Reading The Bible

Providence family.

It is good to see each one of you who are here in this room.

For those over in the harbor, we're also glad that you joined us.

And if you happen to be at home, we want to welcome you as well.

If you're a guest with us, we're honored that you joined us, and uh we mean that.

Um we have guests every single time who are here with us.

And I know some of you don't know the Lord, and perhaps you've heard something about Providence or maybe about Jesus, and maybe you just came to learn a little bit more of who Jesus is and why people would meet and worship him.

And our hope is that you're going to be encouraged.

As a church family, we tried to provide lots of opportunities for every single one of us, how we would really connect and to grow and to serve and to go.

And not only do we want to provide opportunities, we want to provide a pathway for each one of us to know what is our best next step.

And so we've revamped the app, and which is what you just saw.

And uh, and in the app, what you're gonna find, I think that'll be really um, really good for you, uh, hopefully encouraging and helpful to all of us, is there's a dashboard.

And on that dashboard, what it is, it's is it's simply markers of engagement.

Uh, and on that basis, what you'll find is a feed of information that follows that is pertinent to you and to your family.

And so our hope is that you will receive what you need to hear about everything that's happening at Providence in a way that is really helpful to you.

And so I would ask you to open it up, download it, use it.

And if you have it open, um and uh you can actually go to the very bottom, you can hit weekend, and you can find the notes to the sermon that we're gonna walk through right now.

So uh it is really good to see you.

So let's pray together.

Father in heaven, uh, we ask that you would open our hearts as we open your word, that you would encourage us as we as we uh as we read that you would you would do just what you promised, and that is for those of us who are weary and heavy laden, that you would give us rest.

I pray that your word would be like a well, a deep well full of refreshing water, that when we pull that water up and drink, that we would not only find refreshment for our soul, but we would walk out of here wanting to commend the water to others.

And so would you please give us grace, speak through weakness, and help us, I pray, in Christ's name.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, last, um, not last week, two weeks ago, I laid out a five-year vision for us as a church family that ultimately what we want to see over the five years is that every one of us, every one of us, would embrace the cost to make disciples, just as Jesus asked us to, told us to, who would make disciples.

And for that to take place, for us to be able to see that come to pass, we believe that we would need to multiply in four different ways.

One of them is our own maturity as followers of Christ.

We need to grow personally, each one of us.

To do that, we believe that we need to multiply our groups because groups are greenhouses for growth, and many of our groups, our small groups, are full.

And so we need to multiply groups.

In order for us to multiply our groups, we need to multiply our leaders because groups need leaders.

God uses people as a channel of his grace and his truth.

And so more people need to step up to say, I will serve and I will teach and I will help with hospitality and I'll help with parking, whatever the ministry is, is that we would multiply the number of leaders.

And we believe that if we would do that, then we would have the ability to multiply our reach, and that is to extend ourselves to the point of discomfort, to reach people who are far from the Lord and also far from us, not only in Raleigh and in America, but to the uttermost parts of the earth.

And that's what we desire.

But all of this begins within.

It begins with maturity, which is why we're in a series.

This is the second week, and it's called How We Change.

The fact is, we all want to change.

We all know that we even need to change.

There's parts of our life that we think, why is that still part of my life or my attitude or my decision-making skill?

Why is that still unchanged in my life?

Every one of us live in this disheartening gap between who we want to be and who we know we should be, or at very least, who we want to be and who we know we are.

And as a result, what we do is we try.

And isn't it amazing, though, how real and lasting change seems to evade our efforts and our goals and our resolutions.

We tend to revert back to who we were once we release pressure.

And so what we're doing in this series is walking through a series of steps that the Bible gives us and tells us to take, that God has promised that He will meet us in those steps, not first to change our life, but to change our heart.

If we can change our heart, our lifestyle always follows suit.

So last week we began looking at how do we walk by the Spirit.

And that's critically important because the Spirit of God is where the power comes from in each of the steps.

So we looked at that last week, and what we want to look at today is the first step, which is reading the Bible.

So if you have a Bible in your hand, turn with me to the book of Colossians.

We're gonna be in chapter two.

If you don't have a Bible in your hand and you want one in your hand, there's Bibles in the chairs near you.

And if you don't have your own, would you please take that home as a gift?

We would want you to have that.

Let me tell you something that's true about the last, I don't know, three or four weeks of my life.

Okay?

Little confessional.

And the confessional is not about sin and being defiled, because that's not necessarily what has marked my last three or four weeks.

But what has marked my last three or four weeks is uh an unusual dryness that is combined with a what I would call a slight darkness, not utter darkness.

It's just been heavy.

And the fact is, as we know, even from the Bible, there's a number of things that contribute to these kinds of seasons in our life.

Some of you may feel that way right now.

You may feel unusually dry, and maybe that you're walking through a patch of your life where it just seems like it's a little darker, a little bit more ominous than other times.

And sometimes it's physically, sometimes we're not sleeping well, sometimes we're just exhausted, sometimes it's psychological where we're where we're stressed about things, where we're feeling anxiety, we we're we're we're in in that strain and that load.

Sometimes it's spiritual.

The Bible says that there is an enemy who hates Jesus, and because we've aligned ourselves with Christ, is that he hates us as well.

So there's such a thing as spiritual warfare, where the God of this world, as it says, uh, which is a weird way for me to say it, which is Satan, okay, which is what the Bible calls him because he's active in this world.

He says that he's active in our life to try to constrain and to create a sense of dryness and darkness.

And so all these things contribute.

And I'm telling you all of this as I lead into a sermon on reading the Bible, and this is why.

Because when you feel dry and when you feel dark, you run somewhere instead of why.

And every one of us, we run to a well.

There's lots of different wells in the world, all kinds of different wells.

And one of the things that's happened in my life is that I have run to this well.

Isaiah chapter 12 calls the Bible a well, lots of wells, all these moments, all these words, all these passages, all of these promises within his word.

Isaiah 12 · chapter mention

And I have consistently over these last several weeks continued to go to him.

And what I can tell you is this is that it has pulled me out of so much dryness in the last several weeks that I can only stand before you and say what I am telling you today about reading the Bible is not just academic, it's incredibly personal.

I have enjoyed this wealth and can commend you to it.

Those of you who are thirsty and those of you who are tired.

The blessings that are promised to those who take the Bible into their heart, whether it's reading it, studying it, memorizing it, are absolutely clear.

You find them in Old and New Testament in Joshua chapter 1, verse 8, he says, The book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, and then you will make your way prosperous.

Joshua 1:8

You look at the book of Psalms, and in Psalm chapter 1, for those of you who have read it, he talks about the blessing of a person.

Psalms 1 · chapter mention

He says, Blessed is the man, blessed is the woman.

And he talks about the blessing of meditating upon the word of God day and night.

And he says, and this is what this person will be like.

He or she will be like a tree planted by streams of water.

You turn to the New Testament and you find passages like 2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 16, where he says that all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable.

2 Timothy 3:16

It's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

And all of these promises in the Old and New Testament, for those that would take the Bible and place it, interject it into their heart, led Paul to speak to Timothy, his son in the faith.

And he says to him in chapter 4, verse 13 of his first letter to him, and he says, Devote yourselves to the public reading of Scripture, to teaching and exhortation.

Here's the question that I have: Why does he say to the public reading of Scripture?

And why does he not say to the private personal reading of Scripture?

And not only that, why will you not find a single verse in the New Testament that tells you to read the Bible personally?

To curl up on a nice chair in the morning with your tea or coffee, open up your Bible.

Why did we not find verses, instructions like that?

And the reason is because until Gutenberg's printing press in 1455, most people didn't have a Bible.

Christianity is almost 2,000 years old.

And for 1,400 of those years, a pastor could not stand up and say, if you don't have a Bible of your own, take one of those that are in the seat in front of you and take it as a gift.

Pastors couldn't say, now, when you get home, we provided a Bible reading guide for you.

I mean, when you get home, you just look at your Bible and you just open it up and read it.

Most people didn't have a Bible throughout all of Christianity.

And what's interesting is those people who were privileged enough to live in places where there was a Bible, that Bible was in a language that over time they couldn't read.

You see, we read, I'm about to read in English, okay?

An English Bible.

The Bible wasn't written in English, it was in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And in 405, 400 years, we're told that the Pope commissioned Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin.

But the problem is most people couldn't read Latin.

It wasn't the language of the day.

And as such, it made the people very dependent upon the papacy and the priesthood to not only read them the Bible so people would know what it says, but also to interpret it, to understand it.

Well, this was true for a thousand years.

Until 1395, when a man named John Wycliffe, he said, you know what, what I see within the church isn't what I have the privilege to read in the Bible.

Something's not right with this.

We need the Bible in the common language of the people that are in my community, my countries, all these countries around me who speak English.

And so he, in 1395, he translated the Bible in English.

Well, one of the things you find is the Bible-reading people become a discerning people when it comes to corruption and heresy.

And the Pope knew that as well.

And so the Pope not only condemned his life as a heretic, but he burned Wycliffe's translation, the first translation that was in English.

Interestingly, a man named John Huss said, you know what?

I'm going to give it a go after Wycliffe died.

And he gave it a go until he was martyred and burned at the stake as a heretic for translating the Bible from Latin into English in 1415.

120 years later, a man named William Tyndall.

William Tyndall, with bound with a bounty over his head, he finished the translation, hid it so that it would not be destroyed.

He was burned at the stake and martyred in 1536.

But we have his translation.

Now, what why would I say all this?

Because what I hope you can see is this.

A lot of really amazing people died.

Not just so you can have a Bible in your hand, but that you can read it not only when we gather publicly, but privately.

But that's not why you should read the Bible.

You see, those individuals who recognize that we have a unique historical blessing to have a Bible.

And those who see its transformative power in our lives, our homes, our churches, our communities, and our culture, just as these reformers believed that it had.

Well, those are the kind of people who read the Bible.

I can't, as I said, show you a verse that says, So go home and read your Bible.

But let me show you a passage of what happens to those who will.

Colossians chapter 2, verse 6.

Colossians 2:6

Therefore, as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy or empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority.

First, we grow in Christ the same way we received him.

We grow in Christ the same way that we received him.

Now we started in verse six, and verse six begins with the word therefore, and therefore is built on the back of everything that is before it.

And so in chapter one and chapter two, what Paul does is something pretty remarkable.

He exposes a riddle, or what he calls a mystery, that has been hidden for what he says is ages and generations, throughout all the nations in the world, there's this mystery that haunts all peoples, every culture, even today.

And the mystery that everyone's seeking to answer is how do we go to heaven when we die?

How do people like me, who's a sinner, who's has guilt and shame, who imagines that there is a God that I'm not ready to see, I probably need to do something to prepare for that moment, that moment of judgment.

What do I need to do?

You go anywhere in the world today, anywhere in the world, and what you find are philosophies and religions and ideas of what the people need to do.

And the one commonality in the whole world over is this you need to do something.

You need to do something.

You need to pray more, give more, go more.

You need to, you need to know more, you need to be more moral.

There's something you need to do.

And so Paul comes on the scene and in Colossians and he says, I know the world.

But let me tell you the answer to this mystery has nothing to do with what you can do.

It's what someone else has done for us.

He says, This is the answer to the mystery.

Chapter 1, verse 27.

It's Christ in you.

He's not a hope of glory, he's the hope of glory.

You see, God is holy.

And the Bible says that because he is holy, his standard for entrance into heaven is perfection.

If God allowed less than perfection into heaven, it would compromise his holiness.

And so perfection is the standard to get to heaven.

And I'm not making this up.

Jesus says in Matthew chapter 5, verse 48, you therefore must be perfect, because my heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5:48

Well, the Bible says we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The Bible says we're not perfect.

And so, knowing that we could not climb in our efforts to heaven, God sent his son to the earth.

And Jesus was given the name Jesus, Christ came to the earth and he gave him the name Jesus, and he lived without sin.

And then he went and he died just as he promised to pay for our sin.

He was buried in a grave and he rose from the dead.

He rose from the dead as evidence of his authority, is evidence of his ability to forgive, as evidence that his life, his death satisfied the wrath of God Almighty towards our sin.

And then the Bible says that everyone who puts their faith and trust in him are not only forgiven, but it says that Christ comes to live within us.

Christ in us by his Spirit, depositing his righteousness, his moral record into us.

This is what it means to be justified by faith, which is the central doctrine within the New Testament.

That because of Jesus' work, we place our faith in Jesus and we are justified.

We are made righteous just as though we had never sinned.

And that is the gospel.

And so when we get to chapter 2, verse 6, and he says, Therefore, he calls it.

He's saying, in light of the fact that we have Christ in us, the hope of glory, he says, as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him.

In other words, the ingredients that were required to receive Christ are the same ingredients that are required to grow or to change, to look more like Christ.

So we should ask, well, what are the ingredients?

How did we receive Him?

Well, first of all, there was the truth of God.

We had to hear the gospel.

In Romans chapter 10, it says that faith comes from hearing and hearing the word of Christ.

Romans 10 · chapter mention

Someone had to tell us that Jesus loved us, that he died, that he rose again, that we had a need, and he is our Savior.

We had to have the truth.

You have to have the truth.

Second is the gift of faith.

Ephesians 2 says, we are saved by grace through faith, and this is not of ourselves.

It's a gift, not of our works.

It's interesting that even faith, sometimes we read that and we think, okay, when it says this is not of ourselves, he says we are saved by grace through faith, and this and this points to the faith.

In other words, we don't even bring faith to the table of our conversion.

Even that is a gift.

And then all of a sudden, the third ingredient is repentance.

In Acts chapter 3, he says, repent then and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out and times of refreshing may come from the Lord.

Acts 3 · chapter mention

So we hear the gospel, we believe the gospel, and then all of a sudden we say, wait a minute, what this means is I need to repent of my belief that I don't need a Savior or that I can be my own Savior.

And that leads to the fourth ingredient, which is a confession that Jesus is Lord.

In Romans chapter 10, verse 9, he says, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 10:9

When we confess Him as Lord, what that does is it spawns obedience.

It says, You're the Lord.

You you get to call the shots of my life.

And all of this culminates with the power of God moving in our life to regenerate us.

Our sin caused a degeneration of our character, and his spirit within us causes a regeneration.

Where he says, We've been, it's been, we've um we were caused to be born again to a new and living hope.

And so we look at this and we go, okay, this is the ingredients of how we received him.

And so we ask a second question, which would be really, really important, and that is, okay, well, then how do we change?

And it's the same ingredients in any area of life, whether we're talking about our character, our tongue, our sexuality, our work ethic, whether or not we should forgive somebody, how we how we how we do family, how we do work, how we do anything in life, it begins with truth.

This is where the Bible is so important.

We learn the truth from the Bible.

Okay, well, this is the truth.

And then what do we need to do after that?

Well, we have to have the gift of faith.

We may read all of this, hear it, and if we don't believe it, it stops right there.

Which is why nothing.

Next week, we're going to actually do an entire sermon on our need to pray for belief in the words from the Bible that we hear.

And then once we believe, what do we do?

We have to repent.

Any of these areas that we're studying, like forgiveness or compassion or mercy, and all of a sudden we see his word, we believe, and we're like, wow, but I'm not living that way.

So now all of a sudden I have to change paths.

And we confess Him as Lord over that area of our life, which means that He gets to dictate the path that we're going to walk.

And now all of a sudden we're walking in obedience.

And then all of a sudden he pours His power into our life.

And this is how we change.

And in verse 7, it says that if we will stick with these ingredients, we will be rooted, we'll be built up and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

Interestingly, the words rooted, built up, and established are in the passive tense, meaning that we're not doing them, they're being done to us.

The words abounding in thanksgiving, this is the only active tense.

And so this is what he's saying.

If we will continue to walk the path using the same ingredients of how we came to faith in Christ, then Christ will cause our roots to grow deeper.

Christ will build us up.

Christ will establish us, and we will give thanks.

So let me encourage us this morning to read the Bible, to inject God's truth into our heart.

You know, truth, you guys know this is so important to life.

It's critical to life, and it's critical to growth.

And the reason is because truth sets the target of where we're aiming to grow.

And it's interesting that our culture is very confused about truth because we know instinctively that there should be truth sounds good, doesn't it?

Even people who don't believe the Bible, they're like, truth sounds like a word that's appealing.

We want truth.

It's interesting, though, because our culture has abandoned the Bible.

We have to redefine what truth is because we know we need it, but it can't be this.

So what have we redefined truth to be?

You hear, well, truth is what works.

Truth is what you agree with.

Truth is what feels right.

Truth is the sum of your life experience.

And friends, all of those things are interesting, but none of those things are truth.

What God says is truth.

Psalm 119, verse 160 says, the sum of your word is truth, which means that if we could put all the words of God into a bucket, what is in the bucket is truth.

Psalms 119:160

What is outside the bucket is not truth unless what is outside the bucket is in agreement and alignment with what he has said.

That is truth.

And whether we like what is said or not, you can deny truth, you can reject truth, but we will all stand before the truth.

So we need the truth, and the truth is found in the Bible.

And this is why I urge you to spend a little time each day to get to know the Lord who loves you and the one who has given us truth about how to live.

When I read the Bible, there's two things that I typically do through my whole life.

I've done this for literally probably three decades now.

Okay.

So if you can imagine the Bible is like a lake, okay, I get on two boats most mornings, okay?

First boat is a ski boat.

I start at the very beginning at some point, Genesis chapter one, verse one, and I just start reading.

And I might read 15 minutes, and maybe I'll get through two or three chapters, and I'll just put a little marker there, and the next day, that's where I pick up and I just keep reading.

And the point of that is simply I want to read the Bible through as many times as I can throughout the course of my life because the more that I understand the whole lake, the whole narrative of the whole Bible, the more connections that I can make as I'm reading and see the whole thing at once.

But there's a second boat that I get in, and it's sort of a really slow, it's got a five horsepower engine on the back, it has a glass bottom, it's just putts around the lake, and it's where I take a passage of the Bible, I choose a book, any one of them, and I said, I'm gonna study this book, and I'll read a paragraph or two.

And I'm looking at the contours, all the words and the promises, like looking under the lake to see what's what's what's underneath, what's what's there.

And so I'm praying, God, would you help me to understand what this is?

I'll read it a few times and I'll start asking myself questions.

Okay, what does this say?

Second, what does this mean?

He chose by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he chose that word and not another word.

And that word has a meaning, and I don't get to determine what that word means.

Which means that I have to bend my life around what those words are saying and not ask those words to mean what I want them to mean.

Those words are true.

And if I'm gonna live in the truth, I have to wrap my life around those words.

And some of us I know that we've maybe you've tried to study the Bible, and you're like, I just can't do it.

I don't know how to do it.

I don't know how to read the Bible.

I have some good news.

Not this Sunday night, but I believe it's the next Sunday night, or maybe it's the next.

I think it's the last Sunday in September, okay?

We start five electives.

There's five and they run at the same time.

They're like five or six-week classes.

They're free.

You just sign up and you come.

And one of them is how to read the Bible.

So if you open the Bible and you're just like, man, I just read it.

I just don't get what anyone else ever says that they get.

I don't, I don't know what I'm missing.

I don't know how to read this thing.

I believe that that elective would be incredibly helpful for you.

In addition to that, there's a lot of Bible studies for men and women throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

And sometimes studying the Bible and reading the Bible with others becomes incredibly powerful to our understanding of how to read the Bible.

So I urge you to inject God's truth into your heart.

The second thing we find here is that we grow in Christ by refusing to look away from Him.

You see, when the gospel came to this city, Colossae, where Paul was writing, many of the people believed the gospel, and yet, just like us, they found life change to be really hard, and they also found their community, their city, to be a melting pot of lots of different beliefs.

And so they, as followers of Jesus, they would gather together and they had a leader.

His name was Epaphras.

And they told Epaphras, this is what we're thinking, okay?

We're Jesus people.

We get it.

Jesus is the bread of life.

We're Jesus people.

We find our nourishment from Jesus.

He's our savior, he's everything to us.

But this is what we don't understand.

And we got some ideas.

They say, so we got a bunch of neighbors around here, some Greek, some Jewish, and they have other ideas about different grain, about what they eat and how they find nourishment.

Different ideas, philosophies, religions.

And here's the deal like we're Jesus people, so we don't want to throw away that bread.

But what we think is that if we would combine the bread of life in Jesus Christ with some of these other grains from other religions and philosophies, we would create a superfood that would really let us grow.

It was called syncretism.

Just sync up different ideas with Christ and say, does it work?

And Paul comes and he says, in chapter 2, verse 4, he says, Let me tell you why I'm even writing a whole letter.

He says, I'm writing this thing, I'm speaking these things in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments.

Plausible means believable.

In other words, if the false teachers had come in and say, abandon Christ entirely and lay hold to this, they'd say, No, wait a minute.

No, I'm we're Jesus people, so we're not going to go with that.

But if someone comes to you and says, Oh, hold on to Jesus, just add something to him to make it more effective, to find your true self, to be fully self-actualized.

Oh, how much better.

And so he says, guys, you have Christ, the hope of glory in you.

And therefore, verse 8, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy or empty the seed according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world.

That's literally the doctrine of demons, and not according to Christ.

He's saying, you have the bread of life.

There's no reason to run to another pantry.

What you find is to replace or to sync Christ with anything, whether it's mysticism that he talks about in chapter two, Gnosticism in chapter two, asceticism, which is to self-denial, vows of poverty, and vows of celibacy, and vows of silence.

You try to sync or replace Christ with legalism, extra rules, relativism, social liberation theology.

Everything that comes every 20 years, there's a new thing that comes.

What you find is that if you replace or sync Christ with anything, it creates a captivity.

And therefore, in verse 19, he says, Only by holding to Christ can we grow with a growth that is from God.

And therefore, I would ask you to consider this.

Let's identify what is competing for our attention today.

What is the loudest voice in your brain?

What is the loudest voice that's shaping your thoughts about culture, about life, about family, about gender, sexuality, politics, government?

What's the loudest voice?

Is it the news or a podcast?

Is it an old philosophy?

A new philosophy?

A friend?

An emotion?

A book?

What is it?

Is it the word of God?

See, whatever voice has access to our minds is always going to influence our heart.

So I urge you to keep reading the Bible.

The last thing I want you to see is that we grow in Christ by seeing his fullness.

We all become like the person that we admire.

And this is why he ends in this section with the importance of seeing that we grow in Christ only if we can see his fullness.

Many years ago, I was standing on top of the tallest ski peak in North America.

At least there's the sign that says it's the tallest ski peak in North America.

You get off the lift, and you either, if you're, if you need a board or your skis, you gotta take them off, you put them over your shoulder, and you have to hike up this part of a it's not a hill, it's definitely a mountain, but it's a snow staircase.

And it takes a while to get up there.

You finally get up to the top of this thing, and it's just stunning.

I mean, the everything is just it's just it's it's just amazing.

And I remember like there's more glory that was filling my eyes and going into my heart than I could have time to get words to to express what I was seeing.

And so I just I didn't say a whole lot, I'm just totally quiet, I'm just looking, and finally I'm just looking over the edge, about to go over and next to a guy, and I just said, it's just stunning.

And he says, What?

And I said, This, all of this, the mountains, the the sky, the snow, the view, and he says, Oh, I live here.

Some of us live in here.

And familiarity with spiritual riches makes us complacent and lazy and susceptible to trading it in for something else.

You know, I share the gospel now.

Twelve years in a row, every time I get up here, I tell you how to get saved.

Not because I don't think most of you are, but it is an amazing to see the eyes glaze over.

People who have heard it so many times and believe it.

Because familiarity leads us to think and to feel and to lose the feeling of how wonderful it is.

Sometimes somebody next to us may be brand new.

It's maybe the importance of bringing somebody with you to church who doesn't know.

You begin listening very differently, and they say, Can you believe this?

It's stunning, the gospel.

And you say, What?

You're like, the gospel, and you're like, Oh, I live here.

Don't get over what it says in verse nine.

In him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

You cannot put more of God into Jesus.

He is God in full.

And you have been filled with him.

Some of us believe that intellectually, but because we have not seen his glory repeatedly and routinely, we get bored with the idea of Christ in me, the hope of glory.

Friends, if you want to grow, you have to see the glory of Christ.

This is what 2 Corinthians tells us.

Notice, we all with unveiled face, we, he's writing the church in Corinth.

These are Christians.

And he says, we as Christians, the veil has come off of our eyes.

We are beholding.

Literally, it means to see the glory of the Lord.

When we see the glory of the Lord, something happens, and what is it?

We're transformed.

The whole series is how we change.

Here it is.

You want to know how to change?

Look at him.

We become like who we admire.

We are transformed when we see his glory.

Notice in the same image, meaning that we become like him.

We become more Christ-like over time.

The goal in change is not to be a better you, it's to be more like him.

His glory, his image, his character.

And this happens, notice incrementally, from one degree of glory to another, which means a little bit today and a little bit more tomorrow, and it keeps happening.

And you say, wow, how's this going to happen?

Not by your power.

How does it happen?

For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

This is why walking with the Spirit is so critical, because if you read the scripture and you're not walking with the Spirit, you can imagine that this book is about you.

It's not about you.

It's not about David, Noah, or Moses or any of those people.

There's only one hero of the whole Bible.

It's Jesus.

And everything points to Jesus.

And therefore, let me encourage you to read the Bible to see Jesus.

In addition to asking, what does it say, what does it mean, and how do I apply it?

There's a fourth question that I typically ask, and that is, what does this tell me about Christ?

And if you happen to be in a part of the Bible that isn't directly talking about Jesus, like in the Old Testament, you think, what are you talking about?

This isn't about Jesus at all.

My friend, the whole thing is about Jesus.

Listen to what Jesus said.

In John 5, he says, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.

You don't read the Bible to learn what you need to do to get to heaven.

You read the Bible to see the glorious one and how what he did to get us to heaven.

You have to see Christ.

And if you're brand new to all of this, and maybe you're here and you just the whole thing, you're just exploring Christianity today.

I'm so glad you're here.

And my encouragement to you, my encouragement to you is to pick one of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and just read it.

And instead of reading anything of what you should do, just be on lookout to say, all right, God, if you're real, if you're there, I'm asking, would you help me to see the glory of Christ?

And just look at what he did and what he said, and what he said about why he did what he did.

And one of the things you're gonna find as you read through the Gospels is you're gonna find that Jesus is the Son of God who has authority over life and death.

He's the most winsome man in the history of the world who had regard not only for Jew and Gentile, but also men and women, young and old, religious and irreligious.

You're gonna find the most winsome person literally in the whole world, and you're gonna find that the most winsome person in the world went to a cross to pay for your sin and mine.

He was buried in a grave and he rose from the dead.

He invites you to believe, and I urge you to put your faith in Christ in him today, right now.

You see, we see Jesus' glory in the pages of the Bible, but we also see it and are reminded in this beautiful thing that we call the Lord's Supper.

And so if you came in and you grabbed the elements, if you want to go ahead and pick them up, I need to say to those of you who are not yet ready to trust Christ, the Bible tells me to encourage you not to take the elements because to take these symbols of his body and blood is a public witness of you declaring that you treasure the realities behind the symbols.

And so if you're not ready, just listen and observe during this time.

But if you know Christ, he tells me to tell you, you're welcome to the table, but he tells me to tell you first we need to confess our sins.

So let me give you a moment.

You pray to the Lord, ask him to search your heart and anything that he exposes that's out of step with his will, confess that to him so that he can forgive you.

We're thankful for your promise that if we confess our sin, that you're faithful to forgive us.

We're thankful that that promise matters and is fulfilled because you are willing to give your life to take away our sins.

We're thankful that you forgive us of what we say, what we think, and what we do, it's out of step with you.

And we are so thankful that you gave your life for us.

Help us to remember now.

We pray in Christ's name.

Amen.