Good morning again.
Oh, it's even getting better.
This is good.
Okay.
So, we're looking in this series about identity.
And, you know, I've just really been praying for us as a church.
I've been praying for myself and just very convicted, even preparing this.
But just praying for us as a church because I believe that actually God wants to change our hearts.
And the way that he changes our hearts is both through his word, but it's also as we pray.
And I'm praying and begging that God would change us as his people.
I'm praying that we would not be the same as we were yesterday.
I'm praying that we would be people who begin to get a glimpse of what it means to be captured by Jesus.
So that that begins to change the way we live.
That's the kind of church we want to be.
And, you know, as we're talking about identity, I was, when I was in the UK, I taught a whole lot of international students.
And one day I invited a whole lot of these students from a particular country to go out hiking.
And I love hiking.
I'm a hiker.
I'll take any opportunity to go out hiking.
I can.
And so I'd arranged to meet these people and just out in the countryside in the UK, beautiful hills, beautiful mountains, just fabulous.
And I arranged to meet them at the bottom and they turn up.
And all the ladies were wearing high-heeled shoes.
They had their Gucci handbags and their LV clutches with them.
And I was like, goodness me, are we going to the Oscars?
Because they had no concept of what it was to go hiking.
And we started walking up the hill and we got about 200 meters, 300 meters.
And then they said, and they turned around to me and they said, okay, that's enough.
I think we've had a little hike now.
That was great.
Thank you.
And I looked at them and I said, but don't you realize, like, the view from the top is incredible.
Like, you've just got to get there.
Don't you realize the joy and the satisfaction as you climb up and you get there and the vistas, the views become greater and greater and more beautiful.
And they just said, no, it's fine.
We're happy here.
And so then they, we had to turn back.
And that was our hike.
And my hope for us as a church is that we're not like those students.
Because they didn't see themselves as hikers.
They didn't even know what hiking was.
And so they didn't see the glory of where they were going.
And they were only content with a kind of comfortable mediocrity when there was so much more that they could have.
And what we're talking about today is we're talking about Christ has given each one of us as Christians a new identity.
And we're not defined by what we do, but by who we are in him.
But if you don't get that, if you don't get who God has made you to be and what he's called us to be, then what's going to happen is we're just going to live with kind of like a vague stroll in our spiritual life.
When God says, I want you to pursue me.
I want you to find joy and satisfaction in me.
And the closer you get to me, the more you'll begin to see more and more of my beauty and my glory.
And so I want us to have as a church a kind of holy discontent.
I want us to be dissatisfied with where we are in our spiritual lives.
Because he wants to push us on to know more of him.
So that's why we're doing this series.
And even as we're looking to think how we can plant out a second service and gather a team of people to be involved in that.
And just to be able to see ourselves as gospel ministers, as people who make disciples.
All of that is meaningless unless we are pursuing the goal of knowing Christ better in our lives.
Not staying at the bottom of the mountain.
So, we talked about being a disciple last week.
And we said a disciple is someone who is growing in trusting Jesus as their savior.
And growing in lovingly obeying him as their Lord in every area of their life.
We said there's a cost.
But we also said we're called to be on his mission.
And this journey that we're on of making disciples, that's what we're about.
But now we're going to look at another title that the Bible gives us.
In fact, the title disciple only occurs in the New Testament in the Gospels and Acts.
Outside of that, Paul and other writers use a whole load of different terms to really flesh out what it means to be a disciple of Christ.
And the one we're going to look at is the title of saints.
So how many saints do we have here this morning?
We've got three.
Okay.
Well, we have St. Simon.
Okay.
St. Sherman.
St. Echo.
St. Veronica.
In fact, if you want to say some of us struggle with the idea of thinking about a saint.
Because this is what we think a saint is.
Okay.
I think they always have this kind of holy glaze.
They're always kind of looking up somewhere like that.
And there's this kind of thing over their head.
I never know quite what it is.
And because we think that a saint is somebody who's kind of associated with some kind of super standard of godliness, super Christian, which we could never reach.
And so the Catholic Church canonizes saints.
And we would never dream of being one of those.
We're just ordinary Christians.
But if you look at the beginning of this passage, and if you have the passage open in front of you, Paul starts off talking to a group of Christians, ordinary Christians.
And he says, to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.
And you realize, actually, saints is Paul's most, his favorite title for Christians.
Did you know that?
And so actually, this was our CG together on Friday.
Heal the saints meeting on Friday together.
This morning, if you're a believer, you're a saint.
It's everyone who has been, who's come to know Christ.
We're all saints.
And the word saint literally means a holy one.
A holy one.
One who's been sanctified, set apart for God.
But one of the things that we, there's lots of myths about this.
And one of the things that we think that the word holy means, we think it means moral.
Or just kind of morality.
Things you should and shouldn't do.
Okay?
And it does include that, but it's far more.
You know, it's interesting.
In traditional churches, they love morality.
You know, you shouldn't do this.
You should do this.
And you have all the lists of the movies you shouldn't watch.
The music you shouldn't listen to.
No tattoos.
No drinking.
All the things.
And that's what it means to be holy.
And if I talk to my non-Christian friends, most of them think that religion is about being moral.
It's about saying no to anything fun.
And actually, they like things that are fun.
So then they don't want to become Christians.
But then, what I notice is also in more kind of modern generation churches, what we do is, we don't want to be moral for Jesus.
We want to be cool and relevant for Jesus.
And so, we watch anything.
We get tattoos everywhere.
We drink like a fish.
We embrace everything because we don't want to be legalistic like the traditional churches.
Right?
And holy is a dirty word.
But the Bible, when it calls you saints, it's not talking about what traditional churches or what modern churches often think about.
It's talking something so much more than that.
It's not morality.
It's more than morality.
Just think about it.
My mom, if my mom said to me, if you love me, the way you're going to love me is by caring for the poor, not talking badly to your colleagues, and not watching porn.
And then I avoid her for the next six months, and she calls me up on the phone, and she says to me, hey, what's going on?
I haven't heard from you for six months.
And you say, well, I've cared for the poor.
I've done everything you told me to love you.
I've cared for the poor.
I've not talked badly to my colleagues, and I've not watched porn.
Have I loved my mom?
You see, I've done all the moral things, but God is not looking for us to just simply be moral and tick a load of boxes.
He's looking, do you want a holy relationship with me?
That's where he wants us to see what it means to be a saint.
It's in relationship with himself.
So if I can ask you, do you see yourself more as a sinner or a saint?
Do you see yourself more as a sinner or a saint?
If you're not a Christian, you shouldn't see yourself as a saint, okay?
That's not reality, according to what the Bible says.
But the thing is, what we do is we always live out who we think you are.
If you think you're a failure, you'll live out as a failure.
If you think you're a weirdo, you'll live weird.
If you think you are a sinner, when temptation comes, you will fall into sin.
If you think that's your primary identity, then sin will become your primary way of living.
But if you see that your primary identity is as a saint, a saint who does sin,
but a saint nevertheless in Jesus, then that gives you the power to live out of your identity and say no when temptation comes your way
and to say yes to what Christ calls us to.
So I want to just kind of unpack this a little bit and I want to look at a couple of things,
how this idea of what it means to be holy, what it means to be a saint looks like.
And I want to look in just two parts.
I want to look at a distinctive God and I want to look at a distinctive people, okay?
A distinctive God and a distinctive people, okay?
The book of Ephesians and the next few weeks, we're just going to kind of camp out a little bit in Ephesians for some of these titles.
It's set in a culture which is very anti-Christian.
To be a Christian was to be a small, despised minority and the pressure to conform to what everyone else around you was doing was very great.
The greatest temple in the Middle East, the Temple of Diana with pagan worship where millions would come on pilgrimage was right there in Ephesus.
And yet, the Apostle Paul writes to this small group of Christians and he says this.
Look in Ephesians 1 verse 3.
He says,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing,
even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and blameless before him.
See, he's fleshing out a little bit of what it means to be saints here.
See, Paul is actually, if you keep reading, he gives this massive list of all the blessings that as saints we now have in Christ.
And it so excites him that actually for 14 verses, there's not a single full stop.
He's just going like this.
He's like, okay, this is amazing.
And he starts, he's just bursting with praise.
He says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus.
Praise him.
Something about being a saint of who he is has just captured his heart.
So all he can do is praise God.
I wonder if that's our response.
Because sometimes I don't respond like that.
It's because I haven't got what this is talking about.
You see, he says we're chosen to be holy and blameless.
He says he chose us.
He didn't just choose me.
He chose us.
Which means he chose us to be part of a people.
He says when you come into Christ, you become part of his church, his chosen people.
And Paul is referring back to the Old Testament.
All of Paul's stuff comes from the Old Testament.
Where a holy God chose our people for himself and said, out of everybody around you, I want to make you my distinctive holy people.
Because I'm a distinctive holy God.
And so the word holy, we've said it kind of means set apart or separated.
But that doesn't really kind of, that doesn't really mean anything very much to us.
I mean, what are we set apart from?
What are we set apart for?
And if you get down into the Old Testament again, we've got to kind of understand where this is coming from.
So Isaiah chapter 6, book in the Old Testament.
Isaiah sees, he has this vision in the temple of the Lord, high and lifted up, it says.
And all these winged creatures around him, which are crying out in awestruck majesty,
holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
The whole earth is filled with his glory.
And they say holy three times, not because they've got a stutter.
They say holy three times, because in Hebrew, you don't have italics or bold or underline.
And so what they do, they'd repeat a word to emphasize it.
So if you had a ring, if your ring is gold gold, that would mean your ring is pure gold.
But here, there's something unique.
It's not just repeated twice.
This word holy is repeated three times.
That's like bold italics and like 15 exclamation marks after it.
He's saying, not just kind of, oh, he's set apart, he's set apart, he's set apart.
Because that's a little bit lame.
No, what he's saying is, I'm so awed that my language has run out at this point.
It's like saying, wow.
Wow.
That's what it's like.
And he's saying his holiness is what makes God, God.
And we are not.
You know, I don't know if you've ever seen a, if you ever made sandcastles on a beach.
You know, you spend all this time making this sandcastle.
And then the tide just comes in.
And you can't do anything to stop it.
It just comes in and it just washes away everything you've just made.
Right?
You have that kind of sinking feeling.
Well, if you think about it, that's actually like life.
There are 7 billion people on this planet right now.
In 120 years, every single one of them will have been wiped out by time.
Wiped off the planet.
Kingdoms, empires, presidents, Trump, Xi Jinping, they'll all have gone.
All have gone.
They'll be replaced by others.
But you know who won't have gone.
God will still be there.
You see, he's different.
He's distinctive.
He's not like us.
He's holy.
He's the creator of everything and we are created.
He is infinite.
We are finite.
He's the definition of beauty and purity and glory.
And the earth around us is just filled.
When you look out at the sunset, when you see each other,
you just see a glimpse of the glory that is just reflected of him.
He's holy.
He's different.
Not like us.
But then the Bible says, and this is interesting, there are ordinary things which can be,
if they're devoted to his purposes, reserved for him, also become holy.
So, you know, in the Old Testament, plates can be holy.
Spaces like the temple can be holy.
A kiss can be holy.
Sabbath days can be holy.
When God appears to Moses in the burning bush, he says, take off your shoes, your sandals, because the ground you're standing on is holy.
Why?
But why?
Because it's God's ground.
It belongs to him.
If God had a seat on a train, it'd be called holy because it's reserved for him, for what is pure greatness and majesty.
It belongs to him.
The amazing thing here is, in the book of Exodus, God says to his people, I chose you out of all the nations to be my treasured possession,
to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, to belong to me.
And when that language in Ephesians that Paul is talking about, about being chosen, about being saints,
it's actually, he's saying, when he says he chose us that we should be holy,
he's saying, you individually and us as a church, you're now holy space.
You're reserved for God.
There's a sign on there which says, reserved for God.
You don't have to go to a special cathedral or church building to have a kind of sacred space or a sacred experience.
Do you realize you're CG?
And you are holy space reserved for God.
Do you get that?
The God of the universe, you are reserved for him.
And if you're going, oh, that's nice.
Great.
Then I don't think you get this.
Because this, if it doesn't awe you, then you just haven't understood this.
Because God's holiness should thrill us and terrify us.
You know, I remember watching a TV program in the UK about the queen going to visit ordinary people's homes.
I don't know if anyone's seen that one.
It's on the BBC.
But the reaction was fascinating.
Because there was this mix of absolute joy and privilege that the queen would come and choose to go and visit these little nobodies in their own homes.
What an honor.
But at the same time, there was absolute terror.
Because suddenly they were like, my house is a complete mess.
I can't believe it.
The couches are dirty.
We haven't painted the walls in years.
And things which they were perfectly happy with before, they were living with just a bit of mess.
You know, it doesn't matter.
But now, when the presence of the queen comes in, it's suddenly, they become self-conscious.
They see every single blemish.
That's what happens with the story with Isaiah.
It's what happens with the story when you and me as sinful people come into the presence of true greatness and beauty.
You've got something so much greater now to compare with yourself.
And it exposes you.
And Isaiah, who's the most godly man in his day, he says to God, I'm ruined.
I can't stand here before you.
I'm not holy.
And you know, the only way that Isaiah can stand and stay in his presence is that from the sacrificial altar, atonement is made for him.
And you know, the word atonement means to cover.
You know, it's like when you get into a taxi and you just realize that you've reached your destination and then you've got no money on you.
And you turn to your friend and say, hey, can you cover me?
And your friend says, hey, I don't have any money either.
And then the taxi driver turns around and says, hey, I'll cover your fare.
The Christian gospel is that everyone who repents and turns to Jesus.
It's not that God forgives your sin, your debt easily.
He doesn't.
In fact, it is so great and God's anger at your sin is so pronounced that it can only be covered by God himself coming down in Jesus and dying for you.
That's why Jesus is so precious to us.
That's why we talk about him all the time.
You know, it's when you promise to read your Bible and you skipped it for the last two weeks and you try and make up for it.
And Jesus says it's covered.
It's when you shouted at your kids and you're feeling so guilty about it and you beat yourself up about it.
And Jesus says it's covered.
He removes your filthy couches and he covers you with his pure spotless clothes.
And he says, now you can stand before me in my holy presence.
Not your merit.
Nothing you've done.
But you are now a saint.
You are now holy.
Reserved for me.
C.S. Lewis said, those who think that meeting God will be a cozy experience have clearly never met him.
If you think you're doing pretty well, you're doing pretty okay, you've clearly never met God.
But the key to understanding the holiness of God, if you understand that holiness, then actually you begin to understand your sinfulness.
And then you begin to understand just how incredible grace really is.
That's why we talk about it all the time.
Are you bored of that?
Are you bored of hearing about grace?
Because if we are, we need to be awed again by that.
It's a distinctive God.
Holy.
Set apart.
A distinctive people.
Ephesians 1 to 3.
Basically describes, if you look through the book, it describes what our identity is.
And then Ephesians 4 to 6 basically then tells you, how do you live this out?
And so if you go to chapter 4, and it's there in your bulletin, Paul begins to flesh out what this actually means for us in practice.
4 verse 17, he says, you're no longer to walk.
Since you're holy, since you're saints, you're no longer to walk as the Gentiles do.
Because God is a distinctive, different God.
You ought to be a distinctive, different people.
That means, when we do things and we say, yeah, well, everyone else is doing it.
No Christian can ever say everyone else is doing it.
Because we're called to be different, reserved for God.
He says, others around you have futile thinking.
Darkened understanding.
They don't know a holy God.
They don't have anything more glorious to live by.
They don't have the life of God flowing in them, he says.
In verse 19, he says, they've given themselves up to sensuality.
What that means is, that word, it's like they've handed themselves over like a slave to a master.
They've become slaves.
And who is their master?
Verse 22 says, their deceitful desires.
Literally, they're in service of a Nala master.
Now, I don't know if any of you drive.
Anyone drive?
Okay, a few people.
If you drive, have you ever noticed how you thought you were a calm, moral person?
And then, you get behind the wheel of the car.
And you're driving along and someone cuts you up.
Have you noticed that almost instinctively, this kind of anger starts coming out?
You start screaming at the people around you.
What idiots you are.
Get out of the way.
You see, my desire for control and to have things my way is getting blocked.
And so, what happens then is the moral person becomes a slave to that desire and it leads me to anger.
You know, or you thought you were disciplined.
You said, I will only watch one YouTube video.
Three hours later, you're like, why did I waste my time on all of that?
What's going on there?
Your desire for comfort, for pleasure rules you.
And so, things that you regret, you end up doing.
Because you've become a slave to them.
And Paul says here, if you're a Christian, that's who you were.
That's not who you are.
You're a new person now.
He says, verse 22, you've put off your old identity.
And that's a verb of completed action.
It means when you came to Christ, you took off your old slave sin master.
And like a new wardrobe, you've put on Christ.
You've got a new identity.
It says, verse 24, to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
You're holy, so live holy.
Imitate God, he says now in chapter 5.
Walk in love.
Put off anything that will enslave you.
Put on anything that will help you to worship Jesus more.
You know, in other words, what he's saying is, you know, sin, he says, sin is falling short of the glory of God.
Do you know what being made in the likeness of God is?
It's being made glorious.
Because we're reflecting the glory of God.
Do you get that?
You were made to be glorious.
Do you want to say that after me?
I was made to be glorious.
Turn to the person next to you.
You were made to be glorious.
In Jesus.
Not from yourself.
No, no, no.
What does that mean?
You know, when Prince Harry was filmed running around with a bunch of naked women a few years ago,
I don't know if you remember the story.
I don't think the queen afterwards came and said, you're no longer my grandson.
But she might have said, that behavior is not fitting for royalty.
You are royal, now live like a royal.
Put that behavior off.
Paul is saying, when you sin, you don't stop being a saint.
Because your sainthood is a status, a position in Jesus.
But he's saying, just be who you are.
You know what people say?
Act your age.
That kind of thing.
That's what he's saying.
Be who you are.
Don't go back to living that slave life again.
You have these habits.
Don't just be moral.
Don't just try and keep the rules.
Aim to pursue everything that will help you to live.
Not in a kind of Windows 95, old virus-ridden software nature that you have.
But now the new, whatever, if you're Windows, it's like Windows 10 million.
Or iOS, I don't know what you'd be with iOS.
But you have a new software.
You have a new identity.
Now live in it.
Don't go running back to the old way.
You know, I used to watch a local TV drama called Ngoi Woi Ga.
Some of you know what that is.
The acting is terrible.
The storyline is even worse.
But it's kind of fun.
And so we would watch it every night for a while.
The piano would translate.
And then afterwards, we ended up watching 24.
24.
And 24 is actually well-written.
And it's well-acted.
And you know what?
Some of you are like, I'm not sure about that.
But I think it is.
And I'm standing here.
So I can say that.
But when I go back then to try watching Ngoi Woi Ga, I'm like, this is so mediocre.
I just don't even want to watch this.
And many of us are content with living mediocre lives.
Because we fail to see who God is and who we are in Him.
And we just settled for living in a slum when He said, I want you to live in a palace.
He says, pursue me.
Cry out to know me.
Cry out for me.
And what will happen is, your taste for sin, as you get to see Him more, will die.
You'll become, oh, I don't want that.
You see, you've got to say, I'm a saint, not a slave.
I'm a saint, not a slave.
And you see, here's how we help each other with this.
When you see somebody else who's walking in something which is not what God wants for them,
don't just go to them and say, stop it.
Or don't just ignore them.
That's not loving.
You were made to be glorious.
Go to them lovingly and say, that's not who you are.
You're a saint, not a slave.
Now act like it.
You're a saint, not a slave.
Now act like it.
Be who you are.
Let me get practical for a minute.
I could take a hundred different things.
And I'm aware I don't just want to take negatives either.
But pornography.
It's a huge problem for many of us.
But the problem with pornography isn't that you're just breaking a rule.
It's that you're living a mediocre, substandard substitute for the intimacy and sexuality that God has created beautiful within a marriage context.
And when you watch pornography, what it does, it removes intimacy, it removes commitment, it removes and dehumanizes the man or woman who's there and makes them nothing more than an object available for your fantasy.
And its effect on us is that our vision of what God wants for sexuality gets reduced so that we can't appreciate the beauty in other people without thinking of them as objects of sexual desire.
And many of us are gripped by it.
And we think God is saying, you shouldn't be doing that.
And we get this guilt trips and all that kind of stuff.
But God is saying to us, you needn't be doing that.
Because that's not who you are.
I've cleansed you.
I've covered you.
You are saints in me.
In Jesus, you have the power to live out as a saint and holy.
So now go with each other because we're a chosen holy people.
With each other.
Confess it to someone else.
Walk alongside each other.
You need to remember writing each other.
You're a saint, not a slave.
Let that be the rhythm and the words that we encourage each other with.
Because that's how we'll be a distinctive holy people.
Many of us think that holiness and obedience to God is simply about avoiding sin.
We say things like, is it a sin if I?
Is it okay if I?
That's what we're worried about.
But that's not what saints ask.
Saints ask things like, is this helpful to me being like Christ?
You know, like some movies, it's not wrong to watch movies.
But I find certain movies just get stuck in my head.
You know, I watched an episode of Game of Thrones.
And, you know, honestly, the graphic section, that image is still in my mind.
And some of us think that what we watch doesn't affect us.
And we say it's not a sin.
But is it helpful?
Don't be a fool.
You probably, like, think that advertising doesn't affect you either.
But the reason advertisers spend billions of dollars on advertising is they know it does affect you.
Is it helpful?
If you struggle as a single with your marital status,
does watching wrong comms feed your sense of dissatisfaction in your identity
and stop you finding satisfaction in Christ,
it's not wrong to, it's not a sin to watch a wrong comms.
But you've got to be honest with yourself.
This is helpful for me in finding satisfaction in Christ.
Holiness is saying things like,
I will not criticize my husband or wife when I'm with my friends
and everyone else is criticizing theirs.
But I'm going to say, hey, my husband's got a whole list of things which are wrong.
But, you know, there's one thing I appreciate about him.
And you're going to be different from people around you.
And some people won't like it because it exposes them.
But do I want to be holy more than I want to be liked?
Will I live out who I am?
We have a distinctive God.
We're called to be this distinctive people in every area of our lives.
But if we only focus on the put-offs, what you don't do,
the things I should stop doing,
and never focus on the put-ons,
never focus on what God wants you to push into your life,
you know what happens?
It's deadly.
It's absolutely deadly.
Jesus says, you know,
if you drive out a demon
and you put nothing back in its place,
do you know what happens?
It's a worse situation than it was in the first place.
Try and beat porn, gossip, anger,
whatever it is in your life,
without fixing your mind on Jesus regularly.
And it will either leave you more self-righteous if you succeed,
or more discouraged and condemned if you don't.
The way out of sin is this.
You worshipped your way into sin
because you surrendered to those slave masters.
And you will only worship your way out of sin.
You worshipped your way into sin,
you'll only worship your way out of it.
It's only becoming more captivated with who Jesus is
and tasting that he's better than the other things
that you say, that's mediocre, I don't want it.
So the way to live as a saint,
and I'm going to finish with a couple of things here.
Paul says in verse 23,
if you want to live as a saint,
you've got to saturate your mind
to be renewed in the spirit of your mind
day by day by day with God's word and worship.
You've got to fix your mind
on the one who gave himself for you.
You know, Jesus,
when a woman who was caught in adultery,
all the moral people came around her and said,
stone her.
And Jesus said to them,
okay,
okay, fine.
They said she deserves to die.
And Jesus says,
okay, you're right.
Okay, so who here is holy and blameless?
Throw the first stone.
And everyone starts walking away
because they know
they cannot be,
none of them were holy.
The only one who was holy
stayed there.
Jesus.
And he said,
I don't condemn you,
but go and sin no more.
My grace is on you,
but don't live in that sin anymore.
A while later,
all the moral people
and all the immoral people
gathered round.
And this time they said,
Jesus,
you deserve to die.
So we can keep being slaves
to our desires
for power
and greed
and approval.
You're getting in the way
of my life.
And he,
the holy God,
gave himself up
to their desires,
to our desire
for death.
But he did it willingly
so that you
and I
could be his holy,
chosen people
who belong to him
for his eyes only.
There's no other love like that
in the whole of religion,
in the whole of everything,
any other religion.
There is no other love like that.
It's a holy love.
It's distinctive.
Our sin is covered
but may we not mock
what Jesus has done
by having a cheap view
of sin.
Let me finish this.
Some of us are like,
I know that stuff of Jesus.
I'm bored with it.
But we can't wait
to flick through
the latest YouTube clip
of a cat doing handstands
or a golden retriever
looking at itself
in the mirror.
And we wonder
why our lives
have such a low standard
of glory,
such a pale desire
for holiness
because we've been
fixing our minds
on all of these
other things.
Because if that's
what is in your
rear view mirror
all the time
and you're focusing on,
then you'll settle
for being a moral person
who treats your cat
or your dog well.
But make the worship
of Jesus
a rhythm
in your life.
Take the triggers
during your day.
We've given you this.
Has everyone got one?
This,
pick it up,
it's downstairs.
Put it in your bathroom.
Put it on your fridge.
It's a reminder
of who you are
in Christ
so you can remember
what he's done
for you.
And if you remember
his love for you,
it will melt you.
It will change you.
And over time,
you'll see your colleagues,
even the ones you dislike,
differently.
You'll forgive
when others
think you're stupid
because the more
you gaze on Jesus,
the more you'll become
like him.
Let's pray.