Man, that's awesome.
Hey, that team is still there right now. So we need to be lifting them up and we need to be praying over them. So it's just incredible to see what God is doing this summer. I really believe, you know, I don't know that there is anything that a church should desire more than for God to capture the heart of the next generation. And man, we are just seeing that and we want to continue to see that, and so we praise God for that. Not only Summer Project, but also y'all the student camp.
We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The students got back and God just moved in incredible ways. We had between students and leaders over 200 people went off to youth camp and man, God just moved in incredible ways. 17 of those kids are desiring baptism.
Six of them said they were maybe experiencing a call to vocational ministry and over a hundred of them want to go on a go team next year. All right, so it doesn't, I mean, this doesn't get much better than that. So anyway, we're really pumped about what God is doing there.
Let me say one more thing and then we're going to dive in to Colossians too, so you can go ahead and be fine on that if you want. But hey, there's a little bit of home talk here, okay, just real quick. I know some of you might be brand new at our campuses.
You're gonna say, what in the world is this? Next week is who's your one weekend, okay? And if you're kind of part of the home crowd, you've heard that language before, the idea there is every single one of our series, we're going to have one week that is just totally dedicated for our people to really reach out. I mean, there's somebody in your life that's far from God, but they're close to you and they need to hear the life-changing message of the gospel and have an opportunity to respond and we're going to do that next week. So we just want to alert you, you know, like if you got somebody you've been praying for and that kind of thing, man, we'd love to see them here and it might be a really strategic time for you to think about this next weekend, them coming in and trying to invite them.
So I just want to make sure you're aware of that. All right, Colossians chapter 2 today, we're excited to continue in our series. Guys, contrary to many, you know, contrary to many people's religious opinion, what we're going to see today is that Jesus is more than enough for our maturity.
We've talked about that already, but specifically what we want to get into is this idea of not moving on from him into something else. You see, you don't need more if you have what is more than enough. And what the Bible presents to us is that Jesus and the gospel is more than enough for our maturity.
There's a depth there that we will never get to the bottom of and we don't need to move on into other things. It's not like, well, yeah, I received the gospel one way, but now I want to walk in something different. I want to walk in works or I want to walk in religious practices or rites or symbols or, or I want to, I'm going to go back and revert to my works. And that's going to be what I do with the rest of my life as if the gospel were a diving board instead of the pool.
Okay. And what we want to say today is no, no, no, the Bible is going to call us today. Then Paul is going to call the Colossian church today.
No, don't move on. You don't grow beyond the gospel. You grow deeper into the gospel because the way that a human grows in their faith is not by mustering love for God. It's by responding to God's love for us. And the way that we respond to God's love for us is we remember who he is and what he has done for us.
Here is the big idea for this weekend. Being satisfied in Christ keeps you from looking for more. If we are satisfied in him, we don't need to move on to a lot of other things that we think are more complex or a deeper experience or a religious ecstatic experience.
You know, we don't have to do that because instead we understand, no, the goal is not to move on. The goal is to move deeper into our satisfaction when it comes to Christ. And so we find ourselves in Colossians chapter two. We're just going to walk through the passage today. This is going to be all of our time just kind of walking through and talking about the depths of the gospel and how it should be sufficient for us.
And it's more than enough for our maturity. Therefore, as you received Christ, Jesus, the Lord, 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. You received Christ, verse six, now walk in him rooted, built up, established. What I want you to see right here very quickly, kind of a broad overview, this verse does it, we'll get into more of the specifics here, but I think this really is a call for us to realize for our growth, for our maturity, Jesus is more than enough. He is more than enough to save us. He is more than enough to grow us.
And that's what he's saying here. As you receive the gospel, walk in him. As you receive Christ, walk in him. In other words, you don't get in one way and then become rooted and built up and established in another. I don't know the context that you come from. I have no idea, but it might be that if you're from kind of maybe a southern tradition or maybe you come from church world, maybe you come from Baptist world or whatever it is, sometimes it can feel like, okay, that you sort of receive the gospel by grace through faith, but you grow by learning a lot of stuff about the book of Revelation.
You know what I'm talking about? It's like you grow by, man, we're getting into the nuances of this theological position and that theological position and all this kind of stuff. You receive the gospel here, but you grow by conforming your life over and over and over and being a very model, patriotic citizen.
And that's where you... No, no. What the Bible is saying here is, no, wait. The same way that you got in is the same way that you grow. As you receive Christ, we are to walk in him. I think what the Bible wants us to see very easily today, we just got to keep hammering it over and over, is that we were built to grow on the gospel. What got us in grows us. You could say it like this, the gospel isn't the diving board, the gospel is the pool. The gospel isn't the A through B, A through C, it's the A through Z. It's not the starting blocks, it's the whole race.
It's not the diving board, it's the pool itself. And I think what happens in our life sometimes is that we end up sort of... We get saved, but then we start this thinking of like, man, I want more. I want more than what I have.
I want to posture up. I want to end up being better. I want something else from God in terms of religious experience. And it can lead us to some pretty dangerous places. I think what we're going to see today is it'll lead us to Jesus plus works or Jesus plus tradition or Jesus plus religious rights or Jesus plus I'm also going to consult the stars and tarot cards. I mean, it can take us to some pretty crazy places.
And what the Bible I think is going to say and is trying to say here is, no, therefore as you receive Christ, walk in him, you don't move beyond. Anytime there's that impulse... You know what Colossians 2 is? Do you guys remember the dog whisper Cesar Millan? You guys remember this? Okay, the dogs would be going absolutely crazy and he had this little move. He'd go like that.
You remember that? And all of a sudden the dogs just in amazement are like befuddled. I'm sure you try to do it to your dog.
They don't even look at you, right? But he does it on the screen and they all of a sudden like snap out of it. I think it's a little... Colossians 2 is a little bit like that. It's supposed to be a bit of an interrupter.
It's supposed to be a bit of a short circuit. You start going down the path of, you know, Jesus is great, but I think I want... No, stop. Like let's just stop right there and let's just kind of short circuit that thought. Man, get into Colossians 2. We don't need to move on. We don't move beyond. We move deeper into. You know, we don't grow beyond the gospel. We should be seeking to grow deeper into the gospel. You know, we got overwhelmed.
I don't know about you. You probably got pretty overwhelmed with God's grace and his goodness to you when you got saved. You know, we've just talked about that here. You know, we sang about that.
Our worship leaders led us in that. Like that but God moment. If you're a believer... Now, if you're not a believer, you haven't had this experience. You haven't been run over by the grace train, okay?
But if you remember that, that but God moment in your life, you know, you were pretty overwhelmed by the goodness of God. It's what got you into the door, so to speak. Don't move beyond that. The way that you received, walk in.
That is the key to being rooted, to being built up, to being established. It is to never move beyond the heart posture that says, I am overwhelmed by what Jesus Christ has done for me. I can't believe that in my sin he would want me in his family. I can't believe that in my sin he would see for maternity pass.
He would look forward and know everything, every wrong decision, every failure in my life, and yet he would go to the cross and spill his blood because he loved me and he wants to bring me into his family. See, if we can stay in a posture of going back to that place, we won't want to move on to more because we will have been satisfied in what is enough for us here. You know, I would say it like this. We were built to grow by the gospel. We weren't built to grow by works. We weren't built to grow by religious rites and traditions.
We weren't we weren't built to grow by, you know, syncretism and ascetic, you know, all these different philosophies, I guess you should say. Now, what we were built to grow on is the gospel itself. That understanding that 1st Corinthians 15, if you're like, man, what's the gospel? Jesus in my place. I deserve death and hell.
Jesus took both so that I would face neither. And then in his resurrection, he gives me the opportunity to walk in the newness of life. A very good summation of that is 1st Corinthians 15, if you want to read that later. That idea of staying in an overwhelmed posture, that's the way we grow. The way you got in is the way you grow. The way you received, he says in verse six, walk in that. Don't move beyond that. If you, listen, you wouldn't be at a church, you wouldn't be at one of our campuses, probably. If you didn't seek to be rooted and established, if you didn't want to grow in the faith, you probably wouldn't be here.
Okay, how do you do that? Man, you take the teachings of the word, which always go back to God's love for you, and you allow that to wash over you. We're not moving beyond that. Man, we don't need to get into worshiping saints and worshiping angels and religious rights and all this stuff. We go back to what we know, this simple truth that is simple enough for a child to understand, but it's deep enough to plunge to the bottom all the days of your life. Here's what I want to say. Your Christian growth is, you're built to run on this gospel.
You're built to grow on this gospel message. You know, one of the ways I would illustrate this is, I don't know if you guys have ever been really, really thirsty in your life. I don't mean like you played a basketball game and now you're thirsty. Okay, I mean like you got separated from water for a long time. Thirsty.
And you probably have maybe an experience like this in your life. I remember one time we were doing a canoe trip on the Suwannee River, our youth group, and my dad had us out there and they got bad intel about where the takeout point was. Alright, and so there's no cell phones or no, you know, there's none of that kind of stuff back then and nobody had one anyway and so, man, we get going down the river and I don't know, we probably started like 10 o'clock and by two o'clock we're all, now we've all eaten all of our, you know, eaten our lunch and drank all our water and snacks and they keep telling us it's just right around the bend. It's just right around the bend and finally by like three o'clock, you know, my dad is getting a little nervous. He's leading this trip. He's got all these high school and middle schoolers out there and he pulls everybody off the river and he says, look, here's the deal.
He pulled all the senior guys to one side. He said, look, all you guys, you got to quit playing around, get in the back of a canoe. Every one of y'all is in the back of a canoe.
I'm gonna set the pace and we got to go because I'm like getting a little nervous here about how far away we are and the sun is eventually going to go down and, you know, we thought, oh, it's around the next bend, around the next bend. Five hours later, we're still paddling them bad boys, okay, and it's, and it's, the sun's going down and it was a crazy story but I'm gonna tell you, I've never been thirstier in my life because it was all day long and we're working all day, summer, sun, Suwannee River and I remember, this is probably the dumbest thing you can do. I, I think the Lord didn't get sick from it but me and the other guys were so, I mean, we're working hard, we're so thirsty, we, you could see a spring in the bottom of Suwannee and, and different places you go and so we started diving all the way down and putting our, our face on the bottom of the river and drinking water out of the bottom of that spring. It was so, we were so thirsty. I don't know if you've ever been that thirsty, okay, but here's what I'm going to tell you. If you are that thirsty, you, if you've ever been that thirsty, you are going to know that your body was built to run on clean, cold water. I don't care every single commercial in the world for Powerade, Gatorade or Starry, whatever that is, Prime too, okay, whatever the stuff is, whatever everybody wants.
I don't care what it is, if you've ever been thirsty enough, you're gonna know. You actually don't need more than water and what happens is, if you think water is boring because they put a hundred grams of sugar in the Gatorade and you just decide, I'm not going to go with water, I want something more flashy. I want something that has a little more color to it. I want something that's a little shinier.
Man, this kind of thing, you know, we go to church, we do the flywheel, we hear the gospel, that's feeling a little boring to me. I want to do something shinier, you know, it's like a, it's like a person who just decides, well, I'm going to live off of Gatorade my whole life. I'm going to live off of Powerade my entire life and it's like, man, you've moved beyond to the point where now it's actually really bad for you. Probably got diabetes in your future. Your mouth's probably getting rotten from all the sugar. It's really not good.
You weren't built to run on that. Sure, it's shiny, it looks good, it tastes good for a while, but it's not what you were built to run on and I wonder how many of us might be there when it comes to, man, the everyday, the growth, the going back to the gospel, the simple path, the simple disciplines of reading the scripture and thinking about Jesus and being overwhelmed by what he has done for me, that's losing its luster. And so I want more. And now we start getting into weird stuff, man. We start moving into weird theology, we start thinking about our works, we start comparing ourselves, it becomes Jesus plus morality, Jesus plus some other thing. And I think the Bible here is trying to guard us against that. I think what he's saying is, man, you want to be rooted and built up and established, you don't move on from what got you in.
If it brought you to life, it can grow you. And so go back to the gospel. Verse eight, here's what it says, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy or empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Now, what he's getting at here, I think is something like this.
Hey, you know what? It's not just that we can stumble off the path of wanting to be one of those people who has grown by the gospel and we remember Christ. Actually, there are things that are trying to grab us.
I mean, that's what he says. See that no one takes you captive by vain philosophy and empty deceit and according to human tradition and the elemental spirits of the world. Philosophies, deceit, tradition, elemental spirits, I think, I think here, and actually there's a few different things that can mean in scripture. Probably it's just something to do with like, man, it's Jesus plus the, you know, the earth and the, you know, some kind of maybe animistic sort of idea of the spirits of the world or whatever.
Very much like Captain Planet, if you guys ever saw that in the 80s. Okay, so, but I think about, you know, we got to get this idea in our heads. Something is trying to grab you. It's not just, oh, I fell off. It's like, no, I got deceived. I got taken.
There are those empowered probably by demonic forces that want to take you. And, you know, I thought the thing that came to my mind immediately was if you guys ever seen that movie 12 Years a Slave or read the book. Got him Solomon Northup when he was a free black man from New York in the 1860s. And he was a professional violinist. He was a farmer and he had been free his entire life until he got offered a gig in Washington, DC that was still a slave state at that time. And he went there to play his violin and instead was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. And he was there for 12 years as a free man, but he wasn't. And he ended up, it's a crazy story, ended up getting word out by a Canadian guy that was down there. And he ends up, he ends up getting his freedom back for a while. And then he kind of falls off the pages of history after he does a lot of abolition work. But I think about that idea of like, man, it's not like he just stumbled himself into that situation, right?
The idea was there were people in that time that would drug you and grab you and take you and take all your identification and how are you going to know? And next thing you know, this is now your new reality. I think about that here for us.
Do we understand that there are things that are out there that want to grab you and take you off the path? That want to convince you that Jesus plus some things is the gospel. Jesus plus you need to have this philosophical tradition. Jesus plus some traditions. Jesus plus works. Jesus plus ecstatic religious experiences. Y'all I've seen this. I've seen it in young people where they're in a good church, they're growing in a healthy, sustainable way, but they want more and they want more and they want more. And next thing you know, man, they're ended up, man, I need dreams and visions. I need to have the speaking in tongues.
I need to have these different areas. And they can end up in some charismatic, charismatic type churches. I'm talking about no seatbelt. You know, it's just like, and it's like, man, is that why wasn't it enough to just have Christ? Why wasn't it enough to be satisfied? The fact that we're looking more means we're not satisfied in what we have. You walk in what you received.
And there are shiny trinket, philosophies, traditions, works, righteousness, morality, that want to pull you and grab you and take you off the path. But you weren't born for that. You weren't built for that. Your body's built for water, not Powerade.
You're built to grow in the gospel, not works. If anybody here works for Powerade or Gatorade, I'm sorry. Okay. They're awesome. I love Powerade.
I love Gatorade. Okay. But just not for your entire life. Look what it says in verse nine. For in him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily and you have been filled in him. Y'all, y'all this, if you've never heard the glorious news, if you've never heard the gospel, if you don't understand why people raise their hands in church and take vacations to go on mission trips, why people joyfully give away their time, their talent and their treasure. This is why this is the gospel.
You ready? The fullness of deity dwells in him bodily is what he's basically saying in verse nine. And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority in him. Also, you 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 power full working of God who raised him from the dead and you who were dead in your trespasses and 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.
He disarmed the rulers and the authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them. Y'all, this is the gospel. It's the idea that Jesus Christ, who was fully God, fully man, has come to this earth to live the life that you didn't live so that he could be a sacrifice.
He could restore you to your position in God's family and thereby disarming the satanic realm, death itself, the rulers and authorities that want to hold you in fear of not knowing how your relationship with God can ever go, not knowing what's in the afterlife, and he has disarmed them because of what he has done in the gospel. And Paul is so clear on this in the book of Colossians. Y'all, what I've just shared, Jesus plus nothing is the gospel. It's not Jesus plus works, tradition, religious rights, certain days of the week, eat this, don't eat that, morality. That's not what it is. It's this story. It's this set of facts that we believe and give our life to.
And that's what it is. Jesus plus nothing. Verse nine tells us Jesus was God and man. The fullness of deity dwells bodily in him. After you and I received Christ, the Bible tells us that we are filled with him. Verse 10 says this, he is the head, he is the ruler, he is the authority.
What do we talk about? He is first, he is before all things. Verse 11 and 12 say this, that in our spiritual baptism, we are marked, much like what he said earlier, in circumcision. Circumcision simply means to put off.
I don't need to go into it in graphic detail here. But the idea is that you are marked to be in a certain people. That would be the Old Testament kind of way of thinking about it here. In our baptism, we're marked in a sense.
Not something physical. It's what God has done in our heart spiritually. Baptism is the picture. When I believe the gospel, the old me dies with Christ, the one that wanted to work for my salvation, the one that was in rebellion against God, the one that was guilty of all types of sin and deserved hell and death. That person is gone. That person is dead.
That person has gone under the water. Then in baptism, we are brought forth. He says in verse 13, we were dead because of our trespasses. Now we are alive.
That's the idea of coming out of the water. We are alive. We are forgiven all of our sin. Because we don't have the fear of God for casting us into hell. We don't have the fear of death. We can now live free because of what God has given us. Now, the rulers and authorities have been disarmed. They have nothing to hold over us anymore.
One pastor said it like this, the enemy becomes a toothless foe. This year was tough, man. A couple months ago, I lost my dog, man.
He was 10 and a half years old. We had to put him down. It was really hard.
Very tough. He was the one. I have two dogs. The one I had put down was my favorite. The other one is, listen, he's as dumb as he is pretty and he's the prettiest dog you've ever seen.
That's the truth of it. The other one. The one that we had to put down, he was faithful to our family for over a decade.
You want to know for me, what I loved about him the most? Now, you got to understand where I live. I live somewhere. You can't see no other houses.
You're out in the woods. I mean, there ain't nobody else around. The thing I loved about him the most was his teeth. If somebody came up, he would show them his teeth and he wasn't playing around either if it was the wrong person. People would say like, man, is that a nice dog? I'm like, depends on who you are. What do you mean, is he nice? It depends on if you're nice.
It depends on if you're nice, right? And here's the thing. Those teeth, burying your teeth, that's what keeps an enemy at bay. That's what keeps fear in the heart, seeing that. That's why somebody wouldn't want to get out of their car. Maybe they want to turn around and go back the other way if something was bad, if they had bad intentions or whatever.
It was the teeth. And what one pastor said is like this, when you think about what Jesus has done, when the enemy becomes a toothless foe, what can he do to us? You kill me, you plant me for the afterlife. You see what God is going to continue to do.
There's nothing that can be done to us when we have the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I think what he's saying here is, man, this idea, I mean, look back what he said, the record of sin, verse 14, the debt that stood against us with its legal demands, it's been set aside. One way of thinking about this, hard to know exactly, one way of thinking about this is that back in the day, we just write on paper, crumple it up, throw it away. When paper was kind of a commodity, papyrus, all this stuff, it's like, no, no, no, you wiped away what was there and you use it for something new.
You didn't just, right? And the idea is, this is what it was, you and I, sinner, deserving of death, deserving of separation from God, wipe that away and write a brand new story. And that's what Christ has done for us.
There's no record of what we have done wrong anymore. There's an old story that's told about Rolls-Royce in the mid-1900s. There's this guy that bought a Rolls-Royce, he maybe decided he was, you know, trip of a lifetime, he's going to drive it around Europe, starts driving it around Europe, boom, the thing breaks down. He goes to the closest town and sends a cable, his way back in the day, sends a cable to Rolls-Royce and says, hey, this car just broke down.
They said, sir, we will have someone where you are today. We will fly someone in, one of our techs, and they fly a technician in, fixes the car right then and there, thank you, leaves, no paperwork, nothing. The guy is thinking to himself, how in the world, I'm not going to, you know, this is crazy, how much, how much does it cost to fly a technician in and what is the bill for this going to be? And he's worried about it, never gets a bill. Finally, he calls the Rolls-Royce company, the car company, and he says, look, tells them the story, this thing broke down, you know, the guy flew out, all that kind of stuff.
I just need to know how I'm going to pay or how much to pay. And they said, dear sir, thank you so much for your letter about what happened to you. We have no record of your car ever breaking down, thank you. One way people tell this story is that they say, they actually say, we have no record of any Rolls-Royce ever breaking down.
You understand kind of the analogy there? It's like this idea of, man, it's, it's wiped away, it's clean. And in the gospel, God sees no record of our sin, not because of something we do, but because of what he has done in our lives.
And so, we have no record of any Rolls-Royce ever our life. We had a debt incurred, and yet Jesus Christ came and paid it in full, so that what is left for you and I is all of the blessings of being a child of God, man, a purpose, a future, a relationship, the spirit of God that cries out, Abba Father, in us, a family of believers that we grow tight with all the days of our life. Why would we look for more when we have that type of fullness?
It's dangerous to look for more. Look what he says, therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. This is really getting at the heart of it here. These are the things that Colossians we're dealing with. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels and going on in detail about visions puffed up without any reason by his sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows with a growth that is from God.
This gets to the heart of it very quickly. Guys, at the bottom of the book of Colossians, there's an issue. The answer to the issue is the most Christ-centered book of the most Christ-centered book in the Bible, but the issue is what theologians call the Colossian heresy. Now, here's what's crazy about the Colossian heresy. I can't tell you exactly what it is.
Nobody can. It's a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The very basics of it, though, are you need to add some stuff to your gospel message. That's what was afflicting the church in Colossae, that it's not Jesus plus nothing is the gospel. It's Jesus plus all this other stuff. It's Jesus plus new moons, and it's Jesus plus festivals, and it's Jesus plus morality, and it's Jesus plus all this stuff. Eat this.
Don't eat that. And here's what Paul says. Look what he says. These things are a shadow, but Christ is the substance. Now, what does that mean? It's a little bit tough, but I think one way to think about it is this. It's not that Christians don't maybe have rules around things or festivals that they do or days that they observe or whatever.
I think what he's saying is those things are the shadow. The actual main thing is Christ and him crucified. That's the main course. You go to Chop House, you're there for the steak. You're not there for the potatoes. Potatoes are fine. I'm not saying I don't have them, but we're there for the steak.
A little more my speed. You go to Cracker Barrel, you're there for the catfish. You're not there for the biscuits. Biscuits are fine, but you're there for the catfish.
Actually, you're probably there because you're traveling somewhere with one of your boomer parents, so that's why you're actually there. The point here is there's a substance, and then there's other things, and he's saying, man, get back to the substance. Can I please tell you, and I know we got to start kind of winding this down. Let me please tell you one of the most scary things about the book of Colossians. The Colossian heresy was a heresy of addition, not subtraction. That is so scary, because nobody was saying, hey, pull Jesus off the throne, because if you say pull Jesus off the throne, any of us with even a rudimentary understanding of Christianity and we've been to Sunday school would be like, well, that doesn't sound right. Jesus is not the king. No, no, no, no, no.
That's not right. I mean, we would, it's not that. They're not saying pull him off the throne. What they're saying is line up a bunch of other stuff on the throne with him.
Put some other stuff up there. You know, so one of the things here, well, I mean, I think in our, I mean, you saw this list of festivals and new moons and shadow of things and worship of angels and asceticism. We have our own versions of that with self-discipline and visions, religious.
I mean, I think there's a few things I would just warn us against very quickly here, okay, that I see in our culture. It's Jesus plus, I mean, there's, I'm consulting with the element of spirits. I mean, I'm astrology. Man, I'm getting into the stars.
I'm a Leo. You know what that means about me or whatever, right? It's Jesus plus some of these things that we trust. Maybe it's Jesus plus the philosophy of individualism. Your identity is not given to you.
It's discovered from within. So I'm holding on to Jesus. I mean, this other thing about my identity that our culture pushes on us is right there with it. Jesus is Lord, that's fine, but I'm also pretty concerned about this election coming up in November and actually maybe what I would say is like, yeah, yeah, it's Jesus plus the right political party in office. You know, it's Jesus plus, it's Jesus plus.
Maybe some of us would say this, you know, and maybe we don't think about it, but it happens all around the world. And some of you are going to go out and be missionaries to the ends of the earth. Like the ones that we commissioned last week, syncretism is all over the place.
What is syncretism? It's not rejecting Christ. It's just lining him up with all the other things we already worship.
You know, it's, it's taken a lot of times. The way we see this is when you have animistic beliefs, you know, in different parts of the world and India and Peru, and they take Jesus and they just sort of line him right up there with all the rest of this stuff. I was in, I was in Peru one time and we were telling, you know, we heard the story. You know, some of those missionaries that were down there, they were engaging a woman with the gospel and they said, well, do you know the gospel? Yeah, I know the gospel. Well, what is the gospel? Jesus was good. Jesus was God become flesh. This is what she said, you know, way out in the jungle, she's been evangelized some, but also there's just other beliefs.
Syncretism is kind of happening. Jesus was God become flesh, born of a virgin, sinless life. He did miracles to prove himself, to be true, doing pretty good, pretty, pretty, you know, doing pretty good so far. He was betrayed and nailed to a cross under Pontius Pilate. And then right before he died, he turned into a lamb and flew to heaven.
The end. Well, that took a turn pretty fast, right? It's like, man, you, you have a lot of this stuff, but then it just kind of gets brought in with all the other sort of that's Jesus plus our other beliefs. You know, asceticism is interesting here to me because we live in a day that is all about discipline. And I know this might be some of you are like, man, I'm not, but a lot, a lot of the general, a lot of people that go to a church like mercy Hill, man, you're very driven. You're thinking about the next thing in your life and that's all good. I love that. I think it honors the Lord.
Okay. But here's the thing. It, we can really get taken in by, you know, what is asceticism? It's the idea of extreme self-discipline for transcendence. So what, what does that look like, man? It's, it's, it's the it's 75 hard. If you've heard of that, it's, it's the fire movement, financial independence, retire early.
I'm going to kill myself these 20 years so that I can do something else with my life later. It's it's you know, it's things like, I don't know, David Goggins type books or Jocko willing. How do you build an Instagram account? That's got millions of people simply by posting the same picture of a 5.00 AM workout every day to prove that you're up and everybody else is not. We love that kind of stuff.
I want to, we love it. Let's, I want to out discipline you and I want to talk to you about how disciplined I am and out disciplined and all that kind of stuff. Is it about Christ or is actually a Jesus plus look how disciplined I am and look how I'm transcending Jesus plus prosperity, Jesus plus morality. There's a million ways that we could go with this. Here's the thing. If you add to the gospel, you lose it. If you add to the gospel, you lose it. So here's how I want to, so here's how I want to just, you know, kind of really shut things down. Listen, don't look for more than Jesus.
That's the application today. Don't look for more than Christ. Instead using him as the interpretive sort of prism, man, we grow in our life. We grow in different areas of our life, but it's never by moving beyond what he's done for us. It's looking back to him and being motivated by what do you say in that first verse of verse six, that deep gratitude over what he has done in our life. You know, I, I just want to give you guys, I know we've talked about the gospel a lot. I want to give you all one quick mental picture of this because I think it's pretty good. You know, don't move beyond this.
Okay. Don't move beyond it. What happened in your life is this man in sin, you became incredibly tainted.
It's just what happened. There's no part of us that wasn't tainted. There's no part of us that didn't have sin. There's no part of us that deserved to be in the presence of God clean. Then here's what happened. Jesus Christ comes in and he washes all of our sin away. He comes and he washes it away by his blood. But here's the thing. Now, listen, now this is the fullness.
All right. The fullness is that after Christ has done this and washed our blood, washed our sin away by his blood. Now, even when we sin, it doesn't count against us and God doesn't see it as sin. He doesn't see that instead what he, it's like forever and ever and ever. What God is going to see in us is this perfect picture of the righteousness of his son.
Not because of what we did, but because of what he has done for us. And it will never end. All right.
Is that more than enough or what? So let's not move beyond. Listen, some of you are not believers.
You're at our campus today. I'll call you to the faith, man. I would say you need to get what I'm talking about. You need to step over that line. And I would also say to those of us that are believers, man, are we tempted to begin to move on today? You know how you're tempted to begin to move on? You're kind of getting bored with the gospel. You're kind of getting bored with the church growth flywheel.
Is there more? You know, I want to do this. I mean, somebody's in your ear. Have you spoken in tongues?
Have you spoken in tongue? You know, this kind of idea. I just, I just hope today we can sort of reject that and say, Jesus, you are more than enough.
I want to be satisfied in that, but satisfied to the point of where I want to continue to grow in my relationship with you. Let's pray. Father, we come before you and Lord, we ask right now, God, that you will turn our hearts to you. And this gospel message would just light us up.
Just be an identity thing that would just, we would remember who we are. We remember what you have done for us, and it would move us. Lord, if there are those that are thinking about moving on from the gospel, they're judging other people by their works, or they're thinking about religious rights, or they've gotten into something that's even a little crazy. They're praying to angels. They're praying to saints. God, I just pray today would be a day where all that goes away. We go back to what you've done for us in Christ. Amen.
