Turning To Obedience | How We Change

Well, Providence Family, it's good to see each one of you.

If you're a guest here, we're honored that you have joined us.

We worship Jesus and we celebrate life change because Jesus makes that possible.

We're in a series called How We Change.

And the fact is, we all want to change, and so we chose this story.

We could have chosen literally from many, many people's lives to for each one of us to say this is what Jesus has done in our life.

But it's to encourage each one of us that we are involved in something, that we are in a mission where God Almighty, by His power, by His Word, by His Spirit, changes people's lives.

That's an amazing thing that we get to be a part of.

There's a few things I want to share with you before we pray.

First of all, we have 190 high school students right now at Meta, Metamorphosis, or How We Change.

And so we want to be praying for them.

They should be finishing up right about now, or maybe in about 30 minutes from now.

And our prayers that the seeds have been planted in their heart over the last weekend, that uh that God would water those seeds and that he would change their lives.

I also want to say thank you on behalf of many of our partners here at Providence.

We support 110 international church planners.

What that means is we are partners with a lot of schools around the world.

Um, a lot of um, and these schools, what they graduate are people who are gonna plant a church.

And uh, and so uh they need help.

And so, as a church family, um you actually um help support when you give to Providence 110 other pastors that you're never gonna meet personally, at least most of them you won't.

Uh they don't even speak English, and um and they're all over the world.

And over the last um eight, nine days, uh just a few of us had the opportunity to go and visit with a number of them, be in their spaces in Europe and in Asia, and uh and to see their churches.

And they just wanted me to say thank you on behalf of each one of them, their families, and their churches uh for uh for you as a church family, as you give, as you pray, as you serve them.

Um, we know there's a lot of people who've been affected by weather.

And I've been told before this service started that we might hear a bunch of phones go off uh in here, uh, that we may have some weather.

If we do, um there may be someone who walk up on stage, offer me some instruction, and I can offer that to you.

So just don't freak out if somebody does that, okay?

Um, and so anyway, all that to say, um, it is really good to see you.

Let me pray.

Father in heaven, we bow before you and we pray there's a lot of needs around the world.

So many needs.

We pray for people who are devastated by the storm.

We pray, Father, that you would you would pick them up, that you would you would cause the glory of Jesus Christ to be known, that your people would have compassion and heart and kindness in their hands to help.

We pray, Father, that you would rescue and that you would protect and you would provide.

Even for us, God, we ask that you would protect and provide.

God, we want to change.

I want to change.

As a church family, we want to change.

There's things about our life that we don't want them to be there any longer, and we know that you don't either.

So we ask, Father, that you would help us to see another picture, another step of how we change, how we are empowered to grow.

And I pray for those who feel like this is never gonna happen.

Or for those who feel hopeless, would you pierce through that darkness of unbelief in their heart with a picture of your power and love and show them that even they, by your power, can change.

So do this, I pray.

Would you speak through weakness in Christ's name?

Amen.

If you have a Bible, turn with me to the book of Colossians.

If you have the app, you want to follow along and see my notes as we go through, you can find them there on the app.

Um, in this series, How We Change, it's very obvious that all of us want to.

That's one thing that I've found.

A lot of people have talked to me and they said, you know, I'm really excited about this because there are a lot of things in my life that I want to change.

Every one of us live within that really disheartening gap between who we are and who we want to be.

And Jesus knew that we would experience that gap.

In fact, he spoke about it and he spoke of our initial instinct, what we would think we need to do first when we feel that gap.

And what he says is that we are all tempted when we feel that gap to address the outside of the cup and dish, meaning to polish the externals.

And the reason is because we care about what people think about us and we live in community.

And so if there's things within us, responses, behaviors, words, actions, where we're where um where they see it in us, that can be shameful.

And we're like, I definitely want to stop that.

And so oftentimes what we think we need to do, because real character of the heart takes a whole lot more time, is we try to expedite the process by simply cleaning up the outside.

But Jesus said that the battle is only one in the heart.

So what we're looking at in this series are the steps that the Bible tells us to take.

And that if we take them, that he will meet us on those steps, not just to change the outside of our life, but to change our heart.

And all of this is preceded by faith in Jesus Christ.

You need to understand, if you don't know Christ is your Savior, what I'm talking about here, it literally is impossible, okay?

And the reason is because once we put our faith in Jesus Christ, and in a moment, if you've never heard what Jesus has done for you and how deeply he loves you, you're gonna hear in just a few moments.

But once you put your faith in Jesus Christ, the Bible says that God's Spirit, the same Spirit who lived in him and who rose him from the dead, that much power, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within our own heart.

Meaning it's the Holy Spirit who has the power to enable us to change.

But many of us don't know how to walk with him, how to interact with him, how to draw on that power.

And so we looked at the very beginning.

How do we walk by the Spirit?

Well, the first step then is that we need the truth, is that we need to interject truth into our heart by reading the Bible.

And as we read the Bible, we read God's word.

And God's word is truth, and truth is critical to life and to growth.

And the reason is because truth establishes reality.

Interestingly, though, every one of us, when confronted with the truth, sometimes we don't believe that truth.

Sometimes we open the Bible and it's like, this is what the Bible says in our circumstance.

This happens to me frequently, and when I show this to people, and sometimes even in my own heart, I say, okay, this is your situation, this is what the Bible says.

And people say, Well, I don't want to do that.

I don't believe that's good for me.

I don't believe that's in my best interest.

I don't believe that's gonna work in my situation.

And so the second step is always to pray for belief.

We want to read the Bible and then we wanna pray, God, help me to believe this.

And one of the most important things that the Bible tells us we need to believe is what God says about us.

You see, there's lots of voices in the world that we hear telling us who we are.

And whichever voice we listen to, that voice gets to determine our identity.

And our identity is really important because identity determines behavior, it informs behavior, it spawns behavior, it shows us how to live in order to align with our identity.

And so what we looked at is the importance of believing what God says about us, to taking that on as our identity.

And then, because identity creates behavior, informs behavior, we looked last week at the importance of repenting of sin, meaning once you understand who you are in Christ, there's some behaviors that are out of step with that identity.

And so he says, you gotta put those things off.

What we want to look at today is turning to obedience, which is essentially what is the behavior that is in step with our new identity in Christ.

Well, the last few weeks we've been in the third chapter of this book, Colossians.

It was written by Paul, a man who had experienced life change.

And the church was very confused over how they could grow.

They had all kinds of neighbors with in their city, Greek and Jewish neighbors, who were saying other things.

There were other truths, other philosophies.

And the church was so confused they thought, you know, we really believe in Jesus, but we really want to grow.

So if we could simply combine the gospel of Jesus Christ with other life philosophies, maybe we would create this super soil that we could really accelerate our own growth.

And Paul writes them a letter, and this is the whole letter, essentially to say, you have Christ in you, the hope of glory.

You have enough power.

It is a super soil, and if you mix it with anything, it loses its power because it gets diluted.

And so in chapter three, he tells us how to go about living and growing within the soil, which is the gospel.

In the first four verses of chapter three, he says, Let me tell you who you are.

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, he says, you've been raised with Christ, you've died with Christ, your life is hidden with Christ, you're gonna appear with Christ when he appears.

This is your identity.

And then last week we looked at verses five through 11 where he says, now if that's true, then there's some things that go on in life.

There's some sin that's just totally out of step.

All sin is totally out of step with this identity in Christ.

And so verses five through 11 he says, This is what you need to put off.

Now we come to verse 12, and he says, Now, this is what you need to put on, and this is what he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, how do we grow?

In this text, I want to show you three things.

The first is that we grow as we remember and live out our new identity.

To remember it and then to live it out.

You see, it is very possible for all of us for there to be something absolutely true about us, and yet we live as though it were not.

Let me give you a few examples.

We're all created in the image of God.

Every human being is, and yet many human beings live like an animal.

Satisfying every impulse.

It is possible, not just possible, for those of us who are in Christ, we are forgiven of our sin, and yet many of us live condemned.

In Christ, we are loved and accepted, and many of us have this drive to find approval from man.

In Christ, we've been adopted into his big family, and yet many of us live in vulnerable isolation.

There is a difference between having an identity, remembering that identity, and living that identity out in daily life.

And so what he does here is before he tells us what to put on, he feels compelled to say, I just can't tell you what to put on unless I talk to you one more time about a few characteristics about who you are.

And so notice what he says in verse 12.

It's so fascinating to me.

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

This is amazing to me what he does.

If the words as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, were removed.

Not removed, don't remove them, okay?

It is God's word.

But if Paul never wrote that, none of us would say, why didn't he add this?

Because the sentence says, put on then.

He just has said, put off, and he gives a big long list.

And now he says, put on then, and the first thing we're supposed to put on is a compassionate heart.

So why did he interject this one more time?

And the reason is because he couldn't bring himself to tell us what to do until unless he could get back one more time to say, let me just reach into the pot of our identity in Christ, grab three things and shove them into this sentence.

In other words, the only people who can actually put on these things as powerfully as God intends us to, are people who believe and live out their identity, that they are a chosen person, a holy person, and a loved person.

So let's talk about each one of those.

First of all, chosen.

A doctrine that has literally confused and divided the church for 2,000 years, tragically.

One day we're gonna get to heaven, and I believe we're gonna find that man's responsibility and God's sovereignty were best friends.

We were just confused.

We are chosen though.

If you don't like that, you can take that up with the Lord because he said he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

That's an amazing truth.

Before the world was created, for those of us who were in Christ, God Almighty says, I chose you.

He doesn't say, He chose us in him before the foundation of the world so that you could divide up churches for two thousand years.

Now, why?

What's the connection between us?

He's not minimizing personal faith.

It is absolutely critical that we believe in Jesus Christ.

This is why every single time you ever have heard me preach, I have shared the gospel and pled with you, would you believe?

Believe.

Everywhere we go around the world, believe, believe, over and over, believe.

You have to believe.

He's not minimizing the importance of our belief in Jesus Christ, he is showing us what precedes it.

Think about it this way: when we come and we hear the gospel for the very first time, and we hear that Jesus went to a cross, he lived without sin, and then he went to a cross and he died for our sin, and he was buried and he rose again.

And the invitation is if you will admit that you are a sinner and if you will believe in Jesus Christ and confess him as the Lord, then you can enter into these doors, enter into a relationship with God.

And we look at these doors, and over the doors, as we are thinking about entering the doors, we find a verse over the door.

And you want to, in that verse, Romans chapter 10, verse 12, everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

Romans 10:12

And that is true.

Whosoever, everyone, the door is open.

I believe God has invited everybody.

And then you get in and you believe, and you're like, okay, I believe.

And you walk in in faith, you know you have a relationship with Christ, and suddenly you look back at the doors that you once entered, and there you find that a verse on the inside of the door has been changed over the door, and it's John chapter 15, where Jesus says, You did not choose me, I chose you.

John 15 · chapter mention

In other words, on the outside of the door, he says, Everybody whosoever, you get into the family of Christ, and he says, Don't think that this was about you.

That you would be so arrogant to think that all the heavy lifting was done by you.

And the reason is because people who recognize once they have come into faith that Jesus had something to do with that ahead of you, become humble enough to do what he tells us to do next, which is to put on compassion.

And so we are chosen.

You, if you're in Christ, you're chosen.

You're also, he says, holy.

Some of us are like, well, you should have seen what I did this weekend.

That doesn't seem so holy.

And I would probably agree with you.

Some of that stuff needs to be put off.

However, he's made us holy.

He says that he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless in his sight.

Well, again, when Jesus rose from the dead after dying for our sin, he gives us the invitation.

And when we believe, he forgives us of our sin and he gives us his perfect, moral, holy record as our own.

And therefore, in heaven, God looks down upon us and he says, And there's a holy one.

And there's a holy one.

And do you know why it's so important for you to believe if you're in Christ that you're holy?

It's because only people who believe that they are holy are motivated to put off everything that we looked at last week from verses 5 through 11, all the sin.

That's that's out of alignment with who I really am.

And then he says, We're loved.

We're loved.

And the challenge comes because we sin and we stumble.

And when we stumble, we think, does God still love me?

So where do we look for assurance?

Where do we look for assurance when we stumble and we wonder, does God still love me?

Well, some people look within, they're like, let me just look within me.

But don't look there, because there, all you're gonna find is all the reasons that it's amazing that God loves you.

You probably shouldn't look out.

You see, if I said, I just need somebody to assure me that I am loved, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let you know everything about me, and then you tell me that I'm loved, you might look back at me and say, Well, now that I know everything that I know, I'm just as surprised as you that God loves you.

So if you need assurance, you don't look within the mirror and you don't look to a friend.

Where do you look?

You look to the cross.

Romans 5, God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

You see him on the cross, and he says, I love you this much.

You're loved.

And the reason we need friends in our life is those friends, when they echo this is how much you're loved.

It's not because of your merits and morality, it's just look how much.

And those friends become really, really valuable friends.

But don't you see that our being chosen holy and loved isn't achieved by our merit or morality, it's received by mercy.

And do you know why that's so important?

Because you can't lose it.

If you gained it by your morality, your immorality would be an enormous problem forever.

But because of his mercy in your life, to say this is true of you, it cannot be lost.

So let me encourage us to establish rhythms to remember our new identity.

Establishing rhythms to remember is so important in the Bible.

Over and over, he says, please don't forget, please don't forget, please don't forget.

You see, the reason we need to establish rhythms to remember this is because the world speaks to us more frequently than we read the Bible.

I know some of you read the Bible every day, and yet, in the course of one day, you receive enough messages to outweigh, in terms of quantity of words, what you've read.

Some of us we don't read the Bible at all.

The only hope you have is to form an identity around your evaluation of the standard of the world.

So you have to remind yourself this is true of me.

Because the world is constantly speaking to us.

And the only way I know to do that is to establish a rhythm, a physical rhythm in my life to say, I need to think about this again today.

You remember when the people of Israel that they went through the Jordan, and God says, I'm gonna do a miracle, I'm gonna stop the water so you can cross and dry land, and as you do so, I want each of the tribes to pick one rock up and stack them up, make a monument of rocks, rocks to remember my faithfulness.

But friends, faithfulness of God is not the only thing we need to remember.

Our identity in Christ is something we need to remember as well.

And so study what the Bible says about you.

Write it down.

Read it once a week.

Put it on your bathroom mirror.

You have to remember your identity to live in it.

And that leads to the second thing, and that is that we grow as we put on the character of Christ.

You see, our identity then pushes towards behaviors.

Once you believe these things to be true, now all of a sudden it says, okay, well, if that's true, there you go.

Then put on, then put on certain things.

What does he say in verse 10?

We actually saw this last week.

He says, put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

You notice our creator is Jesus Christ.

And so the goal in life is not, this is so important you hear this.

Your goal in changing your life is not to be the best version of yourself.

It's to be like Christ.

You're not the goal.

Your best self is not the goal.

Being like Christ is the goal.

So what does a chosen holy and loved person then put on that's like Christ?

And that's verse 12 and 13.

He says, put on then.

And the first one he gets to is compassionate hearts.

A compassionate heart.

Compassion literally is the word tender mercy.

I realize many of you have heard me say that the word compassion comes from mercy in the gut.

This is a different Greek word.

Typically, we talk about Jesus' compassion.

And typically in the Gospels, the word in the Greek that's used is two words put together.

One of them is mercy, one of them is gut, meaning you look at human need and you feel something right here, and it moves your hands and feet.

This word is different.

This word compassion is not mercy in the gut, it's tender mercy.

When something is tender, even the slightest touch, you can tell.

What he's saying is this is this compassion is a mercy that feels the slightest touch of human misery, and it moves our hands and feet to go and help.

Once you have compassion at hearts, though, if it's not wedded with kindness, your compassion might get you there, but you won't do anything kind to them once you get there.

So he says, you also need to put on kindness.

Kindness is, once we get there, kindness does them good.

And it's interesting, Jesus, of course, was kind in everything.

I learned something this week in Matthew chapter 11, which I've never seen before.

Matthew 11 · chapter mention

It says in Matthew 11 from Jesus, Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I'll give you rest.

And then he says something really interesting.

He says, My yoke is easy.

And what I learned is that word easy is the same word that's used here and translated as kindness.

Meaning when we come to Christ with our self-sovereignty, and he says, You got to put that yoke off and put my lordship over your neck.

He goes, I want you to know that my lordship is kind.

It's easy, meaning it eases the pain of others.

Our heart, full of compassion towards people's need, moves us there.

Our kindness creates an ease within their life by helping them.

Then he says, put on humility.

Humility is not thinking low of ourself.

Humility is taking the low place and serving others at the point of their need.

Just like Jesus, Jesus never once said, Oh, I'm such an awful person.

And yet he says, I am humble in heart.

He knew who he was.

He was the Son of God.

He was confident in who he was.

And yet, in his confidence of who he was, he was able to take the low place and serve people in that place.

Interestingly, humility has lots of children.

And Paul writes two of those children down next.

The first is meekness.

He says we're supposed to put on meekness in our friendships and in our homes with one another, how we treat one another.

Meekness is a fascinating thing.

Meekness is humility in action, okay?

It's strength under control.

It's a dad who has absolute power wrestling with a two-year-old son and not pinning him to the ground.

He could, he has the power to do so, but it's strength under control.

Everyone who didn't understand the totality of what Jesus was doing on a cross could have looked up at him and the man in the center cross and thought, what a weak man.

And yet Jesus said, I have the power to rip the earth in two if I really wanted to.

I have the power to call down a single angel and remove all of you if I wanted to.

I have absolute unrivaled strength and authority, and yet I'm putting it under control in order to save you, to die for you.

Meekness.

And then patience.

If meekness is humility in action, patience is humility in reaction.

It means to have a slow fuse, to suffer long, to endure mistreatment, not once, but like Jesus many times.

And then he moves not to words, but two other phrases.

One of them, he says, then, is we want to put on bearing with one another.

Sometimes in the Bible, that's translated forbearance.

Forbearance is when we show restraint to people, this is interesting and maybe funny, who are strange, or at least we deem strange.

We forbear with them.

The next one is to forgive one another.

As Christ is forgiven, we are to forgive.

And so forbearance and forgiveness are really interesting things.

Forbearance is to someone who is strange or we deem strange.

Forgiveness is necessary when someone has sinned.

And it's very important not to get those confused.

We are not to forbear with someone who is sinning against us, and we're not to forgive someone who we deem simply to be strange.

And so many of us, of course, if you're in a friendship or a life group at all, there's always somebody in there, or in your family, there's always the weird uncle.

And if you don't have one, you may be the weird uncle.

And where everyone else is like, you know, there's this, he's sort of quirky, sort of our guy, and we all forbear with that person.

We don't have to forgive them.

They're not doing anything morally wrong, they're just a little different.

You get married, and suddenly you find that this person you love so much, they just do things a little different than you.

And you think, that's an interesting way to floss your teeth.

That's a really interesting place that you thought that's where the clothes should go.

It's different.

We're supposed to forbear with one another, which means show restraint.

But then when someone sins, we are to forgive.

Forgive means to send away.

What are we supposed to send away?

We're supposed to send away their offense and our wrath.

Forgiveness can be an incredibly difficult thing.

Sometimes it's maybe not, maybe if the offense wasn't so painful.

But this is very hard for those whose pain is so deep.

Forgiveness can be very hard for those who fear injustice will prevail if they release and give away the offense.

And it can be very hard for people who build an identity around being the victim of that mistreatment.

You see, some people when they get hurt and someone has genuinely sinned against them, they can build an identity of this is this is what's happened to me.

I am a victim.

Well, if you have an identity, there are behaviors that correspond to that identity, and so suddenly you feel justified to be suspicious, you feel justified to be bitter, you may feel justified to be cruel, you be justified to speak ill against them, but suddenly if you send away the offense, some people have a hard time forgiving because the only thing they have left is now an identity that's not built on anything because you've given it away.

And now all those behaviors are now no longer justified in your life.

The only way that we can learn, according to the Bible, to give away our wrath, to send it away when someone has sinned against us, is to learn how God's wrath was sent away that was directed towards us.

And that is, his wrath was absorbed by Jesus Christ on the cross when Jesus died for you and he died for me, and he said, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.

Forgiveness, to be sure, does not eliminate all social consequence of their behavior, nor does it immediately restore the friendship to its current level of trust.

But it does release us from bitterness and it prepares a road towards healing should there be repentance.

Interestingly, each of these things that he tells us to put on are not only characteristics found in Christ, but in 1 Corinthians 13 we learn that these are characteristics that all describe love.

And that's why Paul's exclamation point in verse 14 is above all these things, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

So if you're sitting here and you think, this week I have to remember this long list of things I'm supposed to put on, chill out, just put on love.

If you really understand what love is, you'll begin to put these other things on.

And so let's make it our aim to display the love of Christ.

And as you make it your aim to display the love of Christ, let me remind you that only those who are genuinely confident in who they are in Christ can love this freely.

One of my favorite stories, I don't know why it is, it's just so unique to me, is when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.

They gather for the meal, if you remember.

Someone had to wash the feet, there was no one there to do so, and so one of the disciples, or Jesus, had to do it in order for them to begin eating.

And for the disciples, that felt so threatening.

If I get up and wash everyone's feet, I'm going to acknowledge before all these people that I'm the least.

And none of them wanted to admit that they were the least.

Interestingly, the story, of course, you know, Jesus gets up and he's not the least, but he's the one who shows everybody love by washing their feet.

But it's interesting, John can't tell the story of what he does without telling us what Jesus knows.

It's fascinating to me.

Watch this.

When Jesus knew, he knew something, that his hour had come, he's gonna die, he loved them to the end.

He says, He knew it was time, so he was gonna love them.

Now notice what he does.

He says, Jesus, knowing, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God, then he rose from the supper.

Now think about this whole section could have been removed, and John simply said, and Jesus did an amazing thing.

He rose and he washed their feet.

But John wanted us to see what Jesus knew about himself as the motivation for what he did for these men.

Understanding who he was, he washed their feet.

Friends, if we know that we are chosen holy and loved, we can serve without fear of losing ourself.

And that leads us to the last thing, and that is we are to grow as we're guided by new motivations.

Just as our identity calls for new behaviors, it also generates new motivations that help us make our decisions.

And he gives three of them.

The first is the peace of Christ.

He says, Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.

The Spirit of God, who now lives in the hearts of each one of us who have put our faith in Christ.

He says that he convicts us of sin and righteousness and judgment, which means he creates guilt within us when he is grieved, and peace within us when he is pleased.

And Paul's simply saying, make decisions to protect that peace.

Now sometimes we think of peace and we think of it as serenity, but really peace within the Bible, the words of the Bible, it literally means to remain interwoven.

And the lack of peace is when we unwind.

What does that mean exactly?

Well, think about it this way: God made us to have a body.

And our body has lots of parts, it has bones, flesh, skin, organs, a body.

And so long as all the parts are woven together and working, there's peace in the body.

But even if one of those parts, our skin, our bone, organs, is out of sync with the rest, it frays.

And even though all the rest of the parts are still there and not hurting, there's no peace in the body.

God made our reason, our conscience, and our emotions to be interwoven psychologically.

But when our emotions want something that frays our conscience, pulls apart, and what happens?

It's a lack of peace.

Spiritually.

Spiritually, our hearts are woven to God.

In Isaiah chapter 26, it says, You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.

Isaiah 26 · chapter mention

I love this verse because perfect peace is literally, the words are shalom, shalom.

And anytime a word is doubled, it's like adding a, well, it's not just peace, peace, it's perfect peace.

What he's saying is that when sin frays our fellowship with God, either before we put our trust in Christ or even after we have put our faith in Christ, peace goes missing.

So this motivation is simply to be motivated to make decisions, to remain inside the double doors of God's peace.

The second motivation is the word of Christ.

He says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

You know, dwell is very different than to visit, isn't it?

When we have visitors over, we have guests over to the house.

We say, here it's in the South in particular, make yourself at home, but we don't mean it.

We don't mean it at all, because if they didn't brush their teeth before they came, we wouldn't be so happy if they went in and used our toothbrush to brush their teeth.

If they needed that, we wouldn't be so happy if they curled up inside our sheets on our bed.

What we mean when we say make yourself at home is be very comfortable within these boundaries.

Unless someone dwells in that house, but it happens to be your kid who curls up within your bed.

You don't think anything about it.

The difference between a visitor and someone who dwells in the house is accessibility.

The people who dwell there can go anywhere.

And what he says here is this make decisions to give the Word of God unlimited access, where he gets to speak into every room and every relationship and every responsibility of your life.

And this motivation is to govern not only our personal life, but even when we come together, because he says we're to do this, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thanksgiving in your hearts to God.

Meaning that when we gather, we want the word of God, whether it's spoken or sung, to literally pour it over our heads.

The third motivation is the glory of Christ.

He says in verse 17, Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.

We all know that a name can be disgraced.

For example, the name Judah, Hebrew name Judah, is the same word Judas in Greek.

And yet today there's a lot of families who say Judah would be a great name for our son, but not so many choose Judas.

Because one name is honored and one has been disgraced.

And we bear the name of Jesus.

And so in our decisions, he's saying honor Christ as a primary motivation.

Interestingly, each motivation is marked by gratitude.

Verses 15 through 17, he says that we're supposed to live under the rule of Christ and be thankful.

We're supposed to sing and speak the word of God with thankfulness in our hearts to God, and then we're supposed to be governed by a passion that He would be glorified, and we're supposed to do so giving thanks to God.

And so, as we close, let me just, one more application, let me encourage you to examine your motivations.

We all have one.

There's always something within us that pushes us to make the decisions that we make.

We should ask, what is your primary motivation?

You see, if it's not the peace of Christ and the word of Christ and the glory of Christ, then it's something else.

You say, Well, how would I know what that thing is?

Here's the question that I would ask you.

It's the question that I asked myself.

What if you lost it and couldn't gain it?

But you could gain everything else, would utterly wreck you.

What in your life, if you lost it or could not get it, would absolutely wreck you, even if you had everything else?

And whatever your answer is, is not only your motivation, it's also your functional identity.

For some of us, that might be pleasure or marriage, or family, or money.

But there's a verse in Romans that says, from him and through him and to him are all things, which means that Christ is the point of life because he's the origin of our life, the purpose of our life, and the destiny of our life.

And did you know there's nothing else that fits within that sentence?

You can't say all things are from marriage, through marriage, and to marriage.

If it was, marriage would be the point of life.

And so if your primary motivation for everything is to be married, that's gonna produce a lot of anxiety in your heart.

He doesn't say from pleasure, through pleasure to pleasure is all things.

Otherwise, pleasure would be the ultimate point of life, but it isn't either.

And through Christ and to Christ are all things.

If you've never put your faith in Christ, I urge you to do so now.

And if for whatever reason you don't believe that you're ready to do so, what I would encourage you to do is to take one of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, read it, and just be on lookout for Jesus.

What is he like?

What has he said?

What does he do?

And there you're gonna find somebody who loves you more than anyone else in the history of the world who gave his life so that you could be saved.

So I urge you to put your faith in Christ.

Let me pray.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the privilege that we've had to gather.

And we pray, Father, that as we sing another song about our love and affection for Jesus Christ, I pray that you would help us as people who have put our faith in Christ, who have taken up an identity around being someone who is loved and made holy and chosen.

That you would help us to sing as people who believe.

That we would sing with thankfulness in our hearts.

So help us we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.