Put On Love

Today's scripture is from Colossians 3, 12 through 17.

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you are called in one body.

And be thankful.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

I was on vacation over last weekend.

Those are great.

I recommend a vacation if you haven't taken one in a while.

We went to Southern California, and I get, I get it.

You know why like everybody's like, we will live there, no matter the cost.

It's a pretty wonderful place.

Um let's pray and then we'll move back into Colossians.

Oh, I also wanted to say uh thanks to Jacob for preaching last week.

Jacob Carr, he did such an excellent job.

Yeah.

He's not here, but I'll see him on Tuesday.

I'll pass on your applause to him.

I'll clap in front of him.

Which is our typical greeting.

So I'll clarify that it's from you guys and not from me as it ordinarily is.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, we thank you for this gathering together of your people.

We praise you that you make us a body by your love towards us, and that we can participate in that love by loving you and one another.

Lord, your love binds everything together in perfect harmony.

I pray that we might participate in that this morning.

Lord, would you show us the pattern of life that you have called those who are chosen in you to adhere to?

Might we participate in your love as you give us commands of ways to be and modes of being, and would you show us and equip us by your spirit to put on those qualities which you call us towards?

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we're continuing through Colossians and the summer's winding down, and so is Colossians.

We've got one more chapter that's a lot of um thank this person and tell this person hi and thank this person.

So, you know, those sorts of things.

But where I had left off in Colossians was this portion of the text where Paul is explaining how it is that we the church participate in the gospel message.

Now, the letter, this letter has one simple message that Paul states over and over again in all sorts of ways from beginning to end, and it can be summed up in what's basically the thesis of this letter, which is Colossians chapter 2, verse 6, where Paul says, Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him.

Colossians 2:6

This is the great exhortation and hope of the letter to the Colossians.

This is a young church, and Paul is writing to them, having never visited, and he's seeking their maturity in Christ.

His desire for them is that they would be a mature people.

They've received the gospel and they've understood it, and it's bearing fruit in their lives.

And what he wants to make sure the Colossians understand is that the path to Christian maturity is not different from the path of becoming a Christian.

It is in our understanding of what Christ has done for us that we become mature as Christians.

And so Paul explains this gospel even as Zach read, that's his name, right?

Zach?

Zach read this morning in our.

I will see him more than I see my wife.

Zach read this morning from that passage to Colossians, he has transferred us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved son.

He shows us this pattern of the gospel is this death and resurrection, which Christ accomplished for us.

That's the good news of the gospel.

The death and resurrection is accomplished on our behalf in Christ.

And so you'd think Paul is switching here when he's teaching us what it is to put to death in ourselves and then what it is to take on in our own lives.

But it's not a switch of story.

Paul is saying that because the gospel is true, we are to live lives that are in accord with that truth.

And we as Christians grow as we are able to participate in that gospel.

Because consider what it is to be a person, you don't just know and understand things in your hearing them or in your listening to them or even in your affirming them.

You know and understand things in your participation with them.

That's the way it is with your spouse, how your understanding of that relationship grows and develops.

Otherwise, it would just be you sign the marriage contract.

There's one person here who I'm looking at.

We need to do that.

Yeah.

Not my wife, it's somebody who I did the ceremony.

My wife's not here.

Uh the uh it you otherwise you would just sign the marriage contract and that would be it.

It would be, it would be done.

But instead, you sign the marriage contract and then you begin being married.

And you have to participate in this relationship, and there's all sorts of growth and learning throughout that process.

But as you are participating in the marriage, you aren't denying that you ever signed the marriage contract.

You are living in accord with the reality that you have entered at that wedding.

And that is the way that we grow in Christ.

So maturity is in our participation with Christ, and we participate in his story, which is death and resurrection.

Last time I preached in Colossians, two weeks ago, we Paul explained to us what it is in our hearts that we put to death.

It is the malice, the anger, the selfishness, and the greed.

It is sexual immorality, all of these things which adhere in our members, and Paul is saying, put those things to death, because Christ has put them to death on your behalf.

This week, Paul shows us what it is, not that we just put to death or put off, but what it is that we take on, how we participate in the life of Christ, in the resurrection of Christ.

You see that that's the same pattern, it's the same gospel, and we participate in it in our own lives.

So let's move into this.

Paul says in verses 12 through 17 of chapter 3.

Put on, it's a little distracting.

It's cool.

It's no doubt cool, very cool person.

It's just also distracting.

Colossians chapter 3, verses 12 through 17.

Colossians 3:12–17

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

So Paul gives us this list of qualities: compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience.

These are markers of the Christian.

These are the qual this is what a Christian is like when you meet them.

It's their mode of being.

But even here, when he's telling us what to put on, he's always turning our minds back to why it is that we're able to put those things on.

We don't put them on as those who would just like to be those things one day, so that perhaps we might attain to a level of character in which God would receive us.

That's not why we put those on.

We put them on as God's chosen ones who are holy and beloved.

We seek humility and compassion because we have been chosen by God and made holy.

Holiness captures the essence of who God is.

And all of these qualities of humility, meekness, kindness, patience, these flow out of the very heart of who God is, out of his holiness.

And Paul is saying you adopt those qualities because that is who God says you are.

You are chosen of him and you are holy and beloved.

Now, the doctrine of election, this reality in Scripture, that God is the one who chooses us.

He is the one who initiates this relationship.

This has to be understood so that we can know how it is that we are participating in the qualities that Christ is calling us to.

These qualities of kindness, humility, patience, compassionate hearts, these are not things that we take on in order to elicit an action from God towards us.

These are not the ways that we win him over.

It is not an initiation.

This is a response.

A response of what God has initiated towards us.

A response of praise in the rescue that he has enacted and accomplished for the Christian.

Now, the doctrine of election, you know, we could probably burn up a couple of six-packs on an evening between all of us, we're Christians.

And uh spend forever and not get much further than the church has gotten for uh throughout uh the centuries debating the doctrine of election.

And and and I've spoken with so many Christians who find in their hearts this sort of revulsion to this idea that God chose because of no quality that we can discern, but only because of his free will and sovereign choice that he chose those who would be saved.

And we, particularly in our culture, have this visceral sort of uh uh revulsion to that.

But but that said, I've never met a Christian who disliked the phrase, we love because he first loved us.

And that's the same thing.

What the doctrine of reelection shows and lays out plainly is that it is God who initiated towards us.

He is the one who provoked, predestined, in eternity past, named our salvation.

And this shows that the way that we respond to Christ is a reaction to what he has done to us.

We respond as servants to our God who saves us.

I've heard it said that a true grasp of the doctrine of election is a recipe for narcissism.

The thinking goes like this.

A narcissist thinks of themselves with a deep level of insecurity.

And then they create this kind of split in themselves, and in their public life, they manipulate those around them to try and fill in that deep level of insecurity.

And so the gospel can be painted in those terms.

That what you're meant to do and how you're meant to participate in the gospel is to recognize this deep level of insecurity that you have and then seek to have it filled in for no real reason that accords with the truth.

Do you hear the parallel?

And narcissism, just so we're clear, it's bad, right?

Right.

We're all on the same page.

That's not the type of personality that we want to be.

We the gospel is not a mode of just tending to our inner insecurities and then creating some type of fictional goodness that we live in out in the world so that we know we're terrible, but we pretend some gospel truth about us.

Now, the reason why that narcissistic reading of the gospel is wrong is because it's making a category mistake.

You see, the way that we receive our chosenness, our holy and belovedness from the Lord is not the way that we receive applause from a crowd, even secondary applause from a friend who's just conveying it later.

It's not, it's not the same as that.

That's something where you, as the person, are working and you draw that out of the crowd.

You try and draw it out as a response to you, to some act that you're able to uh you know put forward that's actually distant from who you really are.

It never actually touches that insecurity because it's a fiction that you're living in.

This is not the type of blessing that a creature could bestow upon another creature.

We don't receive this name chosen, holy, and beloved, like you receive applause from a crowd.

A better analogy would be you receive it in the way that the animals received their name from Adam.

You know, Adam, one of his first tasks that he was called to was to name the animals.

And in naming the animals, he's he's given this uh image of God task where he's giving identity to things in the world and he's providing meaning and identity to the creatures, to the other creatures that God had put in the world.

And this is just an analogy because it's even more than that what God does for us.

Because we don't relate to God in the way that uh an animal relates to us when we say dog, and it, you know, adheres to the identity of a dog.

We relate to God as the one who made us, the one who knit you together, who intimately and intricately did the work to develop who you are.

And so, us as creatures, we can, we can there's a sense in which we can help each other discover the identities that we have and help that image to be refined and have the sin and the dross kind of melted away from the truth of who we are, but we cannot bestow who we are onto one another.

That must be given to us by our Creator.

So when that's done at the human and creature-to-creature level, yeah, it just looks like manipulation and narcissism.

But this is the opposite.

Because we are receiving the truth of our identity, not in some manipulation or some fiction between one another, but in the one who made us and then names us in truth, and we receive it like a creature receives who they are from their creator.

And so, like a dog who knows, okay, my identity is dog.

So I'm gonna keep my nose wet, gonna be more social than the wolves with people.

Wolves hang out together.

And I think, I don't know, coyotes.

This is a distraction.

I'm not going to look at the humans and think, uh, you know what?

I'm gonna start walking on two legs like they do.

And these extra paws, they should be hands.

No, there's no i i they receive their identity as who they are.

That's how we are to receive this identity, but we don't receive just just, you know, dog, as good as they are.

In Christ, we are told things about ourselves.

You are chosen, you are holy and beloved.

Chosen, holy and beloved from your creator.

This is the center of who you are.

Now, when you receive that, as though you are receiving it not pulling it out from a crowd to fill in some inner insecurity, but like a servant receiving an order from their master, or like a creature receiving their identity from their creator, then you receive it with humility.

And your heart seeks to conform to who your creator has described you to be, and that's holy and beloved, and that looks like the way we participate in that identity is by adhering to these qualities that God has described of us.

Go to the second half of this verse into the next one.

These qualities look like this Colossians 12 B, second half through 13.

Compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

These are some actions.

You'll be bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.

As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Now, these qualities you can hear that they all have a social and relational element.

Paul is not thinking of just virtues that you uh place within yourself, although those can be helpful.

He's thinking of things that we participate in as a body.

And these support the cohesion and the unity of the church, especially over time.

They're deeply related qualities, and many of them overlap.

You can see that a compassionate heart would lead towards kindness.

Because a compassionate heart seeks to understand and and and grasp.

You know, you know, are you familiar with all your own problems?

You know those?

And then you hear somebody else say their problems.

You know their problems feel to them the way that your problems feel to you?

Isn't that crazy?

And then when you grasp that, you know you can hear the issues that people are facing, you can receive it with a compassionate heart, and then you you think, okay, what what is it like to be this person?

How would how would I like to be treated in this?

I'm going to be kind.

Compassionate heart is is the overlapping with kindness.

Next is humility.

Now think it's the humility of a creature, someone who has received their identity.

Why is it that we are called holy and beloved?

It isn't because we drew this out of God, it is because God's heart overflowed towards us.

We learn to receive that.

Now, reception of good things requires humility.

It's one of the most challenging things to do is receive the good gifts of the Lord because it takes such a humility to say, this is not something I drew out of you, this is not something I earned or deserve, and yet it's good and it's mine, and I can hold it with a confidence because it's from the steadfast love of the Lord.

And humility overflows to this meekness, often misunderstood.

Meekness is not like uh, you know, you're a doormat or a weather vane or something who's easily pushed around by the world.

Meekness is this decision.

I would rather have injustice done to me than do injustice in return.

That is the meek person.

You know, that's a very Socratic decision.

Socrates said it is better to do to have injustice done to you than to do injustice.

That is that is the power and control of a meek person.

How would it appear from the outside?

It might look like weakness, you know, uh an inability to retaliate.

That's the way it might appear.

But with this humility of the Lord, we can see that it is a proper restraint towards what the Lord has called us to, allowing vengeance to remain his.

Not that we disregard vengeance.

Vengeance is right, but it's not ours.

It belongs to the Lord.

And so in our meekness, like a creature before his Creator, we allow the Lord to have it.

Patience flows into bearing with one another.

Doesn't Paul know what it's like to be in a community?

You know, we're all bound together in the church by our uh looking to Christ and who Christ is.

He is the highest aim that we all look to.

And then among ourselves, we have all of these strange idiosyncrasies and these weird things about us.

Some of you more than others.

And that we are called to bear with that, to bear the idiosyncrasies and the strangeness and the dispositions and the differences of taste and uh even the differences in our own Christian maturity and our own grasp and understanding of the gospel.

Patience allows you to bear with one another through the ordinary course of life.

Likewise, we are to understand that because we have been forgiven in the Lord, when we are wronged, we are to likewise forgive.

You can see that a community that has these qualities is one that's extremely resilient.

Resilient towards the dramas that spur up within it, resilient towards the uh the difficulties and the interpersonal conflict and the clashing and the um uh interference of desires that we all experience when we draw close to one another.

This type of community is an extremely resilient community.

There's a lot of slack in it.

You know, there's a lot of patience and forgiveness.

There's there's experiences of reconciliation along with experiences of being wronged.

This community looks like and is patterned after the gospel.

You can don't you see the levels that this happens at?

You are chosen, holy and beloved.

God loved you when you were not eliciting his love from him.

He loved at you.

Now go and do likewise.

Treat others in that same way.

People who just you need to just bear with, because there's nothing in them that draws your love out towards them because they're too strange or frustrating, or they're too much like this person on Twitter, or they're too much like that person on Twitter.

You extend your love to them.

Isn't it in the word for give?

Wouldn't it be strange if it were after give?

That's what it means, you know.

You give before.

You know, when the wrong is done, you continue giving.

That is the way that God treats us.

That is that is our experience of his forgiveness.

Because we've experienced that, that has become our identity, we do that to one another.

It's how we participate in the gospel.

Many of you have wondered how does this become real?

How does this truth of the gospel actually start to impact my life?

Try and adhere to these qualities.

Seek to be humble, to be patient, to bear with others, to draw close to people who you initially found repulsive.

Jacob touched on this last week, all the lines that we tend to draw, the purity lines that we tend to draw.

What if you crossed those to bear with one another?

Now, this is something that you can't do from afar.

You can't bear with one another in the metaverse because it looks so terrible.

This is something that has to be embodied and together and in real relationships and real community with one another.

That's where this takes place.

Things like this.

Colossians 3, 14 through 15.

And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful.

Among all of these virtues that have been listed out.

Would you mind closing the back doors?

Getting a little musical in here.

Oh, sorry, but I don't want to leave you guys out.

Leave them open.

We'll all be fine.

Leave them open.

Close one.

Ah, leave them open.

It's totally fine.

That one.

Yeah.

That's the sound door.

That door keeps the sound out, the other door keeps people out.

Good.

With all these virtues, this whole list of virtues, to the top, Paul raises love.

This is what he says of love.

And above all these, above all these virtues, kindness, humility, patience, bearing with one another, forgiveness.

Above all of these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

That's a strange phrase, but it's very like Paul to carry a double meaning like this, which binds everything together.

What is everything referring to?

Well, at one level, it's referring to the virtues themselves.

It is humility and kindness and patience.

These flow downward from an adherence to love.

These are expressions in particular ways of humility and self-understanding, compassionate hearts and others' understanding, kindness and how we act and treat others.

These are all demonstrations of love in particular ways.

They must flow from love.

So in that sense, it holds all of the virtues together.

If you were to ask, what is it that all of these have in common?

You would say these are manifestations of love.

Another sense, it holds everything together.

He's referring to the body, the church.

What is it that makes us a community?

Because there's a couple of options for what we all could be here today.

One option is you could be uh you could be a crowd.

A crowd is a group of people that uh, you know, there can be there can be a crowd just on a busy street, and there's nothing really that holds them all together.

You just happen to be in the same place, and there's no real unity there, and there's no love amongst them.

You could be an audience.

An audience is at least held together, it's like one step better than a crowd.

They can perhaps clap on rhythm.

You know, they uh they have one thing that they're all looking at, but Paul is saying you're a body.

And this is this is more unified than any of those.

A body is not just held together by something that it looks at, a body is interdependent with itself.

So that there's a shared focus, there's a shared head, and then the body itself supports itself and builds itself up.

That is the type of unity that is provided by love.

And it works on both levels, right?

There's this love of Christ, which holds us together, but then we participate in that love as a body together.

So love holds us together, provides our identity, and then holds us together.

There's this other sense in which love literally holds everything together.

Now, this is so strange for us to grasp as modern Western peoples, because it's intuitive for us to not think of the world being held together from the top.

We think of the world as emerging from the bottom.

So we think of life, for example, having come from just an emergence from time plus chance plus matter, and somehow by incredible amounts of faith, we imagine that counter to entropy, which we observe everywhere else, order emerges out of this chaos, and then emerging from that is life, and then on top of that is something like love.

So, what's beneath that drive towards order?

The our culture presumes that it's power.

It's power.

Now you can see this that the order comes from this the these interactions and tensions between competing forces as a way to depersonalize it.

But then you have someone like Nietzsche come along and say it's the will to power, which is the fundamental driver of all of life.

It's the only thing that's really fundamentally driving us.

And then you can see, so you see that at the physical level and then at the human level, creaturely level, then you see it at the social level, where our interpretations of the world are exclusively through the lens of power.

We say if you want to have a view of the world that isn't just Pollyanish or foolish, that isn't naive as to the way things really work, then you'll understand that the world is held together just by power.

And if you want to be wise and understand the world, then you'll see that it's held together just by power.

And so any community can ultimately just be interpreted at its reality in terms of exchanges or competitions of power.

Now, here's why love is different from that.

That love holds everything together.

You can hear I love this translation, in perfect harmony.

It's the perfect way to say that.

Because here's what power does.

Power can create unity.

But power creates unity by having an ideal, and then by coercion and force, causing you to conform to that ideal, and then you relate sort of tyrannically to one another.

Or power creates just destruction, where it creates an absolute disunity, where there's no hope of actually coming together.

But here's what love does: Love treats the other person as another person, as the one to whom God, as the one whom God made.

This other person who relates directly to the Lord and has their identity directly from the Lord, and it relates to that other person, not by tyranny and power or not by destruction, but in a way that upholds who God called them to be.

And so love works together not with like an absolute unity, which is really just tyranny, that's like the Tower of Babel, or in a you just everybody does what's right in their own eyes, that's an absolute disunity, that's like the flood.

Love works in this way where you are bound together, there's a true relationship there, but each of you are upheld, so that there's actually beings to whom relating can happen.

And that's what forms a real body, a real unity that is the church.

It's a pattern like the Trinity, who is who is three persons and is one, simple, and yet is three persons.

These the I don't have the words.

How do you understand something like that?

You see, here's what I want you to see.

If if you were to seek to understand, here's what I want for you.

I want your imagination to be shifted, to be transformed, so that when you see the health of a of a body, or when you see the way that the world even physically upholds itself, that you recognize that this is held together by love.

And that is not being foolish.

It is not being foolish to seek to hold things together by love.

But it is actually the appropriate response to the world.

Imagine it you can feel it in yourself of like this feels it it it has a sense of foolishness to it.

Say, I'm going to seek to love.

Okay.

Now where this love takes place in this sort of context where Paul says, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful.

This phrase, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Paul's writing this at a time known as the Pax Romana, which means the peace of Rome.

Now the peace of Rome allowed for any Roman citizen, to quote President Bartlett from the West Wing, to walk from any side of the empire to the other and to know that they were safe and protected.

And they were not being, a Roman citizen was not being coerced by their government.

They were free to lead the lives that they saw fit to them.

That is the peace of Rome.

But Paul is saying there is a greater peace.

There is a greater peace that is ruling and providing this context.

It is the peace of Christ, which rules in your heart.

And so you participate in this freedom of knowing the identity that He has called you to live out.

See, when we are pursuing holiness and kindness and love and compassionate hearts towards one another, it is not that we are like by some mold forcing ourselves into this contorted shape in which we must leave who God made us to be behind.

No, we are actually receiving humbly who it is that God called us to be and who it is that in Christ we are named as.

And so as a response to what Christ has done, we seek that mode of being.

So how do we do that?

How do we do it?

Receive the Pax Christi.

Colossians 3:16.

Colossians 3:16

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Okay, so what do you do?

First, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

If you go camping and you light a campfire, then you don't light the campfire, and then you all go sit in different parts of the campground.

Instead, what you do is this becomes the focal point, and it's what builds the community around it.

The light and the warmth build the community.

That is the word of God to us.

It is the light and warmth which builds our community.

I've heard through the grapevine of a couple of Bible studies which have just sort of joined together out of parishes.

Now, as a pastor, that's like the most thrilling thing you can hear.

People in the church are just seeking each other to gather around the word together.

This is precisely what you should be doing.

It's precisely the mode in which we allow Christ to dwell in our hearts richly, his word that he has given us, so that our hearts are formed by it.

We understand who He is and then seek to participate in that.

We teach and admonish one another in all wisdom.

See, because this is a response to our Creator, don't hear me say this is where you find your fullest identity as some sort of just self-expression.

This is where you find the freedom to self-express whatever you feel.

That's not what this is.

That's a different type of tyranny to however you happen to be feeling.

This is a conformity to who God made you to be and a humble reception of that.

And so we teach one another to conform to what the word of God is.

And then we admonish one another, saying, come be like this.

Live with humility because you're arrogant right now.

Part with your money because you're greedy right now.

Close your laptop because you're sexually immoral right now.

Be patient with your children because you're provoking them right now.

We admonish one another by the word.

And he says, in all wisdom.

Oh, this takes such incredible wisdom.

So consider yourself, consider the voices that are in your life.

Listen closely to the wise voices that have been placed in your life, particularly in the body of Christ.

As we're doing that, we are to be a people that are marked by singing.

We sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

There's been so much ink spilled over what those three categories mean.

But something like psalms, which are the psalms, hymns, which are songs of praise, and spiritual songs, which are, you know, things that Christians write that that build us up spiritually.

Type of things we sing here.

We sang a psalm this morning.

We'll hymn the Lord and praise to him, sing spiritual songs.

You guys are really crushing it with this one so far this morning.

Why are isn't it interesting that Paul says you're to be marked by singing?

Like if I what what self-help book have you ever picked up off the shelf that was like, you're gonna need to be, you know, disciplined, courageous, and and humble.

And I'm gonna explain the those in the first part of the book.

In the second part of the book, I'm gonna show you how to do that.

Okay, sing together with people.

So it's so strange, but it's so deeply human.

It makes perfect sense.

Because think of what singing is love unites all things together in perfect harmony.

In singing, we're participating in that harmony.

You are only able to sing with your own voice.

It's the only one you have that you can make come out of your mouth.

And everyone else just has that voice, and that and yet we join them together in unity of praise towards the Lord.

And that's the proper orientation of us.

It's seeing, it's putting love above all other things.

Then it's it's the and our type of singing is a response.

Because praise is something that you respond with.

And we're creatures who are responding to our Creator.

We are not initiators.

And so this is doing all of its work to properly orient our hearts and unite us together so we sing together.

I think that there is something deeply inhumane about going weeks without having sung with people.

Who knows what that can do to your heart?

One of the biggest dangers of the podcast era is all the music we're not listening to.

I don't know what that's gonna mean, but I think it's gonna be really bad.

I'm serious.

I think it's gonna, I think there's gonna just be like this drone uh of other people's conversations where it's like you should, there should, you should, there should be more music.

Especially in a Christian's life.

There should be more music in it.

We have lots of things that we can't participate with in any other way.

They're too high above us.

We have to sing them.

Sing those songs of praise.

These are all with this demeanor of thankfulness in our hearts to God.

Why is it that we are thankful to God?

All of your sins are forgiven in Christ.

Here's my news for you this morning, Christian.

All of your sins are forgiven in Christ.

There is therefore now when no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

That's the Bible, you can look it up.

In the present, Christ promises to be with you, to draw close to you.

And I will be with you always, even till the end of the age.

Your future is one of glory, where the thing that you were made to be.

Which it doesn't even think a thought that doesn't glorify the Lord, you will be that one day in the presence of your creator, in the depth of relationship with the one who made you, that was broken by sin, but you'll be able to participate in completely and fully, knowing one another and loving one another and loving and praising your Lord.

That's what's coming.

So our hearts ought to have this disposition of thankfulness to God.

What does a chosen Christian look like?

They look like a narcissist.

No, they they look like a people who sing because of the thanksgiving in their heart, because they understand how Christ sought them.

Now, these are all things that we can do.

You know, if we check our schedules, once a week is pretty good.

To be able to come together and do all of these things.

I wouldn't try for any less than that.

But come together, hear the word, admonish one another, sing praises to the Lord.

These things form our hearts, and this ties directly into what Paul says next, this very famous verse with this his most comprehensive exhortation.

He says in verse 17, and whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Now, this this verse and this type of understanding, it can have a tendency to flatten the world.

Say, okay, uh, in everything I'm doing, I'm seeking to glorify the Lord.

So really the mountains are my church.

You know, things like that.

But if you see the context of this, it is flowing out of this heart that is formed by being a member of a body that loves one another and worships together and hears and shares the word together with one another.

And then when when you're participating in this body, which is not something, this is not theoretical.

You know, it's no more theoretical than your voice is coming out of your mouth.

It's very real.

Paul wasn't thinking like they'll sing with something that was pre-recorded online, you know?

He's thinking we'll sing, which is probably why podcasts and music doesn't matter so much, but I d I think it's a bad sign, is what I'm saying.

That they're, you know, where where did all the music go?

They'll call this season the day the music died.

But we won't even have anything to sing about that.

Because we will have forgotten the song.

Somebody write this dystopian fiction.

When our hearts are properly oriented in worship together with one another, and we're seeking the identity that God has given us as His chosen ones, holy and beloved, then all of your life, you realize, opens up to this opportunity to live in accord with the name of Jesus.

Because where can you not be patient?

Where can you not be humble?

And all of your life is all of a sudden imbued with this glory and majesty of what Christ has done, so that there is no area of your life which is not brought under the lordship of Christ.

So you would ask yourself questions like in doing this, is this something to which I can be thankful to Jesus for?

That's a helpful question.

Is this something to which I can be thankful to Jesus for?

If it if it isn't, if if it would be like, yeah, I could probably be thankful if he didn't totally know all that I was doing, then that's not the thing.

You carry a name.

Just like when Adam named dog, he gave dog meaning.

And so dogs should act like dogs.

You carry a name.

The name of Jesus.

He calls you holy and beloved.

Live in accord with that name and all that you do.

This is the calling of the Christian.

It's what a chosen one looks like.

So with that, Matthew, are there any questions today?

In Ephesians 5, Paul connects Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with being filled with the Spirit.

How should we integrate that with Colossians 3, where Paul connects Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with letting the Word of Christ dwell in us richly?

What a wonderful question and a beautiful insight.

I wish I had noticed that.

So just like riffing on it, what is one of the promises of the Spirit?

It's that he will bring to mind the words of Christ into our hearts.

And so in these psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, we we see that it is this, why are we able to sing them together?

It's the Spirit's work of bringing to mind the very words of Christ that we can then not just hear, but but participate in, get in rhythm with, in our minds, in bodies in this, in this uh this way that's really transformative of who we are.

Think of this compared to just before this, when Paul says to put to death these things that are in your members.

We talked about how Paul thinks of members as aspects of our personalities as well as our hands and feet and you know, members of a body.

And he's saying that there's these sin patterns that are embedded in your being, and you need to put those to death.

And then you can hear through this that there's like this alternative pattern, and it has singing in it, and it also looks like singing, where we use our whole bodies to orient towards the praise of God, and that's what our lives should look like.

So singing is like a practice of that, enabled by the Spirit.

That's cool.

Good question.

Beautiful thing.

Now we participate in this other way with what Christ has done for us.

Paul writes to the Corinthians, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

We come together as one body to the same table to orient our hearts towards what Christ has accomplished for us.

He invites us to the meal, to the feast.

So let us come and participate and finish it with the way a good meal and feasting should conclude, which is with singing and praise.

So sing loudly today as you come to take communion.

Holy Father, we praise you for the work that you have accomplished for us, the identity that you have given us and bestowed upon us in Christ, we pray that we would receive it as your humble creatures, that you would make us a body that loves and honors and glorifies you.

And that in all that we do when we leave here today, in all that we do throughout the next week and throughout our lives, we would bear your name and would come from a place of thanksgiving from what you have done for us.

Teach us how to receive that, Lord.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.