10-11-26 - Colossians1:1-8: The Gospel comes to us, bears fruit in us, and goes out from us - Kyle York

Amen.

I want to invite you to turn yourselves to Colossians 1, what Connor and Mia just read for us.

I want to say thank you also to Ty and Mallory and Maya for leading us in worship.

And I would like to, as you're turning to Colossians 1, I would like to echo what Heath said a moment ago about our night of worship tonight.

Harvest folks are really excited about this, about getting together for a worship service.

As one people in the Lord, our our worship leaders are going to participate.

Maya's done a great job of leading and preparing us for this evening.

It's going to be an awesome time at 6 o'clock.

So I hope that you'll be here with us tonight for worship.

As we look this morning at Colossians chapter 1, fall is my favorite season.

Colossians 1 · chapter mention

And by a pretty wide margin, can I get a show of hands?

Anybody else fall is your favorite season?

A lot of us.

It takes a sweet time getting here.

I realize that.

We're going to have 94 degrees this week, apparently.

But falls here.

The leaves are falling.

And leaves aren't the only things that fall in our massive oak tree in our backyard.

And if you were to go there right now, you'd find about 60,000 of these little guys.

I'm not sure if you can see from where I'm standing what I've got in my hands.

Kids, can you tell what this is?

No, you can't.

I can barely see it.

I'm getting older.

This is an acorn, all right?

I thought about bringing an acorn for every child as an illustration, but I thought better of it for our parents.

This is an acorn.

Now, kids, I want to ask you a question because what an acorn basically is, it's a seed.

If you were to take this little acorn and plant it into the ground and give it nice water and sunshine, over time something would grow.

What would grow?

An oak tree.

An oak tree, right?

Absolutely.

An oak tree would grow.

Now, kids, here's another question.

Um, if we planted this acorn in the ground, how many trees might come from this acorn right here?

Good answer.

One.

You plant this acorn in the ground and one tree will grow up, right?

But now really think about it with me.

If you plant this acorn and one oak tree grows up, will that oak tree also have acorns?

Thousands.

Thousands of acorns.

And those acorns will fall and perhaps get into the ground, and then more trees will come up.

I mean, if you really think about it, this one acorn has the potential for a world of oak trees.

Not just one, but thousands upon thousands, because if this one acorn gets into the ground, the potential never ends.

And y'all, there really is an amazing application here when we consider how God chooses to work in the world.

When we read the Bible, it's written almost on every page.

How does God operate in the world?

Well, let's take a few examples here.

These, I just wrote these down off the top of my head.

Back in Genesis chapter 12, God takes one man named Abraham, and he says, From you, from your seed, Abraham, I will make a great nation which will bless the whole world.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

And he did from one man.

Later on in Genesis, uh, one of our favorite stories, Jennifer and me, is the story of Joseph, how Joseph is sold into slavery by his hateful brothers and left for dead.

He ends up alone and forgotten in a dungeon prison.

And yet the Bible says God was with him, his favor was upon Joseph, and God eventually raises him up out of the dungeon to become head over Egypt, the greatest nation in the world.

When we think about Moses, Moses in the Exodus story, Moses was forgotten on the backside of the wilderness, spent 40 years tending sheep away from his nation and his kinsmen, until God one day speaks to Moses in the burning bush and says, I'm going to raise you up to be the deliverer over my people, Israel.

And he did.

David was the youngest and the smallest of all his brothers, and yet God said, David will be king of my people.

When God wanted to send a Savior into the world to rescue us from our sins and grant us eternal life, he sent Jesus into the world.

How?

Jesus was born in a what, kids?

Manger.

In a manger.

Good answer.

He was a little baby.

The Savior of the world came to us as a baby.

Jesus in his own ministry once remarked that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

The smallest of all the seeds.

And yet, when it's planted in the ground, it will grow up to something infinitely greater than that which you once held in your hands.

Y'all, there's an unmistakable pattern here.

We could go on and on, dozens more examples.

That the Lord does his great work so often, so often, in small places and in small and ordinary people.

And this is the lens through which I want us to read today's scripture.

Colossians chapter 1.

Colossians 1 · chapter mention

Paul is writing to a church in a little town called Colossae, of all the places that we read about in the New Testament, certainly of all the places that Paul wrote letters to, Colossae was the least significant place.

No major roads led there.

It was barely a blip on the map at that time.

And Colossae doesn't even exist anymore.

Some commentators have actually said that if not for Paul's letter to the Colossians, we'd never even know that town existed in the first place.

And I give that to us as background to say that God can take any small thing and make it significant.

Y'all, the letter to the Colossians is a masterpiece.

Because the Lord does not need us to be big and impressive in order for him to do his great work and accomplish his perfect will.

Not only was Colossae a small and forgotten town, but Paul actually writes this letter from a prison cell.

None of the circumstances around the writing of this letter were ideal.

There was no indication on the front end that there was anything special about this letter or the recipients of the letter, and yet what we hold is eternally significant.

This letter to the Colossians and the word of God that comes to us this morning.

God is not limited by circumstance or by size, by our human priorities and platforms or anything else.

God is not limited by you or by me.

He accomplishes his great work in places and in people that we would never guess.

So let's take a look this morning at how this works itself out in the case of this local church that Paul is writing to.

Colossians 1, verse 1.

Colossians 1:1

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you.

Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Let's stop there for a moment.

Paul actually makes reference right here to the big three.

We see it.

Faith, hope, and love are all three present here in what we just read.

If you're familiar with 1 Corinthians 13, the great love chapter in the Bible, these three remain faith, hope, and love, Paul says, but the greatest of these is love.

Well, they're right here.

And what we recognize throughout the New Testament is these are Christian qualities that are foundational here: faith, hope, and love.

And in the context of this opening of the letter, Paul is commending the Colossians for their faith, hope, and love.

He's proud of them.

He's encouraging them to keep going.

But he's also locating these things where they belong.

Faith, hope, and love, these are commendable attributes that he sees in the Colossians, but they didn't originate with them.

They don't originate with us.

If we have faith, hope, and love, they come, of course, from God.

God's the one getting the credit here.

And you see this in Paul's letters.

If you read the very first part of pretty much all of Paul's letters, you see Paul thanking God for the church.

He doesn't thank the church.

He doesn't say thank you.

He says, Thank God for you.

We give thanks to God for these things, your faith and your love, and he grounds their faith and love in their hope.

You see that?

I think it's in at the beginning of verse 5.

Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Who lays up our hope for us in heaven?

God.

I mean, y'all are on it this morning.

Who is that out there answering everything right?

Okay, wonderful, wonderful.

God, you don't make your own reservation.

I hope you know that.

1 Peter 1 says that there is a hope laid up for us in heaven, that it cannot be diminished or destroyed.

Reserved for us by God, and we are protected by God through faith.

It's faith that accesses that hope, but God is the one who reserves it and secures it for us.

God is the source of all these blessings.

That's Paul's point.

And y'all, this isn't just nice Christian language.

This is the real foundation of all that we are.

Everything that we are comes by the grace of Jesus.

And it's important, you know, we don't get this sense right off the bat in Colossians 1, but present in Colosse, and in every place where the gospel was being believed and rooted in the early days, there was a false teaching going around.

We see it maybe most especially in Galatians.

If you read Galatians, that's pretty much the purpose of the whole book, is to combat this false teaching.

And it was an interesting teaching that was floating around in the early church because it was not an outright denial of Jesus.

It wasn't saying, no, Jesus is not Savior.

You shouldn't believe in him.

It was more subtle than that.

A lot of the false teachers were saying, sure, Jesus is great.

It's good to have faith in Jesus.

Nothing wrong with that.

It's just not enough.

Faith in Jesus is good, but not sufficient.

You can't really be saved unless and until you perform certain religious rituals and achieve certain levels of spirituality or knowledge or obey certain rules of behavior.

Only then can you fully be accepted by God.

Jesus by himself is fine, but not sufficient, not enough.

You've got to fill in the gaps.

Jesus will complement your salvation, but only according to what you put into it, 50-50 perhaps, or even 90-10, whatever it is, but you've got to provide the rest.

Now, we might sit here and say, well, I'd never fall for that.

I know better than that.

But y'all, that false teaching plays on a very deep insecurity present in our human nature.

That all of us deep down believe that we've got to earn the good things that we get.

And we all know that we're not good enough and we ought to work harder to get those things.

So let me give you an example of this.

This has probably been maybe in the last 10 years or so.

Blog posts, podcasts, headlines, articles, you've seen these on the internet.

14 things all successful people do before eight in the morning.

Have you seen that article?

Click.

I don't do 14 things total before eight in the morning.

But I want to be successful.

I want to know what the secret is, and so I'm I'm prone to click into that.

I want to know what I'm missing.

Six ways you've been peeling bananas wrong your whole life.

Nine ways you've been washing dishes all wrong this whole time.

Twelve things you must stop eating today if you want to live to be a hundred.

Yeah, we live in a very strange world of self-improvement and self-optimization.

That apparently we're doing everything wrong, and thank goodness we've got the internet to tell us what we're missing, but there's always something that's missing in your life that you can hack your way into and find your way out of.

From the outside in, I can solve all the problems and become the perfect me.

Well, y'all, in a way, this is exactly what the false teachers were going around doing in the early church.

We can fall into this trap.

That as it stands, Jesus is great, but he's not good enough to make you acceptable to God.

You've got to fill in the gaps.

Here are the 37 things that all good Christians do before 8 in the morning.

Don't you want to be a good Christian?

Don't you want God to love and accept you?

Well, then you've got to fill in the blanks.

You've got to optimize your way to the Lord.

But y'all, that is not ever the emphasis of the Apostle Paul.

Certainly not in Colossians 1.

As if there were some way for God to accept us based on our own efforts, our own earning.

No, look at the emphasis here in what we've just read, in the first few verses.

We give thanks to God, Paul says in verse 3.

Of course we do.

Your faith is in Christ, verse 4.

The hope laid up for you in heaven is yours by virtue of Jesus, the one who goes to prepare the place for you.

Even when Paul says in verse 4, your love for all the saints.

Now that's something the Colossians are doing that is commendable.

But if you keep reading through this letter, you'll realize that the love they have for one another is rooted in the grace of Jesus.

He's the one producing it.

Even the good things that they're doing are ultimately finding their place in the grace of God and owing to his work in their lives.

And so, y'all, this, we just we come back to this as a first importance.

If you are a Christian, it is not owing to a lot of Jesus and a little bit of you, or 50-50, or any other formula that we might try to apply.

It is entirely the gracious work of God.

100% Jesus.

The only thing we provide to the equation is the sin that He died to forgive, and we receive from Him His mercy in full.

That's a work that we can add nothing to.

That's a salvation that we cannot improve upon.

In fact, when you try to improve upon what Jesus has done, you actually take away from it.

We sour it by adding something imperfect to the perfect work of Christ.

And so that's why we say if there's anything good in you, if there's any good spiritual fruit, if there's any love, as we see in the Colossians, our response should never be, look at us.

Our response should always be, just as Paul says, we thank God.

Any good thing, we thank God.

It's his work, it's his grace.

In Bible study earlier, uh Brad was talking about Acts 17.

In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul says, It is God who gives to all people life and breath and all things.

What room is there for our boasting, for our credit?

All things are from him.

Paul understood that, and of course he preaches it.

But Paul's gonna remind the Colossians now not just where you are today, not just what you have, which is commendable, but how did you get here?

And so we're gonna we're gonna take present moment, chapter one, and now we're gonna backtrack to some point in the past when Paul's gonna locate their present faith in the past sharing of the gospel.

Look at verse 5.

Now, right in the middle of verse 5, Paul says, Of this, of this hope, you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in all the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you or in you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Paul is saying, very simply, the gospel of Jesus, which is the word of truth, came to you.

It was not intuitive, it didn't happen somehow in an ethereal sense of, you know, we just we just kind of figured it out on our own.

No, it was brought to you once upon a time, just as it is even now, Paul says, going out into all the world, beginning in Jerusalem at the beginning of Acts, and then in Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth, through the Roman Empire.

The gospel is traveling and bearing its fruit.

Eventually, y'all, it made its way to central Mississippi of all places.

The gospel has come to us.

But he doesn't just talk about the gospel going outward.

You notice Paul also says it is bearing fruit among you or in you.

It goes inward.

The gospel has been doing this in you since the day you heard of it and believed in the grace of God.

You understood his grace in truth.

And so, y'all, we come back for just a moment to the idea of a seed.

The seed goes into the ground, it sprouts and it grows, and it bears from within itself, as it grows, it bears its own fruit, its own seed, which in turn goes out and does the same.

And so Paul's giving us both pictures here as the as two sides of the same coin.

The gospel of Jesus comes to us and grows within us and bears fruit from us, meaning it reproduces in all the world.

People spread the gospel, new people hear it and believe it, and then they in turn go out and do the same.

We get that picture, I think, a little more naturally, the picture of outward growth.

We'll come back to that in a minute.

But let me remind us of what Paul is saying when he talks about the gospel bearing fruit and increasing in you.

This is so precious to me.

Yo, I think a lot of us, if we're honest with ourselves, we approach our Christian life perhaps a lot like the blog posts and the podcast I mentioned a moment ago.

I know I'm a sinner, and I know that Jesus died for my sins, and I believe in him and I receive his forgiveness.

How wonderful.

But isn't it up to me now to figure out the rest?

I mean, Jesus did a great thing by getting me in the door.

He's forgiven my sins.

Now it's up to me to figure out where my behaviors are misaligned, and I've got to stop doing the bad stuff, and now I've got to start doing the good things.

That is this idea that, you know, I was I was running from a significant deficit of sin, but Jesus forgave me.

He brought me up to zero and gave me a do-over.

And now, if I'm especially sincere, I'll be good enough.

Jesus is giving me a second chance.

He got me in the door, and now it's up to me.

Now, as I'm saying that out loud, I hope you hear the false teaching that's present in that.

That's right, that's what the false teachers were preaching.

Jesus got you in the door, that's great, but what else?

What about you?

And y'all, the emphasis here is easy to miss because y'all, the gospel, when we talk about the grace of God, I think Dallas Willard used to say this.

The gospel is not opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning.

It's opposed to earning.

You can't earn anything from God.

Certainly, we come to God seeking Him, diligently obeying Him.

That's the Apostle Paul is all about it.

But that doesn't mean that somehow Jesus gets you in the door and leaves you to yourself now to figure the rest out on your own, to optimize your Christian life in hopes of maintaining the good thing that he started.

That's not what the Bible teaches us.

As if grace only gets you so far.

No, the grace of God is not just A, B, and C, it's A to Z.

It's the whole thing.

And so one of the things the Apostle Paul says in Philippians chapter 2, he says, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

That is, get to work in obedience and devotion.

Yes.

For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

It's both end.

There's effort involved in the Christian life.

There's diligence, there's obedience, of course there is.

God doesn't just zap us with a magic wand and make us holy.

But he is at work in us to produce the fruit in us.

That he delights in.

Our effort is a minor complement to the ultimate great work of God in your life to produce what pleases him.

And so if you view it as Jesus got me in the door and now it's up to me, you will always be gritting your teeth, trying to become something on your own that you never could in the first place.

Only grace can do it.

And this, see, this is what I think Paul means.

When he says, the gospel has been bearing fruit in you, in you, since the day you heard it and understood it.

Here's what I think this means.

Let's take up an example here from the text.

He talks about their love for one another, your love for all the saints.

Now, where did that come from?

Your love for all the saints.

It seems to me that the Colossae, that the church there, they loved each other, but they also loved all the churches, all the saints.

These are people they didn't know.

They're brothers and sisters in other cities.

You couldn't just hop on a train or a plane and go visit these other churches in places like Ephesus and Corinth.

No.

They probably would never even meet these brothers and sisters, and yet they have a rich and deep love for them because of the common faith they share in Christ.

Where did that come from?

Y'all, if you've ever tried to love somebody as an act of the will, you know how difficult, really impossible it is.

When our boys were younger, they would tussle their brothers.

They would tussle and kind of go after each other.

And as you know, as parent of the year, I would always step in and say, hey guys, love each other.

And you know what?

Their hearts would immediately transform.

And they would hug, and it was just it was a beautiful thing.

Forgive each other.

Come on.

See, we know it doesn't work that way.

The command is good and right.

We we should love each other, we should forgive each other, but that's not how it works.

You can't experience transformation of the heart from the outside in, from simply being told it doesn't work that way.

That's not how God changes our hearts.

How does a person who comes to Jesus become loving in a way that pleases God?

Well, Jesus actually gives us the inside track on this.

There's a very famous scripture, John 13, as Jesus prepares to go to the cross, he says to his disciples, John 13, 34, a new commandment I give to you that you love one another.

Now that was not a new commandment.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

That's old.

That's been around a long time.

What's new about this?

Well, Jesus isn't done.

A new commandment I give to you that you love one another, even as I have loved you, so also you ought to love one another.

By this all men will know that you are my disciples by the love you have for one another.

Even as I have loved you, represents a kind of love, a quality of love that's utterly unique.

Jesus is not telling us to drum up from within ourselves love the best we can figure, the best we can muster.

My love is fickle and ultimately self-centered and limited to the people that I like to love or feel like deserve it or whatever else.

It's human love.

It's flimsy at best.

But divine love, Jesus says, even as I have loved you, that's how you are to love one another.

The apostle John says, We love because he first loved us.

There's a prior love, a greater love, a transforming love that is now at work in the Colossians, that's producing the fruit that Paul is commending here.

What's he saying?

This is the gospel bearing fruit and increasing in you, which explains your love for all the saints.

And y'all, the Apostle Paul does this frequently.

When we read his letters, I call it a grace anchor, where Paul will give us a command, a command that we all agree with and we all know is right.

Forgive each other.

That's a good one.

Forgive each other.

We all know that's right, that we should.

But Paul always anchors that command in the grace of God.

He does it later on in Colossians.

He does it in Ephesians.

Forgive one another, Paul says.

Just as God in Christ also has forgiven you, a prior, greater, personal forgiveness, which now animates the forgiveness that we're able to offer to other people.

Forgive each other, period.

We all agree that that's right, but where does the power come from?

Where does the motivation come from?

It comes from the gospel, which is bearing fruit and increasing in us.

We can't become forgiving any other way.

Not from the outside in, not from gritting our teeth.

Y'all, there's a great moment in Galatians 2 when Paul, well, it wasn't great for Peter, but Paul says in Galatians 2 that in Antioch he defied Peter to his face.

Paul and Peter had a public coming to Jesus meeting.

And the reason for it, Paul explains, is that Peter was hanging out with all the Gentile Christians there in Antioch because Jew and Gentile were all one in Christ.

Peter understood that.

But then some important men, some Jewish Christians, showed up in Antioch, and their opinion meant an awful lot to Peter, and Peter was scared that they would have a poor opinion of him because he was hanging out with the wrong people.

And so Peter withdrew from the Gentile Christians for fear of the opinion of these Jews.

And Paul calls Peter out to his face.

He's living as a hypocrite.

Now here's what's interesting.

What Peter's doing is very racially charged.

The Jews and the Gentiles, there was racial, social, ethnic hatred present between those two groups, which is why the whole problem existed in the first place.

That even though we're all one church, we're still battling this racial divide, and Peter bows down to the man, the establishment here, and turns his back on his brothers in Christ.

But Paul doesn't say in Galatians too, you go back and read it.

He doesn't say, Peter, you're breaking the racism rule, don't you know?

No, Paul says of Peter's behavior, he was out of step with the gospel.

He was out of step with the gospel.

Peter was turning his back not on any rule, not on a law, but on grace.

Because the gospel of God's grace is what breaks down the walls of racism, not legislation.

The gospel of God's grace is what breaks down our internal hypocrisy that causes divisions among us.

It's God's grace that brings about a new kind of love that unites together rather than divides.

He says Peter was out of step with the gospel.

That was the problem.

And so Paul says to Peter at that place, I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

That's what the gospel produces.

Not just better obedience to rules, but a new heart which loves and obeys Christ.

Y'all, there's endless potential in a human being who has received the grace of Jesus because his grace becomes our transforming new identity.

This is what it means that the gospel bears fruit in us.

He doesn't just get us in the door and leave us to ourselves, he makes us like him.

He brings us into conformity with his own heart.

Jesus in John 15, Jesus says, Abide in me, and I will abide in you, and you will bear much fruit.

For apart from me you can do nothing.

Apart from Jesus, nothing.

In Christ, abiding in Christ, everything.

It's as simple as that.

That's his transforming power.

That's what it means that the gospel grows in us.

Now I mentioned this a minute ago.

Paul in this paragraph is working present to past, right?

Here's where you are, verses one through four.

Here's how you got there, verses five through six.

And now he goes even further back in verses seven and eight, the last part of our scripture today.

How did the gospel even get to them in the first place?

This is so interesting.

Verse 7, he says, just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

We don't know very much about Epaphras at all.

He shows up very little in the Bible.

Here's what the commentators think is probably true.

This is the best we've got.

That Epaphras was probably a local, a Colossian.

And that somehow or another he came up under the ministry of the Apostle Paul in a different city, maybe in Ephesus.

And he came to faith in hearing the gospel.

He received the truth.

And guess what he does?

He brings it back home with him.

He comes back from Ephesus, perhaps with a souvenir.

He's got the message of Jesus, the saving grace of God.

And he shares it with his family, with his neighbors, with his friends, and they receive that message and they become Christians because Epaphras was willing to share it.

And y'all, this is where, this is both sides of the same coin here.

Now, when we talk about the seed, the seed gets into the ground.

It bears the good fruit internally, but it doesn't stop there.

It produces seed in itself, and those seeds then fall to the ground.

That's what Epaphras is doing.

He didn't just experience God's grace for himself and receive internal transformation that terminated with him.

No, he went out and shared.

Y'all, part of the reason God saves us, a big part, is that he might get to somebody else through us.

We're meant to be a link in a chain.

None of us should be the end of the chain.

We ought to always be praying and looking for opportunity to share the hope of Christ, that as God's grace works in us, that it never terminates with me or you, but that it always reproduces.

Y'all think about Colossae once more here.

A town so small and insignificant.

No major roads led there.

Y'all, it's the kind of town that if you are watching the Weather Channel when we have a tornado warning, and you see those little towns, and you say, I never heard of that town.

Somewhere, you know, 30 miles, 30 miles away.

Never heard of it.

So small, it barely even registers.

That's colosse.

A town that no longer even exists.

And yet God achieved his great purpose there, nonetheless.

I wonder, show of hands once more, does anybody know somebody named Epaphras?

Do you have a personal relationship with an Epaphras?

Anybody by chance?

Nobody?

Oh man.

Me either.

But do you know an Epaphras?

I guarantee you do.

Whoever it was in your life that God gave you the grace to know, who loved you enough to share Jesus with you, that's your Epaphras.

Whether that was a grandmother or a parent or a Sunday school teacher or a friend or a pastor, a coach, whoever it was, who loved you enough to take the good work that God had planted in their heart in their life, and to share it with you that it might be planted in your heart the same.

What a blessing.

That God would grant us somebody who loved us enough to tell us about the Lord.

Now, none of us would think of ourselves in those same terms.

But isn't that the goal?

Isn't that God's good purpose?

That you would become that kind of person in somebody else's life.

That somebody else might one day look back and say, praise God for her, for him, who loved me enough to point me to Jesus.

You say, I'm too small, I don't know enough, I'm a nobody.

Good.

Perfect.

You're right where God needs you to be.

Isn't that the point here?

That God is in no way impressed with our greatness.

He doesn't need us to be anything special.

Think back to Abraham and Joseph and Moses and David and on down the list.

What was so special about them that God said, I've got to have him.

Look at all that potential.

No, he took him right where he was.

He takes us right where we are.

He's not impressed with our greatness, and he is in no way limited by our weakness or our smallness.

The power has always been in his grace.

His grace which comes to us that we might be saved.

His grace, which is at work in us, to bear fruit that pleases him.

And the same grace that now goes out from us.

Because the good fruit always bears its seed for the sake of multiplication.

Y'all, we're having a conversation right now, Redemption Church and Harvest Church, about what it might look like to join together as one congregation.

It's a big conversation, a big prayer.

But this is the vision, very simply.

For all the other things that it could mean pragmatically, this is the vision.

A greater measure of God's grace coming to us, growing in us, and going out from us.

If that's what God wants to do, then my heart is to be all in.

What a simple vision God has for the church.

That the grace comes to us, grows in us, and goes out from us.

And all of it, in all of it, we don't look in the mirror and boast in ourselves.

In all of it, we don't pat each other on the back.

Look at us.

We say what the Apostle Paul says as of first importance.

We give thanks to God.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, it's our heart, I pray this morning, to really look at the precious truth of your word.

And to see ourselves, I pray, just like Colossae.

Lord, 99.9% of the world right now has no idea who we are or what we're doing, and they probably don't care.

And yet, Lord, we are your special people.

That Lord, you incline your heart to your church.

You are present with us, and you we are so favored and loved and blessed right now because you know us and love us and delight in us.

If the whole world, Lord, is blind to this moment in this place in this church, Lord, you're not.

We have your full attention.

We give thanks to you, Lord, for all the good things that you're doing in our lives, in your church.

We are so richly blessed.

Lord, thank you that however the gospel came to us, that it came.

There might be somebody in this room right now that the gospel is coming to them in real time.

And you're helping them to understand from the heart that there's nothing they must earn or could earn, Lord, but that all is grace.

That Jesus saves us entirely of his own mercy and love and his work on the cross, and we receive this gift in full.

Jesus is producing good fruit that pleases him.

And I thank you, Lord, that the gospel goes out from us.

And Lord, I pray that you impress that upon us this morning.

All the good things you're doing right now in my heart, in our hearts, are not meant to terminate there, but to flourish and spill out so that other seeds might be planted in other hearts and that the gospel might go out increasingly into all the world, just as it has come here to Madison, Mississippi.

Lord, what a privilege it is.

Help us, I pray this morning to see Christ for all his worth.

There's nothing in my life worth holding on to, worth um uh turning inward and making it about me.

Everything I am, Lord, is by grace.

Everything I could become, everything we might be one day, Lord.

We look to Jesus and say, make me new, make me like you.

Not just a better version of me, not just an optimized version of me.

But a true Christian who bears good fruit for the kingdom of God.

Make me like a Paphras, Lord.

Thank you that we can ask for these things and we know it's your will.

We don't have to guess.

Would you produce it in our hearts, in our churches, this morning?

And when all the things belong to Jesus, we ask it in his name.

Amen.