Colossians 2:6-15

[0:00] Good morning. Those of you who have not met, my name is Dave, one of the pastors or elders here at Shoreline.

[0:15] ! One writer calls this Colossians' theme statement.

[0:36] With verse 6 comes the heart of the letter, says another. One commentator says, this short sentence introduces us to the whole concept of apostolic Christianity.

[0:50] See, up till now, in the book of Colossians, Paul has been telling us the best news in the world. In the first section, in chapter 1, verses 1 to 14, we see that we have a hope anchored in heaven that gives rise to an active love.

[1:12] A hope that in verses 15 to 23 of chapter 1, we saw that the one who is before all things, in whom all things hold together, and for whom all things were made, and to whom all things belong.

[1:26] He died for us so that we might not face just and righteous wrath for our hostility to God.

[1:36] And then last week, the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, he extended that grace into the whole world so that for all who call on him, verse 27 of chapter 1, he joins himself to them.

[1:56] And what's more, he makes his dwelling with them, lives his life alongside them. And Paul wants the church in Colossae to know, and all the saints to know, he's going to tell them at the end of the book to circulate this letter, so that all in Christ know that this good news is not just theoretical.

[2:19] Verse 6 is where it takes a turn and moves into the everyday. See, this God that gave himself for us, that he'd make his home in us, how that changes in real and tangible ways, that every step we take, every word we speak, every breath we breathe, and that is the rest of this book.

[2:48] Taking the message, this beautiful message, this Christ, dead and risen for us, in our hearts, changing everything about us.

[3:01] It's going to start today with our minds. It's going to be our religious practices next week. And it's going to go deep, deep dive into our hearts in chapter 3, into our families, and we'll walk by faith in chapter 4, outwardly, publicly.

[3:21] So verse 6 is the turning point. It is the theme. It gives legs to everything we have seen so far. This beautiful gospel taking root in our lives.

[3:32] Let's pray. Father in heaven, as we look to this passage, this most beautiful passage, will you root us in Christ?

[3:45] Will you build us up in Christ? Will you establish us in Christ, in your son who died for us, so that we have somewhere to stand, to stand and praise you, to stand and live for you, to take a stand for you?

[4:02] In this world, will you give us roots in him, so that our lives draw on the sustenance of the bread of life that you provide us in your grace?

[4:18] We pray that in Christ's name, and for his sake. Amen. For three weeks, as we've opened up the beginning two chapters of Colossians, we've been thinking very lofty thoughts alongside Paul.

[4:36] And any time that you're thinking lofty thoughts, there is the risk of getting your head stuck in the clouds. Your feet leave the ground. You don't remember why we're doing this anymore.

[4:47] It's a beautiful message, but does it have anything to do with today? See, this good news is not abstract. The announcement of the gospel, the glorying in it, is not the end.

[5:01] When Jesus said, I came that they may have life and have it abundantly, in John chapter 10, he didn't just mean some future day. He didn't just mean the great hereafter.

[5:13] He meant today. And tomorrow when you go to work, and the next day, and every day that we would live alongside him. And that's why he says, in verse 6, with all of this great gospel behind him, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

[5:42] See, he's not just concerned with announcing the message. He's concerned with changing lives. Really practically changing lives. He wants to know that our walk, our manner of life, changes, in the light of the glorious mystery, Christ in us.

[6:00] How? How does it happen? How does God change his people and their walk? Well, that's why verse 6 is, again, the center of the book.

[6:12] He's taking the glorious message. The Lord has chosen to give sinners, ruined by the fall, grace, and forgiveness, and his presence.

[6:24] And he's taking that message and says, in the same manner, walk in him. Well, how did we receive this grace? Did we earn it? Did we achieve it?

[6:37] No. It's by faith. It's by saying, I cannot achieve enough to get God's good graces. It's by faith. It's by saying, I cannot perform enough to please him.

[6:51] It's not by giving. We don't buy our way into heaven. It's by kneeling at the foot of the cross and crying, have mercy on me, a sinner. And so, we receive God's grace by repentant faith.

[7:03] And so, he's saying here, in exactly that same way, walk. What does it mean to walk by faith, though? Like, actually and practically, what does that mean?

[7:16] What does that look like? You know, I often hear, and I think I have in my own life, and I think you probably do too, that longing to see more of God's power at work in our lives.

[7:32] We don't see God's power at work in our lives by, next week we'll talk more about this, right? But, going and sitting on a mountaintop and having some zen moment.

[7:44] That's not how God works. God's power works in our lives. God's power works in our lives as we walk in righteousness alongside him. That's when he gets into our hearts and does things to us.

[8:00] That sanctification is where we see God actually at work, powerfully at work. If you want to see his power at work in your life, it comes by walking the walk of faith.

[8:14] We've already said the blueprint for this is every, the rest of the book of Colossians is an outline, first of our minds, then of our hearts, then of our practice in our families, and our public witness.

[8:30] These are the things of life, and every part of life is touched by this grace. And so Paul's first order of business today is our minds.

[8:42] It was C.S. Lewis who pointed out the importance of taking the wrong path. He said, we all want to progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-face and walking back to the right road.

[9:00] In that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. That's what repentance looks like. So the end of verse 6, Paul tells us to sow in the same way that we received by faith his grace.

[9:17] Sow, walk in him, in faith. Verse 7, he tells us two things. The walk is, one, rooted, and two, built up in him and established in the faith.

[9:30] Just as you were taught abounding in thanksgiving, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ.

[9:47] The application of today's text in our lives is right thinking about the world, about God, about ourselves.

[10:01] See, it matters a great deal what you think. If you think gravity doesn't exist, you will think not much about jumping off a building, right? If you think that God is a tyrant, you won't pray to him.

[10:19] Certainly not as a father. Father, at least. If you think your spouse is awesome, no one will have to cajole you into spending time with them.

[10:31] What we think has huge impacts about how we live our lives. What we think matters, and Paul knows this, and so he's jealous to keep us on the right path, seeing the world as it truly is.

[10:46] and he knows that philosophies and traditions that don't center on Christ, who is the sum and substance of the world, in him all things hold together, we saw two weeks ago.

[11:03] They don't focus on Christ. They're not according to Christ, verse 8. They will hold us captive like slaves. will be people walking through the world not believing in gravity.

[11:18] He wants us to find our roots, our foundation, our footing in our faith in Christ. But there are other philosophies and traditions, other worldviews that are rooted elsewhere, and if they take us captive, they will make a shipwreck of our faith.

[11:33] faith. Now we could count historically some of the things that were probably going on in Colossae at the time when Paul wrote this letter.

[11:46] That would be a very interesting thing for us to do, but I don't know that it would be super helpful for you and me today, because in North America in 2017, we were facing different things, but they are no less of a danger to our souls, simply because we are more modern.

[12:10] In fact, maybe they're a little bit more convincing these days, because we have research studies, we have things to back them up, but they are not according to Christ, as he says in verse 8, and they, if they become the way we live our lives, will wreck us.

[12:28] Let's start out kind of on the shallow end of the pool. We'll go progressively deeper and deeper. Paul says that we should be rooted and built up in Christ.

[12:40] I think the world has different ways for us to be rooted, different ways for us to be built up that are not according to Christ, and they are, as he says, empty. What does the world mean when they say go find your roots?

[12:56] Some. Probably, one of the first things we'll think of is searching out our genealogy, right? That's great. I mean, you know, it means we're interested in family. That's a good thing. It can be really satisfying to fill out the blanks on a family tree, right?

[13:10] It can lead us to family we never knew we had. But that can't be all there is to root us. Filling out a family tree is an exercise that you can't do if you came through a closed adaption.

[13:25] You just can't. Or if your parents came, or if your ancestors came to this country on a slave ship.

[13:37] Or if they crossed a border without papers. What then is there for you to do? And even if you can fill out your genealogy, your family tree, at the end of the day, how far can you go back?

[13:55] How far will you go back? Eventually, you run out of blanks on the tree and say, that's enough, and you're left with a filled out worksheet. And eventually, one day, someone will stop before they get to your name, and you will have fallen off the family tree.

[14:14] Or someone else. Not only does that mean that, you know, it's sort of just filling out a worksheet, maybe busy work almost, but sometimes there's great pain in it.

[14:28] Many family trees that someone has taken an axe to, right, with divorce, or abandonment, or schizo. Many family trees that are achingly empty.

[14:43] There are many family trees that are scorched with fire. are absolutely burned to the ground by lies, or slander, or abuse.

[14:57] It's not enough to be rooted there because it can't hold the weight. It can be positive, too, to find the roots of your family tree.

[15:08] But even if it is a beautiful family tree, what's next? There has to be something more than knowing people who are related to you. There has to be. That can't be it.

[15:20] What's next? Some people say, oh, go find your roots, visit your ancestral hometown, right? Now, if you can find that, again, if your grandparents came over without papers, if they came on a slave ship many years, you don't know where that is.

[15:36] You have no way of knowing. But even if you do, Aaron and I both have Italian roots, and next year is our tenth wedding anniversary, and we're thinking, you know, maybe in the next couple years, plan a trip to Italy.

[15:51] My great grandfather's hometown, I am a stranger there. I have no family left there, no connections left. I don't even speak the same language.

[16:04] Plus, I've actually visited it through the magic of Google Street View. it is magnificently boring. It is a one-stop flight town with a cafe and a soccer field.

[16:19] That's it. That's not me finding my roots. You can say, oh, you know, walk the same streets, great-grandfather doing it, but there's nothing for me there. Now, when we go to Italy, we'll probably drive through, but we won't stay there.

[16:34] There's nothing. My roots are not there. They can't be there. Or maybe worse, maybe worse than finding out that your hometown, your ancestral hometown is a disappointment, is finding out that you are a disappointment to your ancestral hometown.

[16:52] Maybe everyone there is a doctor or a lawyer or an Olympian, and you are profoundly disappointing to them. Right? It can be a beautiful thing to visit the old home, but it can't be how we get rooted.

[17:13] Right? Or maybe, go find your roots. Our culture means go backpacking across Europe for a year.

[17:24] Go travel. Figure yourself out. And that's good. It kind of gives us some power, right? You know, we're in control of that. We can take the good, leave the bad. So my roots are jazz, Chaucer, and laissez-faire economics.

[17:41] You get to pick whatever you want. But if it can change, it will. And if it can change, then that's not roots.

[17:55] That's a conveyor belt. And ask any engineer. There are plenty in this room. A shifting foundation is not success.

[18:08] It is a structural collapse waiting to happen. Those are some of the things that the world tells us to do when it says, go find your roots.

[18:20] None of them are satisfying. None of them are actual roots. Paul says, be rooted in Christ, the one who is before all things.

[18:31] The one to whom and for whom all things are. And then he says, be built up in him. What is the world like to build up?

[18:42] What are the empty human traditions that we are tempted today to walk in, to build ourselves up? the challenging thing is that they are all good things.

[18:58] Corrupted. They are all good things made to be ultimate things. They are all good gifts that God has given us. That we are never meant to bear the weight of our whole soul.

[19:14] But they are given to us as if they could by our culture. How about education? In North America, we like to use education to build up and fix the whole world.

[19:25] Right? We do. And there is a lot going for that. Right? Education improves earning potential and quality of life. It expands our horizons.

[19:37] It helps us make informed and good decisions. And isn't Paul even here educating us? That's what he's doing currently. About the gospel and its implications.

[19:50] The problem with education as the means of building people up, as the soul and the chief way of building people up, is that it can make us smarter, but it cannot make us better.

[20:06] For good or for ill, what do we nickname lawyers? who are some of the most educated people in our communities? Sharks. Education can make you smart, but it can't cure racism in your heart.

[20:27] I didn't mean to make that rhyme. I'm sorry. Have you ever dealt, and this is going into us here in this room, have you ever dealt with somebody who knows a lot about the Bible, but doesn't put it into practice?

[20:44] You can be educated about the Bible without having been affected by it. A mature Christian isn't someone who knows a lot of Bible verses. A mature Christian is someone whose heart has been changed by the Bible.

[21:00] Those are not the same thing. The world says build yourself up by education, or build up your career.

[21:18] I don't know if I could put it better than Rob put it today, right, earlier. I mean, if you are your career, and your success as a human being is your success in your career, and cadets, this is the gospel of the academy and the Coast Guard at large.

[21:34] college, if that's how your success is defined, who are you when you retire? At best, you are something, something, something emeritus, or you are commander, U.S.

[21:51] Coast Guard, retired, right? You're a footnote at that point. Are you as a human being, absolute, as a human being, when you're laid off?

[22:04] If your career is who you are, then yes, yes you are. Are you, in your core, inadequate when you're passed over for promotion? Are you of limited value when you hit a ceiling in your career?

[22:20] Now, make no mistake, work is a good gift of God. God. But if work is the center, the thing you must build, the foundation on which you stand, it will demand more and more of you.

[22:37] Until you're sucked dry, your family has nothing left of you, it will be a cruel God to you. Because even the most successful career ends. We value work.

[22:52] God values our work. In fact, the elders have been discussing a sermon series about vocation. God cares about the work we do, from mopping up to building skyscrapers and nuclear submarines, to stocking shelves, to doing surgery, to changing diapers.

[23:11] He cares about our work, the way we do it, the way we treat others as we do it, and the actual, the work itself. He cares about those things. The Bible's clear about it. But they are a subset of our lives.

[23:26] And so if we spend all our time building that, we have not built ourselves up in Christ. Well, whatever your job situation is, the world tells us.

[23:44] You know, you need to build yourself up in your self-esteem. Now, this actually makes a lot of sense, I think, to a lot of people, right?

[23:54] If we're confident, well, confidence breeds success. And resilience, things won't upset us as much if we're confident in who we are. The conventional thinking goes that if you have good self-esteem, you won't resort to risky behavior.

[24:11] You won't need to use others. And it's actually really great for the whole world, right? But self-esteem is not a cure-all.

[24:24] It does not fix the world. It doesn't fix you, even. A New York Times report cited a bunch of studies that psychologists actually did about self-esteem.

[24:36] They researched the self-esteem of people all across the board. Here's the report. Low self-esteem is to blame for a host of social ills, from poor academic performance and marital discord to violent crime and drug abuse, or so goes the gospel as written over the last several decades by social scientists.

[24:58] Here are some of the findings of these studies on self-esteem. D students, it turns out, think as highly of themselves as valedictorians.

[25:11] And serial rapists are no more likely to ooze with insecurities than doctors or bank managers.

[25:24] Friends, self-esteem will not cure you. It will not make you magically better. So if you spend your day building your self-esteem, you have placed your effort, you have placed your work, you have placed your hope in something that is empty, Paul says.

[25:50] Now, of course, you can have high self-esteem and not be a felon, right? But is that really being built up? Is that as good as it gets? What do you, I mean, at the end of the day, even if you have great self- esteem, what do you do with that?

[26:09] Even at its best, it doesn't get you very far. It's a far cry from esteeming Christ. If you esteem Christ, you can sing hymns like, I need no other argument.

[26:25] Not self-esteem. Not a prominent position. I need no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me.

[26:44] There's a rather new and popular way of building people up. It's taking the business world by storm. If you read, like, the Harvard Business Review, I think they did a whole article, whole magazine issue.

[27:00] Issue. There we go. On mindfulness a few months back. Mindfulness is big in self-help right now. Mindfulness is big in, you can walk through the bookstore.

[27:12] I saw a mindfulness magazine last week. There's a whole theory of counseling built on mindfulness called acceptance and commitment therapy. The chief mindsets, the chief tenets of mindfulness are three things.

[27:27] It's a secular version of Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism. Live in this moment. Recognize that you are not your feelings. You instead experience your feelings.

[27:39] So you can kind of stand back from your feelings, observe, oh, I'm experiencing grief, I'm experiencing anxiety, and sort of release them. And you do this third through the practice of meditation.

[27:52] And actually, it's really helpful advice. People are into it because it, like, works. You know, it could be said that even Jesus told us to live in the moment.

[28:03] Do not be anxious about tomorrow, he said on the Sermon on the Mount. For tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Scripture even speaks of meditation, right?

[28:16] Psalm 1. His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Psalm 77. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds.

[28:31] Mindfulness practices will, like, will, help you reduce negative emotions. They will not build you up. See, Buddhism and mindfulness practices is, and are, an empty philosophy.

[28:49] Literally, they are empty. By definition and design, the whole point is to empty your mind. To disassociate yourself from desire.

[29:04] Nirvana, the end point of meditation, the end point of Eastern meditation, the end point of Buddhism. The term literally means blown. Or, extinguished.

[29:20] In other words, there is no such thing as a Buddhist lament. There is no suffering Savior to take your sorrows to, to have a relationship with, and to be glorified in.

[29:34] There is only an empty, ambivalent ocean of nothing where you hope to extinguish your lives.

[29:46] That is the point of it. That is not building up. That is not giving life. Which kind of meditation would you rather have?

[29:59] Empty your mind and release your feelings, which is really a deadening, if you think of it. Or, I have a Savior who suffered like I do, who loves me and is for me.

[30:12] I am going to fill my mind with thoughts of him and prayers to him. Because that is what Christian meditation is. In the Psalms, those things we just read, his delight is in the Lord. On his law he meditates day and night.

[30:25] I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. Christian meditation is filling ourselves with wonderful thoughts of God. Not emptying ourselves of all things.

[30:38] It is the exact opposite. By definition, mindfulness is empty. It works in that you will have less of your sufferings.

[30:57] Because you're numbing yourself. And what is the cost? Yes, you'll suffer less. You'll also rejoice less. You won't have Christ in the midst of it because you're trying as hard as you can to forget everything.

[31:11] It's not being built up. It's being lobotomized. It's hollow. It's not life-giving. By design and definition, it's an empty philosophy.

[31:27] I spent a lot of time here in verse eight. But I think we need to. Man's wisdom does not give us deep roots. At its best, genealogy can give you some good connections.

[31:41] At its best, visiting the old world can give you some history and some context. Discovering yourself can give you some self-expression.

[31:51] But the shifting foundation of self-determination is a structural collapse waiting to happen. Man's wisdom doesn't build us up either.

[32:05] Education can make you smart, but it can't make you good. Your career can make you a success. But it can't be who you are.

[32:17] And it can be taken from you. High self-esteem is just as likely to be found in a C-suite at a Fortune 500 company as it is on cell block C.

[32:32] Mindfulness helps numb pain, but its end point, by definition, is nothing. So if you try, as Paul says in verse eight, to root yourself, to build yourself up, to establish yourself on these foundations, you're building a house on sinking sand.

[32:54] And that's why Paul says, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

[33:11] They don't give life. Now, I'm not saying throw them out, right? Like, careers are a good thing, good gifts of God. And that was the whole point, isn't it? These things, we take and separate them from Christ and make them ultimate things.

[33:27] You know what? If you know that Christ died for you, that does good things for your self-esteem. But if you just try to pile up your own self-esteem, first off, you can't pile it as high as that lofty thing, that beautiful message.

[33:43] And second, you have lost the most beautiful thing in the whole sentence, Christ himself. So how do we walk by faith in our minds?

[33:57] That's what the whole question is today. Don't go, verse 8, after the empty things. But walk in faith. How do we do that in our minds?

[34:09] What is the answer to philosophy and human tradition not according to Christ? Christ himself. In verse 9, he answers, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

[34:24] And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority. It's incredible what Paul does here. He says, don't be taken captive. Don't be kidnapped, hijacked, enslaved by false philosophies.

[34:41] For, or because, or since. Jesus is God. That's what he's saying here, right? It's really weird that the answer to philosophies that are empty is a person.

[34:57] That's exactly what he says here. Don't be taken captive by these things because Jesus is God. He answers falsehood not with an argument, but with a person.

[35:08] It's an echo. Verse 9 is an echo of chapter 1, verses 15 to 20, the beauty of which we sat in two weeks ago, didn't we? He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

[35:22] For by him 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.

[35:34] And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the answer to empty roots, to shifting foundations.

[35:48] And here in verse 10, he says, you have been filled in him. He's saying that you, who belong to Christ, Christ belongs to you.

[36:02] You don't need to build yourself up with, to build your life on gimmicks and triflings in this world. The one who breathed out the galaxies, makes his home in you.

[36:17] Take your stand on him. Build your life on him. Root yourself in him. And here's how that happened. Verse 11, in him you also were circumcised, with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith, in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.

[36:46] What Paul is doing here is showing us the two covenant signs, the old covenant sign of circumcision, the new covenant sign of baptism. They show that someone is with the Lord, but there is a danger here.

[37:04] Empty tradition can creep in here too. The union that counts, that makes this all a reality, isn't the ritual of the baptism, isn't the ritual in the old covenant, of the circumcision.

[37:22] No, Paul says, you were circumcised, with a circumcision made without hands. That's why in Romans 2, he said, no one is a Jew, who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the spirit.

[37:45] See, you can make the signs of being a Christian without having ever actually been joined to Christ, by repentance and faith.

[37:56] Right? Do you have a Jesus fish in your car? Yeah, that's great. You know, you're publicly proclaiming Christ. You're reminding yourself of Jesus every time you load up your car. Don't drive like a jerk though, right?

[38:09] But, the fish doesn't make you dwell in Christ. It can be a sign that you do, but it by itself cannot make you a Christian.

[38:24] You know, I can put a mustard label on the mayonnaise jar, but that doesn't make it mustard. You show up at church a lot, right? Christians do that, right?

[38:36] Good. That's obedience to God's word. You're putting yourself under the preaching of the word. You're ministered to by the sacraments. You encourage others, and are encouraged by Christian fellowship. But no matter how many sermons you hear, I can't reach into your heart and connect you to Christ.

[38:54] Only your faith and his grace can do that. So, showing up here can be, can be, empty if you are empty of Christ.

[39:07] Attendance doesn't guarantee a living connection with Christ. We can publicly associate with the church, with God's people, without ever having repented and believed.

[39:20] You know a lot of doctrine. We kind of mentioned that earlier, right? It's critical for growth and spiritual maturity in wisdom. It's critical for loving God because you can't love someone you don't know. But spiritual knowledge by itself isn't a guarantee of spiritual life.

[39:37] In fact, knowledge, apart from humility, the humility that comes from a fruit of the spirit, knowledge can puff up. It means it can make you prideful, and pride distances us from God.

[39:50] You can cite verse after verse from memory without ever having met the God who wrote them. Right? So these things we do externally, church attendance, religious participation, those are good things, but they can be a circumcision made only with hands if they don't point to a reality in our hearts.

[40:17] Verse 12 tells us that our baptism is meaningful so long as it points to that inner reality, that we have died to self in sin with Christ, been buried in his death and raised to new and everlasting life with him.

[40:34] That's what repentance and faith look like in the heart of the person who loves Jesus, who's seen that even though he was before all things and above all things, and all things are for him and to him, he humbled himself and died a criminal's death on behalf of criminals like you and me.

[40:57] If our eyes are open to that, not just the fact of it, but the truth of it and the beauty of it, then his death becomes your death, and his life gives life to our souls.

[41:12] And that's why in verses 13 and 14, he shows us, you who were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

[41:34] This life isn't empty because his tomb is empty.

[41:47] This life isn't built on this seed, it's drawn from the deep well of truth. God physically entered history and gave roots to life that are inexhaustible, never changing, and therefore we die to self and to sin every day, and we live to Christ in every moment.

[42:13] That's what Paul means when he tells us to walk in the same way that we received him, by faith. So in closing, what does it look like to walk by that faith?

[42:30] To walk in the same faith, the same way that we received his grace? This has been all about our minds and how we think.

[42:41] Next week will be about our religious practice. This week is all about how we look at the world and how we assess what is being said to us.

[42:53] So when you look, when you're watching TV, that advertisement you see, what are they selling you? Not just the product, but the thing, like this is the good life that this product gives you.

[43:08] Is that according to Christ? Ask yourself that question. Right? You know, you see an ad in GQ, you know, it says, you know, buy our product and you will lose half your clothes for some reason.

[43:21] Right? You're like, what do we get when we get this thing you're selling? Or what lifestyle in that show that you're watching? What is being held up and said, pursue this?

[43:34] Is that according to Christ? That advertisement, that politician, that career counselor, what are they saying? Is it according to Christ?

[43:45] Is the bedrock, the thing they're after, according to Christ? If not, I'm not saying abandon it entirely, like you need to go buy, you know, Washington church and, you know, so you have clean clothes.

[43:58] But, if you're after that thing as the chief end, that thing that is, should be subservient to Christ. And if that is your chief focus, even good things, like careers and relationships, if those are the chief and not subservient to Christ, then you are headed down the wrong path.

[44:26] And C.S. Lewis would say, the most progressive person, the person who will progress the most, is the person who turns around and heads back to the right road first. verse 15, he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.

[44:49] those empty philosophies and spiritualities that are not according to Christ and the devil whose tools they are, they are exposed in the gospel of Jesus Christ as imposters in charlatans by his true and brilliant victory over death.

[45:18] Let's pray. Let's pray.