Yes, yes. Well, again, I want to say a word of welcome to those of you who are guests with us, whether in person or online. We're so glad that you're here.
Last week, if you weren't here, whether you're a guest or just in and out of town, we launched our Vision 2027. What we said was we're hoping and praying that God would make us a force multiplier for kingdom good. We had this sort of infographic that we popped up as a way to describe what we're hoping and praying God might do.
We're praying for more baptisms, like we just celebrated just now. We're praying for a new facility for our Pittsburgh site, for Sider City to open doors. We're praying for double our small groups. We're asking God to give us wisdom to lay track for more opportunities for classes and workshops to grow in our faith. We're praying that God would make us a force multiplier for His good through Chatham Serves and partnering with nonprofits and all that kind of stuff.
If you weren't here or just are new, we've got more of those infographics on those sheets on the way out. Grab one of those, put it on your fridge, pray about it.
We also have our Vision Q&A down at Pittsburgh tonight, and then on Friday, we'll be here at North Chatham at seven o'clock. Down at Chatham Hills tonight at seven o'clock, here on Friday night, free dessert and a chance to sort of talk, ask questions, and give us feedback on the vision and how you would love to see things roll out over the next three years.
So listen, as we sort of look at this goal, this infographic, the thing that we're praying and hoping God might do, if these things actually happen, Lord willing, we'll become the kind of church that many of us have been praying we might become over the next three years. That we might be a spiritually disruptive force across Chatham County, that marriages might be healed, that bodies might be healed, that kids might know the love of Christ, like we just celebrated here a few minutes ago, that lives would be changed.
Listen, there are so many beautiful stories already here at Chatham Community Church, and we're just praying for more and more and more of God to do the thing He loves to do: writing redemption stories and renewal stories. The stories here in our midst, if we become this kind of community, it'll be the kind of church that is changing the world that God has given us to love and serve and impact as best we possibly can.
This is week one of the series called "Change Your World." We started the year in a series called "Change the Atmosphere." We talked about drawing on the spiritual power of God, and we talked a lot about prayer throughout the course of that series to draw on God's resources to change the atmosphere, the places where God has you or sends you.
So for this series, we're asking the question: Hey, we should keep praying for God to change the atmosphere and do these things, but here's the question we're answering throughout the course of this next series: What if you're the answer to those prayers? What if you're going to be the answer to the prayers that you're praying that God would change whatever spot, whatever place you're in? Because all of us are in places where brokenness, sin, or dysfunction is at work, right?
So listen, we want to continue to invite us to be praying about, "God, would you help my dysfunctional family or dysfunctional workplace?" Or, "Man, my school is a hothouse of gossip and criticism and just kind of venom," or "Maybe my neighborhood or my neighborhood listserv is a hot mess, and all this gross stuff is going on." We want to continue to pray bold prayers, and then we want to ask the question, "God, who do you want me to be to be an answer to those prayers? What kind of character, what kind of action, what kind of work do I need to be to partner with the Spirit to push back darkness, push back dysfunction, and be an instrument of change in the world, wherever God has you, wherever God sends you?"
We're going to use the framework for this whole series from this book called "Fruitfulness on the Front Lines." It's a great book. Take a look at it. The practices, we're going to mostly use his framework for how to be fruitful in the spaces wherever God has you or puts you, particularly wherever God kind of puts you in contact with people that don't know Him.
So today, we're talking about what it means for us to be men or women who show up, and by virtue of us showing up, we bring God's grace and God's love and God's truth, God's mercy, God's wisdom to those places.
The first place that we're going to touch on as we talk about becoming these kinds of people is character. Because character transformation is the place where God loves to start. I would prefer God start out there, amen? Fix those people. I got a long list of people God needs to fix and things He should do. And God says to you, "Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. I mean, I see those people. The Lord knows that stuff. But maybe, just maybe, the place where God wants to start is inside me."
So we're talking about character, okay? Let me give you kind of a definition, some ways we're going to think about character and talk about character just today. Character is mostly who you are and how you show up without thinking about it, right? How do you show up? Who are you when you show up? How do you show up without thinking about it, without having to work too hard? Who are you kind of intuitively, naturally, without working too hard? How do you kind of show up in those spaces?
Character is also the thing that dictates the decisions you're going to make at key moments and forks in the road. Yesterday, I was reading a book, and the author was talking about character. He said, "Character is what you would do if you knew you wouldn't get caught." What are you going to do? If you could lie, no one would ever know it. If you could steal the money, no one would ever know it. Have the affair, no one would ever know it. No consequences. What choice would you make?
Character is who you are intuitively, naturally, how you show up. And it's also what drives your decisions at key moral moments in your life where you have to make decisions. It's going to drive the bus on how you make those kinds of decisions.
So there's like what character is. Now, but character gets built over time, right? So we're talking about what character is, how it gets formed over time. Character is the result of two things, right? One is just your natural temperament plus whatever you've habituated: thoughts, words, actions. So character is your natural temperament plus thoughts, words, and actions.
Some of you by nature are just earnest. I've always wanted to do the right thing my whole life, right? Some of you just came out born hardwired to always want to do the right thing. Some of you came out born wanting to do the wrong thing. Lying comes very naturally to some of you. Deception comes very naturally to you. Not taking responsibility for your actions? No problem with that.
Right, but so here's the thing. There's your natural wiring, but then there's the habits, right? Thoughts, words, actions. So lying could come very naturally, very easily to you, but you can make decisions to not lie, to be a truth speaker over and over and over again. You decide, you fight for truth speaking. For years and decades, you become a truth speaker, even if lying comes very naturally to you, right?
So character is habituated. It becomes something, becomes who we are. It becomes shaped by who we are, kind of over the course of time, partly natural temperament, and partly kind of how you habituate. And there's the pieces all together again, right?
So here's the deal. And here's why this is so, so important. Character is so critical because character is the size of your bucket to pour God's goodness into the world. Character is the size of your bucket. And to be able to carry and bring God's goodness into the world. So character is the first place that Jesus goes to work to change us, in part, to change your world. Character is the first place that God wants to go to work.
I want Him to fix everyone out there. God says, "I want to start with you. I want to do the work in you, that you might be the kind of person who has a much larger bucket to bring my goodness, my grace, my power to bear into the places where God sends you, where God puts you, in order to change your world."
So character is one of the first places where God goes to work to change us. But here's the reality: change is hard, amen? Like any of you know that there's a thing in you that needs to be changed and you've tried forever, but it hasn't worked? Like every New Year's resolution, right? There are these things that like, "I want to change this or get better at this." And some of us have just struggled and beat our head against the wall over and over and over again to try to get to this place where we can actually be different.
So today in the Colossians 3 passage that Steffi just read for us, Paul is going to call Christ's followers to engage in a change process. And he's not going to just say, "Don't do this and do this." What he's going to do is he's going to start with, where does the power to change come from? And this is what is uniquely Christian about change efforts. He frames it in the power of what God has done for us in Jesus.
So let's read this first few verses again from Colossians 3, starting in verse one. He says this: "Since then you've been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things, for you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with Him in glory."
We were looking at this passage last week in my small group, and one person commented, as you read through the whole thing, you know, there's a long list of things that you've got to get rid of and things that he wants you to do. And we talked about how that can feel a little bit like soapbox-y; it can feel a little bit heavy-handed at times. Some of us have wrestled with that, and some of us have been in church environments where it just felt like it was just nothing but a long list of "do this and don't do that," and that was kind of the way you grew up. That was your understanding of Christianity, was just basically behavior modification and behavior management, and hey, here's some extra guilt just for the fun of it, just kind of piled on, right? That kind of can happen. Some of us have those experiences.
And we're saying that, like, this list of "put these things on and don't do these other things," it would actually feel that way. That would actually be what it would be, except for the fact of these first few verses.
We're going to talk about these commands that we get from Paul here in just a few minutes, but I want to start with something that's really important. It'll help you read the Bible much, much better. Here's the good news: there are almost no naked commands in the Bible. You'll remember that word because we don't say "naked" in church very often.
There's almost no naked commands in the Bible. Almost every command in the Bible has something before it or after it that frames it, that puts it in a larger context, a larger story. So there's almost no naked commands in the Bible. Almost all of them are beautifully dressed. And there are three ways that God dresses the commands so that they are framed in a larger story that's not just arbitrary and angry and just kind of God recreation saying, "Don't do this and do this." There's a larger story that always gets framed up.
And there are three primary ways that you see the Scripture frame the commands so that they're not just sort of raw power. There are three primary ways. The first one is this: they're beautifully dressed in past grace. Here's how good God's been to you. Here's why God can be trusted. Here's how faithful God has been. Here's how much love God has poured into your life. Past grace, therefore we live lives of worship. Therefore we live lives of trust. Therefore we can trust and believe and obey and walk with Him because God has been good to us in the past.
Past grace is one of the ways that God frames up the commands in the Scripture to do this or don't do that. Another one that is often used is something that is eternally true. God is love, eternally true. Therefore, go live a life of love. You are a child of God, therefore go live like a child of God, right? These eternally true things that frame the commands that we get in the Scripture.
A third way that God dresses up these commands in beautiful ways, not as a cover-up, but just to locate them in a larger story, in a larger frame, is future promises. At one point, Jesus gives His disciples a bunch of commands. At the end of it, He simply just says, "Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them." Blessing follows obedience. Blessing follows obedience. Like, there's a promise of these things in the future coming your way, but you've got to walk in obedience to receive the blessing, right?
So listen, almost no naked commands in the Bible. Almost all of them are sort of nested in this larger narrative of something that is God's past grace, celebrating God's past grace, something that's eternally true, or future promises. This is the power of Christianity. This is why it's so powerful. This is why it's not just about do's and don'ts. This is why it's not just about moralism. It's something much, much richer and much, much deeper, which is exactly what Paul sets up in his first few verses in Colossians 3.
Before he gets to the "don't do this and do this," he says these crazy, wonderful things. First, he says, "You've already been raised with Christ Jesus, already been resurrected in His power." Then he says, "You're also already dead." Good news and bad news, right? You're already dead.
Now listen, what's he talking about? What's he getting around? What did we just do a few minutes ago? We did a baptism. What did he do with baptism? You are buried with Christ. You're raised with Christ. You've died with Christ Jesus. You are raised to new life.
On eternity for those kids just baptized, it started about 20 minutes ago. The clock on eternity starts there at baptism. It starts there at the moment where you died with Christ and you're raised with Christ. My friends, hear the good news. This is the power that sets us free. If you're already dead, when is our time for midlife crisis? At what point is midlife when you're living for eternity?
If you're already dead, listen, and some of you are dealing with some really, really difficult, challenging issues, medical stuff hanging over you or someone you love. Listen, here's the good news and the bad news: you've already died. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. You've already been raised to eternal life. You are already living into eternity. Everything happening for the rest of your life is house money, once you've said yes to Jesus.
You've already died. Already been resurrected. This is the power. No guilt in life. No fear in death. This is the power of Christ at work in us because we've already died. We died with Christ. This is the power of Christ at work in us because we've already died. We died with Him. We've been raised with Him. We've been invited into resurrection power. We've been invited into resurrection abundance.
There's this beautiful, beautiful resurrection abundance of forgiveness and grace and mercy and beauty and truth and mess. There are heartaches and challenges, and there are things ahead that all of us have to face, right? It's not to cover over, ignore any of the complexities of life. And at the same time, the thing that's eternally true for all those who put our faith in Jesus is we're already dead, we're already resurrected, and eternity is yours. God's gonna give you everything. He can't wait to give you the abundant riches of His amazing grace.
This is the power of God at work in us. But wait, there's more. Paul says this: "Your life is now hidden with Christ in God." This is a complete geography change. Spiritual geography. Once you were outside the great state of North Carolina, now you're inside the great state of North Carolina. Once you were separated from God because of sin, but now because you are in Christ, you are in God.
You were once outside the house of God, outside the family of God; you have been planted. Outside to inside. A new spiritual geography change. He is the source of all life. And now you are in the house of the Lord, which is the house of life. The life-giving Spirit is yours.
So our lives are now rooted and anchored in the God who created life, invented life, invented joy, invented laughter, invented play, invented peace. And so we anchor our lives in the One who is our life. Next, when Christ, who is your life, appears, the resurrected and victorious Christ, He's already conquered sin and death and all the brokenness of the world. He is your life now and He is your life forever and ever.
And then finally, you will also appear with Him in glory. This promise that when Christ comes back, eternal glory, where all shall be well, is your future forever and ever and ever. Amen.
This is what frames up the commands that we're about to get. But look at this crazy list. Look at this crazy list of what God has done for you. How God is fighting for you. How God is working for you. How God is at work. When you are in Christ Jesus, there's all this grace, all this power, all this superabundance that He invites us into. He says, "I want you to sort of discover these things. Spend the rest of your life exploring these things to sort of dig into them deeply and become a man or woman whose life is shaped by and marked by this amazing story."
You know how great it is? There's not a thing on there that you can earn. The call to action, the call to obedience, the call to doing, that all comes after God has already done all the work. You don't earn amazing grace; you just surrender to it. Isn't that good news?
Listen, church, it's not about like a bunch of religious hoops to jump through so that God likes you. God already likes you. He's already done all this stuff for you. He's already for you. You don't have to earn God's favor. You don't have to make Him happy with you. He is standing by, ready to pour abundant grace. We just surrender to it, receive it, and then we'll see what happens. Walk in it.
And then, as C.S. Lewis writes famously, he's like, you know, if God's the source of life and sin cuts us off from the fountain of life, what else can we do but dry up, wither, and die? But he says, once you are planted back in the fountain of life, saturated with the God who is life, what else could you do but live forever? What else could you do but live forever?
And so the Scripture says, invites us into this larger reality. For those of us who have grown up in sort of religious contexts where it's all about the do's and the don'ts, that kind of thing, we're not going to do anything. I mean, that's just the secondary stuff. This is what makes Christianity awesome. Nothing else like it. Nothing else like it. Nothing else like it anywhere else in the world. That God would do this for us.
So here's what I want about you to do. I want to invite you to look at the kind of the gold lettering. And we're going to sort of say this together, but we're going to put the "I" in there, okay? Because I want us to rehearse and remember what's true about us. Because you've rehearsed and said out loud things that aren't true about you lots of times, right? Some of you said, "I'm so stupid," or "I'm so dumb," or "I've made so many mistakes over and over and over again."
You've habituated things about you that aren't eternally true. So what I want you to do is I want to invite you into this practice of saying out loud what is actually true so that you might actually begin to live out of the reality that God wants to invite you into.
So we're going to read the gold lines together. Ready to read together? Let's say it together.
I am already resurrected with Christ.
Next, I have already died with Christ.
Next, I am in Christ, rejoined with God, the source of life.
Next, resurrected Christ is my life now and forever.
Next, eternal glory where all shall be well is my future.
These are the promises of God. This is the beautiful thing, the larger truth, the larger reality that anchors our whole life.
Listen, my hope and your hope in this life into the next is that all these things are true. It doesn't matter kind of where you are. It doesn't matter what's going on. My life and your life is anchored in these things.
Listen, again, like I said earlier, some of you are really wrestling with medical issues hanging over you or someone you love. Here's the good news: Jesus is Lord. Your life is resurrected. He's got you. It might be challenging. It might be hard. But my friends, you can have peace in the midst of medical challenges and problems because your life is already in Christ and you've already died and already been raised to new life in Christ Jesus.
Teenagers, 20-somethings, your whole generation is drowning in anxiety. You're the most anxious generation in human history. Listen, us adults, we're worried about you because you're so worried. It's kind of a weird, dysfunctional thing, but that's how it is, right?
Say, "Hey, teenagers, listen, here's the good news. Here's the good news. You can either get hooked into the anxiety all around you, or you can either get hooked into the anxiety all around you, or you can either get hooked into the... or good news, you can die to all of it and have Christ be your life. He can free you. Jesus has the power to free you from the anxiety that's consuming your whole generation.
What if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if you gave your life to Christ and you went ahead and died and then you were raised again? And what if that set you free from looking around at everyone else, "Am I keeping up? Am I good enough? Am I smart enough?" Everyone else looks better, smarter, brighter, more beautiful on social media, all the things, right? All the ways.
Like, listen, what if you're free from FOMO because Jesus is Lord and you're going to live forever anyway? What if you're not going to miss out on anything? Because Christ is your life. Eternal glory is your future.
What if, what if, what if, what if you don't have to live as that NPC, non-player character, a background character? What if, what if, what if Jesus gave you agency? What if you are wired up to make a dent in the world?
Listen, David and Goliath, remember David and Goliath? David was probably a teenager when he took on Goliath. Teenagers now are like, there's so much anxiety, they won't even, like, you're afraid to drive a car. Anxiety has hijacked your whole generation.
Good news, you can die to anxiety. Jesus is Lord. Go take on Goliath. We need you to. Teenagers, 20-somethings, we need you to die to all that anxiety that's suffocating your whole generation, that you might be instruments to go change the world and tackle some Goliaths.
Everyone else in between, we got our own anxieties, we got our own problems, our own challenges. Christ has conquered all. You're already dead. The God of the universe has already resurrected you. Come and see, come and live.
Come and take off the old things and put on the new things, which is exactly what Paul is inviting us to do. He's saying, listen, because this is true, here's what I want you to do. He says, "I want you to set your heart on things above. I want you to set your mind on things above, because you already died. You're already dead. Not mostly dead, like all the way dead."
And there's a freedom that comes in that when you're not trying to hang on to old dead things. And the freedom that Paul's inviting us into is to not try to drag around a corpse of an old self, but to let it go, let it die, and to put on this new self.
And so Paul's going to list some particular things that have to die for us to habituate the eternal life that God has for us, right? Listen, there's eternal grace and love and truth and beauty and joy and wisdom and wonder waiting for all of us. There are things that all of us need to do. There are things that all of us need to do. There are things that all of us are carrying around in our character that aren't going to be brought into eternity, not welcome to eternity.
Like your pride, not welcome to eternity. Your gossip, not welcome into eternity. Your envy, your control freak issues, not welcome to eternity. All these things have to die in order for us to enter into the fullness of God's amazing grace.
So Paul lists some things that have to die if we want to live into eternity, if we want to habituate this eternal life that God has for us. And here's the things he says you got to get rid of. He says, "Put to death all these old things that are dead anyway. Get rid of them: your sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry."
Then he says, "Well, you used to walk in these ways in the life that you once lived, but now you must also rid yourselves of all things like these: anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language from your lips, and also don't lie to each other."
This past week, I came into a meeting with people that I love working with and really enjoy. But I came into the meeting a little bit anxious. And I was anxious because there were some things that I had not done that I felt like I dropped the ball on, that I felt like we needed to get a move on. Like we needed to deal with this. I should have dealt with this a couple weeks ago. I'm so sorry, but we've got to get going.
So when I came in anxious and charged and ready to go, and then I got a little bit of pushback that it wasn't that important, or maybe that things weren't quite as bad as I thought they were. And I was really, really frustrated that they were not sharing in my anxiety. That was their job. Please be as anxious as me, because I'm anxious about this thing.
And when they weren't as anxious as I was, I was so annoyed. And I maybe said some things I shouldn't have said, like some sharp things, some edgy things. Yeah, I brought my anxious spirit with me, and I changed the atmosphere, but not for the better. I brought my anxiety with me. Didn't bless anybody.
Probably never happened to you, but you can imagine it, right? I brought the worst person of me, this old dead thing, this anxious spirit, in with me. See, Paul says there's these dead things that aren't a part of you anymore that you've got to be deliberate about getting rid of. There's this old thing that you've got to deal with, and he has these couple of lists of things that you have to get rid of.
And these lists are not comprehensive. He doesn't list every possible thing that you've got to get rid of, but he's very specific about some things he doesn't want us to sort of scape by or ignore. So in that first list, he talks about a number of things, but he lands in greed, which is idolatry. Notice which one gets more ink. That's always helpful to pay attention to, right? He says greed is idolatry, right?
So greed is basically saying, "I need to have this earthly thing to feel good about me." I need to be greedy for money, greedy for applause, greedy for approval, greedy for cars, greedy for houses, greedy for performance or sort of advancement, career advancement. If you're greedy about something that's earthly, you're saying God's not enough; I gotta have this thing to be important to me, to feel important, to feel valuable, to feel like I'm significant or to be satisfied.
To be greedy for something earthly is to not have our hearts and minds set on heavenly things. You can't habituate greed because it's not coming with you into eternity; it's already dead, so leave it behind.
And then going back to the top of the list, Paul lists several things that all have sexual kind of connotations to them, right? Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires even have that same kind of connotation. Paul starts with this not because it's the most important, but because it's very prevalent in Colossae.
The Colossians, the people he's writing to, were all pagans. They're coming from pagan backgrounds, and in the pagan temples, there was a lot of like sort of temple prostitution that was a part of their worship, right? So sort of sexual kind of sin and sexual impurity was everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. So he says we got to deal with this head-on.
Now here's the deal: sexual sort of challenges, it's like sort of the things of Colossae were that way in the first century. Now all you do is click a button, right? Now all you have to do is go to a website. No one will ever know. Incognito mode, no one will ever find out. So easy for us to fall into sort of sexual impurity, immorality.
So easy to kind of deal with that. Paul says in three or four different ways, "This is not going with you into eternity; it has to die." So I'm going to just take a pass here on the biblical sexual ethic.
Now here's the crazy thing about the biblical sexual ethic: it's never been happy. No culture anywhere has ever thought, "Oh, this matches pitch was exactly how we thought." Never been intuitive. Every culture, every generation, every people hear the biblical sexual ethic and say, "Really? That's ridiculous. Really? Nobody does that. Who would do that? That's crazy."
Okay, so listen, here's the deal. If you're not a Christian, not a Jesus follower, if you don't believe God is good, if you don't believe Jesus is Lord, if you have no experience of the wisdom and power of God in your life now, or you were in a season of your life where you were ignoring God and not connected to God, I don't expect you to follow the biblical sexual ethic because it's weird. It absolutely is.
I don't expect you to live by this. Throughout history, people have picked and chose from the Bible which commands they're going to follow. No one's picked this one recreationally. No one said, "Hey, I'm going to ignore the rest about God's grace and love; I'm just going to pick the biblical sexual ethic."
That sounds good. The biblical sexual ethic is no sex outside of marriage because the boundaries around sexual ethics and sex are so important because this is so precious. It's such a great gift, and it's such a powerful appetite. And so God says, "I don't want this thing to destroy you. I don't want this thing to destroy culture. I want to put a boundary around this to make sure it doesn't overrun its banks."
So the biblical sexual ethic is sex only allowed inside marriage. Now again, for many of you, that's not your story. Not been your story. And again, if you weren't working, walking with Jesus, I don't expect it to be your story. I wouldn't expect you to follow this.
But here's what I want to say: as the world rolls its eyes at the biblical sexual ethic and says, "Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous, that's crazy," and yet they get angry and upset when there's sexual violence in our culture, wow, who could have seen that coming? You normalize sex without boundaries; sexual violence is going to happen. Just how it's going to be.
And listen, as Jesus followers, we grieve. Hey, listen, anyone that's experienced sexual violence, it is heartbreaking. No one, no one, no one should ever experience especially that kind of violence. And some of you, that's your story, and I hear the stories. It's so heartbreaking. We pray for healing and redemption.
But listen, like what happened? Like not your fault, but you know all that. And so as Christians, we grieve with those who've been wounded, particularly through sexual violence, and we cry out and plead with anyone in the world who will hear us: "Hey, there's wisdom to the biblical command. Hey, there's wisdom to the boundaries that Scripture says puts in place. There's wisdom to saying this is the way that God designed us."
And so we plead with the world to sort of hear the wisdom of the Scripture. And even though it is totally counterintuitive and even though it's totally what not everyone else is doing, we say, "Okay, Lord, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We trust you, and we'll follow you in this area."
The same thing is true for pornography, which is so consuming for some of us. It just eats up men especially, but women too, right? It could be so all-consuming. And so we flee these kinds of things. We push back against these things because this is old dead self. And if you don't, it could totally overrun you and the people that you love and people that God loves.
And so Paul says, "Hey, these things are really important. We have to deal with them." Obviously, he doesn't stop there. He continues on to that next list. He says, "Here's the other things you got to get rid of: this old self, anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language from your lips, and don't lie to each other."
Some of you see this list, and you're like, "Oh yeah, that's me. Like I have these issues. This is a problem I have. I deal with it." I'm angry, or I'm a person, and I know I kind of slander people or talk about people other than you. You don't see yourself on the list.
Again, these lists are suggestive. They're not comprehensive. They don't check every single possible box that we got to deal with. But Paul says, "These things got to die." And listen, like when I brought my anxious spirit into my meeting, that's the dead self me. I'm dragging this dead thing into my meeting, and it affected everybody with spiritual gangrene, spiritual corruption.
And that list is, you know, an anxious spirit isn't on there, but it's the thing that had to die. Why? Your gossip has to die. Your murmuring, your criticism has to die. Your control sort of tendencies have to die. They are not habituating eternity and eternal life in you and through you. They're not coming with you into eternity. They need to be checked right here, right now, so that you might be a man or woman of character, that your basket, that your bucket might be big enough for God's goodness and grace to be poured through you into the world.
And Paul puts it this way. He says, "Listen, you've already taken off the old self with its practices and have put on this new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator."
Listen, here's the deal, and some of you have been in these places. Like, when you're in darkness, it becomes a vicious cycle so easily, right? Some of you have been trapped in vicious cycles of addiction. It didn't start out as an addiction, but it became an addiction. Some of you have been trapped in a lie, and you had to lie to cover that lie, to cover that lie, to cover that lie, to cover that lie. It becomes this vicious cycle.
And so here's the promise of Scripture: You can be made new. Anyone need to be made new today? Anyone like that word new? Renew? How about new life? How about new hope? How about a new direction? How about a new start? How about new wisdom? How about new grace? How about new love? How about new experiences of forgiveness?
My friends, anyone need God's renewing grace in your life today? That's where the power comes from for transformation and change. He says, "Okay, these old things have to go." Then he picks up. He says, "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, here's what I need you to do."
Those things are true, right? Again, no naked commands of the Bible. You're God's chosen people. You're holy and dearly loved. So I want you to put on these things: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. And now, yeah, bear with each other. People are driving you crazy. Just bear with them. Forgive each other. If you have a grievance against someone else, forgive as what has God done for you?
What's God already done for you? The Lord forgave you. So you can't withhold forgiveness from somebody else if you're going to receive forgiveness from Jesus. Over all these things, over top of everything, put on love, which puts them all together in perfect unity.
So Paul says, "I want you to take off these old dead things. Stop dragging around this dead carcass of an old self and old practices. Those things are dead, and you dragging along death with you is not going to change the atmosphere for the better. I want you to drop these old things, to put off these old things, because you are holy and dearly loved, because you've already died. Your life is already hidden with Christ in God. There's resurrection power already at work in you.
I want you to put to death these old things, and then I want you to habituate, practice, and practice putting on the new things. I'm going to walk you through a practice here in just a minute with wildly important take-homes, but this week after my meeting where I came in anxious and that anxiety kind of spilled all over everybody, I had to do a couple things.
First thing I had to do was apologize to everybody in the meeting. Send one email to everybody. "Hey, sorry, brought anxiety to that meeting. Not helpful." Had follow-up conversations all week long with people. "Hey, sorry for what I did. Apologize. What can I do better? How can I grow?" So I had to do that work, right? Relational work.
And then I had to do something else. I had to do some spiritual work before the Lord, and that's going to be a wildly important take-home. I want to invite you into a practice that you could do this week to help you take on the new things that you've done.
I want to invite you into a practice that you could do this week to take off the old dead things and put on the new things. Here's a wildly important take-home. I want to invite you to announce, renounce, put on, align, repeat. Would you repeat that with me? Announce, renounce, put on, align, and repeat.
We're going to walk through an exercise that you can do to be on the papers on the way out to help you to take off the old dead things and put on the new things. So first off, you're going to announce. "I have died with Christ, and my blank died with Him, and my life is hidden with Christ in God," right? So this is what's true. We're announcing what's true. The good news is what's true.
I've already died with Christ. My anxiety, his spirit, is what I wrote in that blank this week, died with Him. My life is hidden with Christ in God. So we're starting by announcing what's already true. We're going to try to live into this, right? That's what we're trying to do, but we're starting with what's true.
So I want you to, I want, what I want you to do is I want you to read this out loud with me, and you can whisper if you want to, especially at the blank, if there's something that you need to get rid of, right? But if there's something in that blank you need to get rid of—your greed, your lust, your anger, your gossip—what's dead that you're carrying around that you're still practicing that Christ wants you to drop?
I want you to read this out loud with me. You can whisper it if you want to. I'm going to say my anxious spirit. You say whatever you need to here in this moment. You ready?
I have died with Christ, and my anxious spirit died with Him. My life is hidden with Christ in God.
All right, so we're announcing that's what's true, right? That's what Scripture says is true about us. That's what's true about you, all right?
Let me start. Next, we're going to renounce. "I renounce my dead blank," right? "I renounce my dead gossip. I renounce my dead manipulation. I renounce my dead lying. I renounce my dead anxious spirit." I'm going to renounce those things.
So we're going to sort of draw a line in the sand, right? Repentance is turning around. You turn, changing your mind. Say, "I'm going a different direction." So we're going to renounce this dead thing that we've been carrying around.
It's like a—remember that movie in the '90s, like "Weekend at Bernie's"? To carry around this dead body to kind of like, to kind of prop him up? I'm like, "I'm done propping up my Weekend at Bernie's situation. It's already dead."
So we're going to invite you to sort of renounce whatever you just said in that blank, right? So again, you can whisper this, but I'm going to say it out loud for me. I'm going to invite you to say this out loud too.
I renounce my dead anxious spirit.
We're going to announce. We're going to renounce. We're going to put on. This is what the Scripture invites us to do, right? "I put on the blank of Christ." I put on. I put on the peace of Christ. I put on the joy of Christ. I put on the truth speaking of Christ. I put on the wisdom of Christ. I put on the blank of Christ.
I had a woman in my small group this week. She was talking about this really difficult stretch, a couple months in her life. Very, very hard. Every morning she woke up and said, "I put on the patience of Christ today." Every morning for weeks and weeks and weeks. You know what happened after weeks and weeks and weeks? She was a more patient person. It bore good fruit in her life.
So we're going to put on the blank of Christ. Listen, all the superabundance of God is available to you in Jesus Christ. What? What of Jesus? What of Jesus' riches do you want? What could you use? Joy of Christ? Wisdom of Christ? The courage of Christ? The strength of Christ? Everything's available to you in Christ Jesus. What would you like?
I want to invite you to say this out loud with me.
I put on the peace of Christ, whatever it is for you.
Next, you've got to align. "I align myself." I make these decisions to align my life with Christ's resurrection life at work in me. I'm going to make these decisions because I'm not just going to say stuff and not do anything about it, right? I'm not just going to say stuff and not do anything differently.
Some of you, you need to make some decisions, get some accountability. Some of you need someone else to pray for you and over you because you've habituated this thing so much, right? Some of you need to get some software that blocks you from going to certain sites because you're stuck going to those sites over and over and over again.
Some of you need to come clean, confess. Some of you need to rearrange your past and your habits and your patterns. You need to put things in place to arrange your environment in deliberate ways that might help shape your character in positive ways, the ways you want to go.
So what do you need to do to align your life in accordance with resurrection power, resurrection life flowing through and in you? That's the work that we have to do that we might be children who actually reflect God's character and God's nature.
And then finally, repeat. Because character is part temperament and part what we habituate: thoughts, words, actions, right? So we just practice and practice over and over and over again.
I'm going to say, let's look at this one more time. Would you say it with me one more time?
Announce, renounce, put on, align, repeat.
My friends, I want to invite you to enter these spiritual practices. All the power, all the grace of God is available to you in Jesus. Resurrection life available to you in Christ Jesus. My prayer is that you and I would both align our lives to allow that flow of God's amazing grace, habituating that right here, right now, that you might be equipped and empowered to change your world.
Let's pray.
Well, Jesus, we come to you a little bit of a mess. We recognize that there are things in our lives and our hearts and our spirits that we've practiced that need to go, that need to be dealt with. We've offered some of those to you even now today.
My prayer for my friends is that we would be deliberate, passionate, rabid even, like just day in and day out. Lord, some of us have habituated bad stuff in our character for decades. It's going to take maybe a few more weeks, a few more months, a few more years of practicing the opposite that we might become children of the Most High God that might live as the people that you've created us to be.
So Lord Jesus, I pray that you would call to mind the stuff that you want us to leave behind. Amen. I pray that you might give us the courage and the strength and the perseverance to keep practicing and practicing and practicing to announce what's true, to renounce what's already dead, to put on the grace, the mercy, the beauty, the power, the wisdom, the truth, the peace, the joy of the Lord, and to align our lives, to be ruthless in aligning our lives in ways that set us up to receive amazing grace and then to repeat it over and over and over again that we might be people of character with large enough character buckets to carry more and more of your amazing grace to our coworkers, our family members, our friends, our neighbors, that your Spirit might flow in us and through us to the glory of God the Father.
We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen, amen, amen.
on Feb 16, 2025
