, in Jesus Christ, has delivered us from the domain of darkness, setting us free from slavery to Satan, sin, and death.

And the only way to be free is for Christ to liberate you, which is exactly what he does through the cross.

Third, it says that God has transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

And the idea here is that if apart from Christ we're held captive to Satan, then in Christ we've been set free.

We no longer belong to the enemy.

We now belong to Jesus.

We're citizens of heaven and we enjoy all the benefits and responsibilities of belonging to the kingdom of God.

And finally, it says that God has redeemed us by forgiving our sin.

Now, sin, in a very basic sense, is simply any bad thing that you do or any good thing that you do for the wrong reasons.

And it says that every time we sin, sin is like a debt that we go, oh God.

And when we sin, that debt gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And there's nothing we can do to pay the debt because every time we sin, we increase the debt.

But Jesus pays the debt for us through the cross, where he died in our place for our sins so that we could be forgiven and made right with God.

It's this idea that we owed a debt we couldn't pay.

So Jesus paid a debt he didn't owe.

And so now, if you are in Christ, the Bible says that you've been qualified, you've been delivered, you've been transferred, and you have been redeemed.

That is what Paul is saying here in this section.

But the question is, what's he doing?

And if you connect it back to the rest of this passage, what you see is that he's ultimately giving you a reason to pray.

See, all your prayers for spiritual growth amount to nothing unless you can have confidence in the God that you're praying to.

And if you and you can trust Jesus because of everything that he's done for you in Jesus Christ.

You were once disqualified from your share in God's inheritance because of your sin, but he has qualified you in Christ.

You were once held captive by the enemy, but God delivered you from the domain of darkness.

You're once a stranger and an alien to God's people, but he transferred you into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

You were once dead in your sins and trespasses, but God redeemed you through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And that means that you can pray to God to grow in the gospel because he has saved you through the gospel.

Paul wants you to pray with confidence.

And the reason you can pray with confidence is because of what God has done for you in Christ.

So what should we do?

We should pray for gospel growth.

We should pray for gospel growth in ourselves.

We should pray for gospel growth in our family.

We should pray for gospel growth in our harbor groups and for everyone that we're witnessing to and interacting with.

But you can't grow in what you haven't received.

And so there's also an invitation for us here this morning.

And that's this that if you've not yet trusted Christ, you can't say with confidence that you've been qualified, delivered, transferred, and redeemed.

Then you can't pray for growth in the gospel because you haven't believed in the gospel.

And our hope for you this morning is that you would.

Our hope this morning is that you would not leave this place until you, like the Colossian Christians, have received the gospel and believed it for yourself.

If you've never done that, if you have questions about that, if you want help doing that, we would love the opportunity to talk with you after the gathering or sometime this week because we long for you to grow to maturity in the gospel.

And the first step is to believe the gospel for yourself.

Now I said at the beginning of the sermon that I want you to walk out of here impressed with Jesus Christ.

I hope that you can see now why.

But I also hope that you walk out of here not just impressed with Jesus, but believing in Jesus, trusting him for his salvation.

I also said at the beginning of this sermon that we're a church on mission to multiply disciples and churches.

We sincerely hope that you would join us in that mission, that you would see that there is no greater cause on the planet than to join Team Jesus and to partner with God in what he is doing to make his name great in all the earth.

So as a church, we're gonna continue doing what we've always done.

We're gonna continue praising God for the advance of the gospel, and we're gonna continue praying to God for growth in the gospel.

Would you join me in doing that now?

Lord, we thank you for this word from the Apostle Paul to the Christians at Colossians, in Colossians, Lord.

Lord, we thank you for the fact that the gospel really is bearing fruit and increasing in the world, and that we get to be the recipients of that gospel here 2,000 years later, all the way on the other side of the earth.

Lord, we thank you for the way that the gospel is already advancing into Sarpee County, not just through Harbor Church, but through other churches that have and will be planted in our community.

We thank you for those who've trusted Christ for salvation and been baptized, who are walking as disciples of Jesus, Lord.

And uh we celebrate that.

Lord, we also ask that the gospel would continue to advance among us, even in this room right now, among those who have not yet repented and believed, but feel the prompting of the Holy Spirit to do so.

Lord, we pray that you would cause us to be a church that is growing in the gospel, that we would not be content with the forgiveness of sins and righteousness before God, Lord, but that we would long and labor and pray for spiritual maturity in ourselves, in one another, throughout all the churches in Sarpee County, that your name would be glorified among us, Lord God, as your kingdom advances in the earth.

In Jesus' name, Amen.