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This is the First Mustang Pulpit Podcast, a podcast of the weekly preaching and teaching at First Mustang.! Thank you for joining us.!
Bad theology or false teaching, we're not talking minor skirmishes, they were denying the divinity of Christ. They were saying Jesus was simply one of the things that God had created in the beginning.
And it's because of these false teachers that this horrible theology was seeping in, and this church was in a fight for its life. This church was in a mess because of this bad thinking and needed help desperately.
And Paul would have wanted to visit this church in person. Paul would have wanted to come and visit them and deal with these false teachers face-to-face and correct these straying Christians with the truth.
But there's one small problem. He was in the slammer. He could not visit them face-to-face and deal with these problems. And so, we get the letter to the church in Colossae.
Perhaps the most Christ-exalting letter we have in the New Testament. If you look with me at chapter 1, verses 15 through 17, we get a small taste of what Paul's talking about in this letter.
Talking about Jesus. Thus, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, that is by Christ, all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things and in him all things hold together. And so, Paul was quite distinct from these false teachers and what he thought about Christ.
There was also another distinction between what Paul taught and what these false teachers taught. And it's in answering the question, how do we overcome sin? How do we get rid of sin in our lives?
And if you look at the end of chapter 2, the false teachers were promoting good works. They were promoting a works-based righteousness in order to get rid of sin.
And so, verse 21, these false teachers were saying, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, according to human precepts and teaching. They were bringing in legalism in order to overcome sin.
In verse 23, Paul says, these indeed have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
And so, the false teachers were saying that we have sin in our bodies. Our flesh is sinful. Therefore, the way we overcome sin is by denying our bodies, by punishing our bodies and limiting the enjoyments of life.
And Paul says, well, this has an appearance of wisdom. While this has an appearance of working, it has no power in getting rid of sin. It has no power in overcoming sin that dwells inside of us.
So, how then do we overcome our flesh? How then do we overcome sin? How do we fight against the sin that remains in our hearts?
And it's at this point that Paul picks up in our passage, Colossians 3, starting in verse 1. I'll read it in its totality. If then you've been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you. Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. And in these, you too once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with its practices, and have put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here, there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.
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.
Pray with me. Our Father, we thank you for the grace we have received in Christ as we have sung about this morning. I pray now that you would give me grace and give grace to those who hear as we open your word together.
I pray we would exalt Christ this morning, your Son, who is the word made flesh as we study your written word. So, Father, help us through the Holy Spirit to receive the teaching of Colossians 3.
And it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. Our title this morning is Christ, Our Life. Christ, Our Life. And we'll break this passage down into three points.
Number one is pursue the things above. Pursue the things above in verses one through four. And in these first four verses, Paul shifts the Colossians' perspective and our perspective to something, to someone who will work in overcoming sin.
He lifts our gaze off of ourselves and directs us towards the vision of the resurrected and exalted Christ. He says, if then you have been raised with Christ.
And the word if here is not conditional as if, you know, maybe this is the case, but it could be understood as since. Since you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above.
above. And Paul started in chapter two, verse 20, and saying, if with Christ you died, and now in chapter three, verse one, if with Christ you have been raised.
And so death in Christ frees us from the law's demands, but faith in Christ raises us to new life. And so through faith in Christ, we are united to him, and in being united to him, we have died with him and risen with him.
His death is our death. His resurrection is our resurrection through faith in him. And the false teachers found their identity in keeping rules, keeping their man-made religion, but Paul places the believer's identity in being connected to Christ by faith.
And he says, since this is true about you, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Paul shifts our perspectives up.
These false teachers were spreading things that were earthly, unspiritual, demonic, and Paul wants his, the believers of Christ in Colossae to be heavenly-minded, to be focused on the place where Christ is.
He wants them to reorient their lives toward a heavenly, Christ-centered perspective, perspective, and to meditate on things that belong to Christ where he is.
And we know that Christ is seated at the right hand of God because he has finished his priestly work. And he's remaining there until his enemies become his footstool.
As Psalm 110, verse 1 says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Christ is there next to the Father, seated because his priestly work is done.
It is finished and he will be seated there until he comes again in glory and crushes his enemies. And so we must meditate on these truths, meditate on his completed work on our behalf that gives us righteousness to stand before God.
But he is not doing nothing there. He is continually interceding for us. He is continually praying for us.
And he's helping us in our lives as we overcome sin. And so we as believers must meditate on these truths. We must seek these things.
We must be oriented around these things in every facet of our lives. In verse 2, he also says, set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
So what's the difference between seeking the things that are above and setting your minds on things that are above? Well, granted, there's a bunch of overlap here, but I think we can draw some distinctions.
Seeking the things that are above has to do with our heart's desire, our will to do the will of our Father in heaven. Matthew 6.33 says, seek first the kingdom of God.
We're making God and his work a priority in our lives. And setting our minds on things above has more to do with thinking and reasoning. In Romans 12.2, sense not being conformed to the pattern of this world, but being transformed by the renewal of our minds.
He says, set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. And based on what Paul says later in this passage, I think the things on earth here are sinful, fleshly things.
So Paul is not saying neglect your duties on earth. You don't have to think about anything going on on earth. Just think about heaven. Paul is saying, do not meditate on sinful realities.
Let your hearts and your minds be filled with heavenly things. Because Paul knows that what we set our minds on determines our direction in life.
We as believers must interpret the world around us based on the world above us. Having our minds dominated by heavenly truth is a necessary prerequisite for godly living.
And Paul supplies further motivation for why we should seek and set our minds on things that are above in verse 3, for or because you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Believer, you have died. and yet you continue to live through Christ. This is a beautiful description of what happens to us in salvation. We die to our old manner of life.
We die to our old self and are currently living through Christ. And notice he says our life is hidden with Christ in God.
Our lives are doubly secure with Christ in God. God. And I think of that beautiful passage in John 10, 27 through 30 where Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give them eternal life.
No one will snatch them out of my hand. Then he says, no one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one. It is there we get a picture of both Christ and the Father holding us secure together and here Paul has something similar in mind saying your life is hidden with Christ in God.
There's also a sense in which what we actually are is hidden from sight. Who we actually are as believers is yet to be fully revealed.
And in verse 4 Paul says, when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Our life, our glory is hidden with Christ in God until he returns.
What do people currently think of us as Christians? They think we are fools. The world around us thinks we are wasting our time in serving Christ.
The world around us would like to blame us as Christians for all of the problems we face as a country or in our world. People look at us and mock us because they think we're wasting our time.
But what will people say then? What will people say when Christ reveals his glory and we appear with him in glory? What will people say of us?
What will people think of us when we are shining like the stars in the glory of the Son of God? Then what we are will no longer be hidden. And he says that Christ is our life.
Christ does not just give us life, he is our life. And so this heavenward perspective should be the defining reality of our lives as we await Christ's return from heaven.
This should influence the use of our time and our money. This should impact how we endure trials. I read or heard a story this week of a young girl in a prestigious school, high school we would call it in Britain.
And at this particular school there were day students and there were full time students. So students who lived there and students who were just there for the day. And this particular girl was a day student.
And as you can imagine there was a culture among the students who were there full time that the day students didn't quite fit into. And so this teenage girl was bullied mercilessly.
Reflecting on it later, one of the students who bullied her said we considered her a non-entity. We considered her to non-exist essentially.
And she put up with this for some time and then one day she was found in the stairway just weeping, just crying her eyes out and her parents eventually pulled her from the school after just a year and placed her in another one.
And you can imagine her thoughts of how her life would go. What has her life come to? What does her future hold? And that teenage girl was Kate Middleton, who is now married to the Prince of Wales.
And you fast forward to her wedding, the glory of Buckingham Palace, throngs of people gathered there to catch a glimpse of her glory, to catch a glimpse of her beauty. If you take a snapshot of her wedding day and took it back in time to this teenage girl weeping in the stairwell, letting her know that this is her future, how would that have impacted the way she coped with those trials?
That vision of future glory would have helped her through her darkest moments. glory. And this is what Paul is intending to do with this future vision of glory.
We need to allow our identity in Christ and his future return to refocus and redefine our lives here and now on earth. Our union with Christ connects us to every part of Christ's work.
We have died with Christ, we've been buried with Christ, we've been raised with him and will appear with him in glory. glory. Our union with Christ totally defines us as believers.
So friends, do you think on these things? Do we seek these things? Do we set our minds on these things? If we want to overcome sin, we must make these thoughts a priority in our lives.
Together, as we love Christ, we should seek and set our minds on things that are above. Because it's through our union with Christ we are able to overcome sin.
And that's exactly now where Paul is taking us in verse five. Just as we have died with Christ and been raised with him, so we need to put off sin and put on righteousness. Sanctification, the growth in practical holiness, always requires to put off certain sins and put on righteousness.
And he challenges the Colossians and us to clothe themselves with a lifestyle that corresponds to their new redeemed nature. If you know me, you know one of my hobbies is to mow the yard.
I enjoy it. It does make me sweat quite a bit in the heat of summer. And so I also love to shower and get cleaned up afterwards.
clothes. And now, how unfitting would it be if after I mowed the yard and taken a shower, I put back on my dirty clothes?
I put back on the clothes that I just mowed the yard in. It would be unfitting to my clean nature now to put on my dirty clothes.
And yet, that's what we do when we walk in sin as believers. We are wearing clothing that does not fit our new redeemed nature in Christ. We've been cleansed of our sin and we must dress ourselves accordingly.
And so why should we put off sin or put to death sin and put on righteousness? Because there is no sin in heaven and that is our destiny.
We are heading to heaven and we must dress for the occasion. And so we've seen pursue the things above and now two points left under that. Secondly, put off in verses 5 through 11.
Put off. And while sin is no longer our master as it once was, it can still overpower us.
And so Paul gives very specific commands for putting sin to death. But the order in which these commands come is incredibly important. Paul is not saying put off sin and put on righteousness so that you can earn favor with God.
Paul is saying because Christ has redeemed you, this is how you must live. We are not earning favor with God. We are not earning forgiveness before God. We are trying to live in accordance with the nature that he has given us through the redemption of Christ.
Verse 5, he says, therefore put to death what is earthly in you. And again, we must believe rightly, we must believe the things of verses 1 through 4 if we have hope of putting sin to death in our lives.
He says, put to death what is earthly in you. And gives a list of sins. And so these things, these earthly things are contrary to the heavenly things that he calls us to set our minds on.
Paul tells us to put these sins to death, to deal severely with them, to execute them, to show no mercy, to not negotiate with our sinfulness. And it recalls the Lord's words when he says if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
We must deal quickly and severely with our sin. But notice what Paul says about these sins. Put to death what is earthly in you.
And as believers we must always remember that sin is not something out there. Sin is in our own hearts and we must deal with it personally.
We must get rid of it from our own lives. There can be no holiness, there can be no maturity where sin is left unchecked, where sin is not dealt with.
And in the very famous words of John Owen he said be killing sin or sin will be killing you. Be killing sin or sin will be killing you. And if you think he's being too severe I'll quote Paul Romans 8 13, if you live according to the flesh you will die.
But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. And in verses 5 through 11 Paul gives two separate lists of sin both containing five sins that need to be killed.
And this first list of five in verse five primarily deal with sexual sins. Sexual sins have always been the most dominating vices that not only destroy individuals but also bring down nations.
Sexual sin and temptation were dominant and prominent in Colossae just like they are in our country today. And so it's important we cannot view ourselves as victims of a unique time in history.
I think often people I counsel through sins of this nature can tend to have such a victim mentality of how hard and difficult it is today. You know, if we were just living back then it would have been much easier.
That's not the case. And yes, it's true, the Colossian Christians did not have to teach their young men and women how to walk wisely with a smartphone, but they did have to teach them how to stay away from the temptation of prostitutes who lined the streets of their cities.
So yes, we are living in different times but these sins have always been prominent and so Paul confronts them head on. But why does he start here? Why focus on sins of this nature?
Because I think they're uniquely enslaving when compared to other sins. And so Paul is essentially saying, if you can overcome and fight these sins, you can overcome other sin in your life as well.
If you learn how to wage war against these sins, you'll be able to conquer other sin in your life. And as he starts, he moves from actions backward into the motives.
And so he starts off with sexual immorality, which the word he uses is pornea, which you understand what word we get from that. Sexual immorality is a reference to the illicit sexual activity, the actual act committed, whether it's adultery or sex outside of marriage, before marriage, this is the actual physical act.
Impurity or uncleanness, this can refer to thoughts or to a manner of speaking or even a manner of living, living a flirtatious lifestyle. Passion, the feeling or rage going into an encounter, evil desire or literally lust.
All sin, especially sexual sin, begins in the mind. Evil thoughts produce sinful acts. He concludes with covetousness or we could think of greed.
greed. This is the insatiable desire to have more. This often characterizes addictive sins, especially sins of a sexual nature, and this is mentioned last because it is the root out of which these other sins grow.
It's the soil in which the other sins spring up. Covetousness is the opposite of contentment. And now Paul does something really interesting here.
He says that covetousness is idolatry. Covetousness is idolatry. And so what Paul is doing here is he's saying do not covet.
That last of the Ten Commandments is equated with the first two commandments. And so in the Ten Commandments we don't just get a list of unconnected sins. It's an integrated loop in which breaking any one of them is a reflection of what we think about God.
Coveting is lacking contentment with God. And so whatever it is you covet it is functionally your God. And as he started out this letter idolatry for us today is a failure to worship Jesus in his proper place.
Worshiping and loving something more than we love Christ. And something else that's fascinating is in the Old Testament two sins are constantly linked together.
Idolatry and sexual immorality. And Paul is saying the same is true today. If you are committing sexual immorality, if you struggle with this sin, you have a problem with God.
You have a problem with what you think and believe about God. So how do we overcome covetousness? with thankfulness, with contentment.
No one who is thankful, no one who is content commits sexual sins. And so are you content or are you desiring something more than God himself?
In verses six and seven, Paul gives two reasons for putting sin to death. He mentions God's wrath, verse six, on account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In verse seven, he references these things as according to our former manner of life.
So verse six, on account of these, the wrath of God is coming. God's wrath is his holiness in action against sin. And so we as believers should not participate in activities that caused our Savior to go to the cross.
Christ has paid for all of our sins in full. He has received God's wrath for all of our sins. And so should we then delight in the sins for which Christ died?
Should we then spend our time on things that Christ paid for? In verse seven, and these you too once walked when you were living in them.
This is our former manner of life. And this should make us gentle in evangelism. evangelism. We're talking to people who remind us of ourselves before Christ saved us.
This is our former manner of life. And Paul is saying, let us leave it in the past. Did any sin ever satisfy us? Then why would we return to it?
Verse eight, but now you must put them all away. You used to live in these things, but now you must kill them. And putting away, it's the idea of laying aside or getting rid of.
And many of you have had the unfortunate pain of being laid off from work. Told you you're not needed any longer. That's how Paul is saying we should deal with our sin.
Lay it aside, get rid of it. And he lists five more sins here. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.
Anger is kind of this deep smoldering hatred that lies beneath the surface. And we need to get rid of this because as James one says, the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
Wrath is kind of an outburst of anger. Malice is seeking the harm of others, wishing ill of others. And slander, the word that appears here is actually blasphemy.
And so when this word, when this sin is committed against God, we translate it blasphemy. When it's committed against others, it is slander, it's speaking poorly of them to ruin their character. And when we attack people who are made in God's image, we're attacking God himself.
In obscene talk, this is best understood as harsh, abusive language. It's not using your words to build up and encourage, but instead to tear down. Verse 9, do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with its practices.
lies characterize Satan, not God. Lies are fitting in the lips of false teachers, like these Colossians were dealing with, but not on the lips of Christ's saints.
He says, seeing that you have put off the old self, or the old man with its practices, and have put on the new self. This old man is who we used to be.
unsaved, lost in sin, totally depraved, and we have put on the new self. We are not who we used to be.
We are not what we one day will be, but praise God, we are not currently what we were. And this new self, Paul says in verse 10, is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
In salvation, we are being restored to what we were before the fall. The image of God is being restored to us through knowledge.
And so we must put off these sinful practices and put on the ones that accord with the new nature we have received. And we're being renewed in knowledge.
And again, we come back to this point. There is no growth in Christ apart from knowledge. How fast we grow depends on how much we learn. So if you are not learning, you are not growing.
This is the way we are renewed in Christ. We must fill our minds with godly, heavenly things. And now in verse 11, Paul describes the distinctions that are torn down by the gospel.
So if when someone gets saved, they're no longer the old man, but they are a new person, then what the church is really is a new humanity. It's a group of new people.
And that's exactly what we see described in verse 11. Here there's not Greek and Jew. And Jewish people refused to enter the house of a Gentile.
They would refuse to eat food cooked by a Gentile. They refused to associate in any meaningful way with Gentiles. And we can say Gentiles returned the favor in their own way.
But there was division fundamentally between Greeks and Jews. Circumcision and uncircumcision. This was more or less the same dividing lines. Circumcision was a sign of the old covenant and it made them distinct.
But in the new covenant, Paul is saying there is no room for distinctions. There is no room for old hostility along racial or cultural lines.
He says there's no barbarian. This is a kind of an uneducated person. It's actually an onomatopoetic word. They made fun of the way they talked because it sounded like they were just saying bar, bar, bar, bar.
And so they called them barbarians. He mentioned Scythians. This was a nomadic people that just made war raids on everyone. They were very, just very rude.
Josephus described Scythians as those who delight in murdering people and are little better than wild beasts. He mentioned slave and free.
Aristotle described slaves as living tools. And so trying to imagine in the ancient world, a gathering of Jews and Greeks, barbarians and Scythians, enslaved people and free people was almost impossible.
These people would have never associated with each other willingly. And yet in the gospel, these things are torn down. And a beautiful picture of that, particularly with enslavement and free, is two young ladies, Perpetua and Felicity, in 202 AD, lost their lives in the Colosseum in Carthage.
Perpetua was a young 22-year-old girl, newly married, nursing a child, was thrown in prison for her faith in Christ. She was the daughter of a nobleman.
She was well-educated. Her child was taken away from her so she could no longer nurse. And she would have been free if she had just renounced her faith in Christ, which she was unwilling to do.
Felicity was a slave girl. She was of no means. She was also early 20s. She was also locked up for her faith in Christ. And the two of them in Carthage, thrown into the Colosseum to the lions, could be seen embracing each other as they face to death.
A slave girl and a free noble woman united in Christ. These distinctions are torn down by the gospel and we enter into a new humanity in the church.
And it's here that Christ is all and in all. Because Jesus indwells believers, he breaks down these barriers that exist along racial and cultural lines and makes people into one new man.
Jesus takes diverse people and creates a new humanity in the church. And this is one of the beautiful things about the gospel. It's unity through diversity. The gospel breaks down these barriers.
It doesn't make us all uniform. It doesn't make us all the same. But it does get rid of barriers that previously existed between us. So we must put these things off.
Thirdly, verses 12 through 14, we must put on. Paul now tells us what must be put on. He says, put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved.
God's chosen ones. Election gives us a new identity. No one becomes a believer simply by their own choice.
But believers have been chosen previously by God. Chosen by God, holy and beloved. We are holy and beloved by Christ through the Father's choice.
And some view election as a doctrine that's cold and harsh and removed, but it's actually a result of God's immense love for his people. And we see that election is unto holiness and motivated by God's love for his people.
So we're described as chosen, holy and beloved. All used in the Old Testament to describe Israel, now applied to the church.
Can any religion lay claim to such beautiful titles? Can any other religion besides Christianity rightly claim to be chosen and holy and beloved?
Now Paul goes on to list five righteous things that must be put on. Compassionate hearts, this is heartfelt mercy, this gut level sympathy and love we should feel for each other.
Kindness. Kindness is thoughtfulness in action. It's being as concerned about someone else as you are for yourself. And then humility. Humility looks like thinking about others more than you think about yourself.
The humble person believes that he is always the worst sinner in the room. And so it deals gently with others. He mentions meekness and patience.
Meekness is gentle. Patience is having a long fuse. It's not being easily angered. Not even by your relatives during the holidays, hypothetically. And these virtues that Paul tells us to put on are all others centered.
Compare that to the list of sins that he gives, which are all revolving around the sinful self. And how are we to put these things on? Verse 13. Bearing with one another.
And if one has complaints against another, forgiving each other. Our church should be a forgiving place where God's love abounds to sinners.
And again, this is not in order to earn our own righteousness, but we have an example. We've previously been forgiven like this. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
We are not forgiving others so that we might earn forgiveness. We are forgiving others because we have been forgiven by Christ. And because of this, we have an obligation to forgive others in the same way.
And how is it that Jesus forgave? Sacrificially and completely. So this forgiveness will cost us something personally. This forgiveness will at times be painful, but we have been forgiven much by Christ, and we must forgive each other as well.
Verse 14. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And so love is like a belt that holds us together.
Love is like the duct tape of the church. It just fixes everything. We will never be able to fulfill all of these commands unless we love each other. And Paul does not say, you know, above all these things, put on a mask and just fake it.
Above all these, put on love. We must genuinely love each other. And as 1 Peter 4a says, love covers a multitude of sins.
If we as a church don't love and forgive each other, we will not survive. We are a group of sinners redeemed by Christ, but a group of sinners nonetheless.
We must forgive each other and love each other. You know, if your marriage, if there was no love and no forgiveness in your marriage, no one would survive that. If your marriage was constantly just tit for tat and keeping score of wrongs done and justice needing to be dealt out, the marriage would not survive.
And the same is true for our church. We must have love for each other, and love covers a multitude of sins. It doesn't mean we totally look past major sins, but it does mean we'd rather personally be wronged than cause division.
So where does this ability to clothe ourselves come from? God alone. Only Christ, who is our life, can help us overcome sin. Only God can save us and enable us to live for him.
Christ, who is our life, helps us to live for him. And if you think back with me to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve revolted and rebelled against their creator.
And in an attempt to cover their shame, they made clothing for themselves with leaves, but their clothing was inadequate to cover their shame. God gave them proper clothing to cover their shame.
And that clothing was the result of a blood sacrifice. And in Christ, now God has provided the ultimate clothing to cover our sin. And so we as believers now, having been redeemed by that act, must put off the clothing of our own sinful earthly works and put on the clothing of righteous deeds provided for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And one day, we will worship the Lamb as we are dressed in white, washed clean through the blood of the Lamb that we are worshiping.
One day, we will be utterly spotless. But until that day, until Christ, who is our life, appears, we must continually seek this faithful fashion. We must continue to put off sin and put on righteousness in accordance with God's word.
So let us look to Christ, who is our life, and who sustains us through the living of that new life. And let us love one another as we together strive to overcome our sin.
Let me pray for us. Our Father, we thank you for the grace and mercy you've shown us in Christ. And I pray we'd constantly meditate and dwell on the things that are above, remembering the mercy and steadfast love you have shown us through your Son, Jesus Christ.
Christ. And I pray that as we live out those new lives in the context of the church, I pray that we would bear with each other.
I pray we'd be willing to forgive others as you have forgiven us through Christ. And I pray that above all, we would love each other as we strive side by side for the work of the gospel. It's in Christ's name and for his glory we pray.
Amen. Thank you. You are dismissed. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Thank you.
Thank you.