Colossians - We Need To View Ministry Like Paul, Part 3

God Centered Theology

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Daily Bites Of God's Word - Part 4 - Psalm 119:4

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And so, Paul when he's viewing ministry, I think it would be good for us to make sure that we as a

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Church, regardless of all these other things, but just when you really get down to it, view ministry, which will hopefully produce a culture of ministry within our

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Church, the same way the Apostle Paul did. And we notice first when we pick this up in verse 24 of chapter 1 that he saw that true joy is found in Christ, and true joy is found in serving

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Christ. Because after all, that's all the word ministry is. It's a word that means service, to be in service, to be a servant, be a bondservant.

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And we are all bondservants of Christ. Second part as we move down through coming up to where we are at today in verse 28, he noticed the origin of his ministry, the focus of his ministry, and the purpose of his ministry.

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His origin of his ministry was from God. The focus of it is for the benefit of others. And the purpose of it was he was specifically placed in history to preach to the

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Gentiles, and unlock that mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. And now as we wind this up, we are going to notice two more things this morning.

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Paul knew both the point and the power of ministry, not just ministry in general, but his ministry.

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And after today when you walk away you will know both the point and the power source of your individual ministry.

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And time would not permit me to rehearse it, but we did some sermons in Nehemiah where we discussed the fact, and this was probably last summer, where we talked about the fact that all of you, whether you recognize it or not, even if you want to think about yourself as being in the ministry, you're all in the ministry.

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If you are in here and you are saved, you are in the ministry. Ministry may be a professional occupation, quote, unquote, for a pastor.

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But I tell Gene all the time, I was like, you know you can call it work on Sunday. I just don't see worship services work.

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This is joy. There are other parts that may be quote, unquote, work that you do as a pastor.

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But this for me is joy. This is something we look forward to. A ministry, whether it is a professional thing like say, you know if you are a missionary, or some occupational thing where it's all you do.

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Or whether it is something as simple as you just pray for people in your own prayer closet at home. That's your ministry.

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That's your service. And there is a point to your ministry. And there is power and energy for you to fulfill your ministry.

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Verse 28, we proclaim Him abomination every man, and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ.

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The point of every single ministry, whether it is

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Franklin Graham with the shoe box, all the way down to Ed and Kay here, and everyone else who does shoe box here.

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Whether it is prayer shawl, whether it is a pastor, whether it is an online ministry, whether it is choir, or something like a wild game dinner, which if you don't think that is a ministry there are elements there.

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Now, we love us some food and all, but there are even elements in a wild game dinner that has ministry attached to it.

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Gospel jamboree, things that we do. Everything that we do, I challenge you, pick out something that our

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Church does that you would never think of classifying as a ministry. Go home and really think about it.

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And let God show you ways that it could either, as it is currently constituted, be a ministry, or that we may could potentially unlock it and turn it into one.

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There is always the possibility there is. But the point to all of them is the first three words of the verse, we proclaim

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Him. Who is the Him in context? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the point of every single ministry.

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We proclaim Him, exclusive. What does that mean?

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It means there is nothing else. It means I don't proclaim myself. You don't proclaim yourselves.

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We don't, look we love the name of our Church and all that, so don't misunderstand, but we are not here to proclaim Calvary Baptist Church.

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There is obviously you use the name of our Church, and we promote it and advertise it to a degree because you want people to come, and that goes without saying.

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But the bottom line too it is if it came down to it, we would gladly rip the name off the

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Church sign if we were forced to choose because we are going to proclaim Christ, and not Calvary Baptist Church, or Andy Cain, or whatever, even prayer shawl.

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Take prayer shawl for instance. It's not proclaiming prayer shawl, it's proclaiming Christ. Prayer shawl is a means to proclaim

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Christ. These community revivals we did, we had one back in April. We are going to do another one in July.

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There are a lot of things involved there that are the focus. Just like the last sermon,

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Paul knew the focus of his ministry. We have certain focuses. We have certain things we are trying to accomplish.

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But you strip it all down, and it is about proclaiming Christ. Christ is the foundation of Christianity.

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He is the author and finisher of our faith. Without Him and His grace and mercy as the God -man, zero human beings would ever be saved.

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We owe everything to Him. So, it goes to the fact that everything that we do in ministry should be about Him, and be about proclaiming

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Him. As much as I can I need to sort of remove myself, and keep myself from being seen, and let

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Christ be lifted up. The whole John 3 30 thing, I must decrease so that He can increase.

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See the harmony in Scripture here, my friends? It's one of the most beautiful things to me about Scripture is the harmony in it.

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Everything fits. There are no contradictions. There is no error. It all fits doctrinally, contextually.

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There is the book context. There is chapter context. There is verse context. There is the larger New Testament context.

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And then the whole Bible brings in another realm of context, and it all fits. And the point of all of it, the point of every word in Scripture, the point of every single thing we do as Christians is

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Jesus Christ. So, what you have to do is ask yourself, both as individual

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Christians, and as a church, is what I'm doing proclaiming self, or is it proclaiming

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Christ? That was the biggest shift, and the biggest change in Gina and myself's marriage.

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If you're married, if your marriage proclaims Christ and not self, everything else will take care of itself.

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We were discussing the Ten Commandments on Wednesday night last week, and Brother Matt Dickens was there, and he said, you know it's sort of like my understanding, he says,

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I kind of see these first four or five commandments, you know honoring God, not having any idols, so and so forth, remembering the

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Sabbath, honoring your mother and father. He's like, you know if you get those five right the rest will take care of themselves.

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I'm like, yes, that's it, that's the point. It's sort of like we focus so much on you better not murder, better not steal.

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Yeah, those things are good, but if God is the Lord of your life, it sort of falls into place.

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So, with Gina and I there was a part of our marriage early on where it was about us, and you know we need this, and we need that, and only if we had this car we'd be happy, or if we had this particular job we'd be happy, or you know if this, that, and the other we'd be happy.

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And it actually came from her. Not even, it didn't come from the guy that's supposed to be the preacher, it came from her.

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And she says, you know what? I have found out, and I think it would be good for us to find out as a couple, that if our joy is in Christ, and Christ alone, do any of these other things really matter?

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I'm like, truth bomb for my wife.

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Well, I know I married the right one. She rarely will say things that are that pointed, but when she does it's like, well there's a sermon series.

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I'm supposed to be the one that's the preacher in the family. And she preached a volume of doctrine in one sentence.

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And you know what? That was the turning point. All the other things just didn't seem to matter as much anymore.

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You know why? We were proclaiming Him in everything that we do.

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Our decision making, everything up to and including me standing right here was never about us, or our needs, or what we wanted.

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Now, it worked out that now she's living where she grew up, and she's around her mom and dad, and that's all great. But that wasn't the deciding factor, was it?

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It was where does Jesus Christ want us to serve? And in bringing it into the home it's how can

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I serve Jesus Christ by serving her? How can she serve

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Jesus Christ by serving me? That's the problem people have. You know

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I'm going to use it every chance I get because I'm going to convince the world that it's not a swear word. But everybody thinks the word, submit, is a swear word.

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It's not. It's just people don't understand it. Here's how it works. If a husband is loving his wife as Christ loved the

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Church, and he's meeting every single need she could possibly want, who wouldn't want to follow that kind of leadership?

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It's the same thing in the Church. Pastor has the oversight. Pastor is the elder, he's the spiritual overseer.

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If a pastor is doing his job and putting all the needs of the congregation above his own, who wouldn't want to follow?

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That's why you get preachers and pastors in church that, I don't know have these crazy notions they need $54 million to buy another jet plane.

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I don't want to follow that guy, because I'm thinking, hmm how many poor mouths could we feed with that?

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How many run down homes that we could possibly fix up? I'm thinking of a lot of other things before I get to jet plane.

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Lord forgive me if this Church ever came into a sum of money somehow through tithing or whatever, and the first thing on our list was, gee let's build a brand new building.

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If the one you have functions and it's serving the people that are currently coming, that's not very high on the priority list.

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Something like fixing a piece of sound equipment when it goes bad and stuff, sure you do those things. But you see a lot of churches out there, they get money, or they get growth, and they forget about the fact that even when you are growing you are still supposed to be proclaiming

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Him. And that's where they go awry. He says, we proclaim

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Him. Who's the we? Christians versus non -Christians. This Colossian Church had a huge problem with heresy,

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Gnosticism coming in saying, well you know only spiritual is good. Flesh really isn't good.

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Flesh is evil. So, you know God really couldn't have been in human flesh because that would go against our superior knowledge.

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And then you had Arianism, and all these other kinds of crazy things going on. Always going to the core and the foundations of Christianity question.

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You know nobody from the outside that is non -Christian ever comes to a church and says, man did you see the way they did the

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Lord's Supper? Did you see the way they did that baptism? Did you see the way they sung that song? Did you see the way that preacher preached?

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Or you know the way the piano player played that song? Or you know all these little things that we look at internally.

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No, it's never that! It's you know Jesus Christ really wasn't God. And this historical blah, blah, blah proves it.

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You know you really can't trust your Bible. You really can't trust that that's what they go after. We're the ones that fight about all these other things, because they matter in some cases more than Christ.

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I don't care where the church is at. I don't care who goes there. It can be Hawaii. It can be in Honduras.

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It can be in Emporia. It can be in Bladenboro, North Carolina where I grew up, which is near White Lake, which

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I didn't even realize most of you guys that go to White Lake, I probably ran into you some point growing up and I never even knew it.

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Divine Providence maybe? I don't know. But I don't care where your church is at. If things matter more than people, and if anything you do takes the place of proclaiming

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Christ, you're wrong. You're in error. And that starts with me.

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It includes all of you and all of us together as a group. Which means if I'm doing something that's putting something in place of Christ, one of you needs to come up, shake me by the shoulders and say, have you lost your mind?

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That's not what we do. So, we don't proclaim self, we proclaim

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Christ. He says, admonish, exhort, warn, counsel, supply doctrinal spiritual substance.

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He says, teaching every man, direct, cause to learn, impart knowledge. Both admonishing and teaching present tense verbs.

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Y 'all know I love Greek verbs. Present tense verbs in the doctrinal. Which means, class, ongoing action.

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Ongoing action. It's expected this will be an ongoing thing. We don't just get,

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I'll pick on Dan because he's up here. Say, Dan comes in, he's a new Christian and we admonish and teach Dan and raise him up in Christ.

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Oh, our job's done. Oh, I forgot about all y 'all. Oh, man. Present tense verb says, we teach and admonish

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Dan. We teach and admonish Billy. We teach and admonish Gina. Everybody, Ms. Donna, John, everybody in the choir, we teach and admonish every person, every man, every woman, every child.

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Age is irrelevant. If you're a 90 year old and you just came to Christ, we need to teach and admonish you.

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If you're as little as little Lloyda and Hannah, and we have like four or five Hannah's, so I'll just include all the

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Hannah's. If you're little, or you're young, or if you're high school age, or college, or Shannon College, and young, all the way up to 90, 97, 100, 120, whatever.

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Learning never stops. There's never a point when you can say, I have arrived.

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I've learned everything I need to know, because it says, admonishing every man, teaching every man with all wisdom.

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All wisdom is God's wisdom. He's God, we're not. He's an infinite being.

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We are finite. He's all knowing, all powerful, all places at all times. We're none of those things.

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Our knowledge is limited. Our knowledge should and can be increasing, sanctification, continually be setting apart to God.

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But our knowledge, even in this, I don't know if you've really considered this before or not, this is something that I've started thinking about.

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You know you think about this, even in eternity, even in Heaven, when we've been there as the song said, 10 ,000 years, our knowledge will not be complete.

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There will never be a point where we will have the same level of knowledge and wisdom that God does, because even in eternity

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He will be God, and we won't. Oh, to think about the fact that for millions, and millions, and billions, and on, and ages to come we're going to get to see

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God face -to -face, and learn directly from Him without sin.

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Beautiful, with all wisdom. To present every man complete in Christ, complete, sometimes your

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English translations will use the word perfect. It means having reached it's end, full grown, complete in all it's parts, a fully developed

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Christian character. Every single Christian is somewhere different in their

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Christian life. I've said this many times, there are no super Christians. There are no Christians that have arrived to some place where, okay now until you get to my level, well you're not really useful.

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Well no, because you at some point were not at that point. It is on the ones that are more mature and have grown up in Christ to further humble themselves, and come alongside the ones that are more immature.

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Bring them along, raise them up, correct if necessary, sometimes as a last resort, keeping encouragement at the forefront.

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Obviously we deal with sin, and so on and so forth, it goes without saying, but you want to be encouraging. You want to be bringing along.

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And when they get to maturity, guess what? You don't celebrate yourself for having gotten them there, you still proclaim

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Him. If I ever have a quote -unquote successful ministry here, if you ever have a quote -unquote successful ministry here in the things that you do, there will never come a time where you can say, look what

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I have, aren't y 'all glad you have me? Because if you didn't have me, this, or that, or whatever it is would not have occurred.

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No, there will never be a time where I can stand before you, or any of you could come and stand here and say, look at what

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I've done. We need to be always saying, look at what He did.

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Which fuels us to our last point for this morning. Paul knew both the point of his ministry, and the power of his ministry.

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Verse 29, "'For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power which mightily works in me.'"

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The word labor there, to grow weary, work with effort, both bodily and mental alike, to be worn out, to be exhausted.

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This isn't just labor, you know you go to work, do your shift, come home, okay I'm good. No, this is labor to the bone.

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And I would venture to say that many of us, including me, don't do this.

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We labor up to the point in which I've paid my dues, or I've done what I should do, and I'm just as guilty as the next guy thinking, well you know, yeah

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I could probably do more, but I really just want to go do something else. We all do it.

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And Paul says, I labor to the point of exhaustion for my ministry. Striving is the word from which we get agonized into English.

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Striving, contend for a prize, struggle, agonize over. Guess what ladies and gentlemen, labor, striving, present tense.

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Once again, ongoing action. You don't get to labor really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard one day, oh,

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I'm good, somebody else's turn. No, it's every day, day after day, after day, after day.

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And is it going to be hard? Yes. Talk to people that have chronic illnesses, or diseases, or cancer, or some other thing that is going on, or job loss, or some problem here, or some problem there that just compounds things and makes it even harder.

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You think it's hard to get up that morning and serve Christ? Oh, yeah. Been there, done that, got a t -shirt, burned that t -shirt the very second

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I got it. I don't want any part of that. But you know what, that's life. It's this life.

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Next life, totally different scenario. Totally different story. This life, and people always say, why couldn't you just get rid of evil?

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Why can't you get rid of all the pain? Do you think you would cling and fall on your knees before your

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Savior as much as you would if you didn't have all those things coming up against you? I know I wouldn't. All the hardship, and the pain, everything

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I've been through, if those things hadn't have happened, you know what I'd be going around saying? Boy, look at what

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I've done. Look at what I've accomplished. Boy, look at the life I've made for myself.

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And you know what? There was a time in Andy's life where I did that. You all know the story, some of you better than others.

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But you all know the base story. Oh, boy, if I met that guy right now,

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I would not want to be around him. He's annoying, because he thought he was the best thing on planet earth.

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And everything he did came up roses. And everything he did was by his design, by his power.

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And then the Lord got a hold of him one day. It wasn't quite a Damascus Road experience. I'm no

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Apostle Paul, but I am a Christian. And God had got a hold of me and said, Son, you didn't do it.

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I did. And I've been bowing the knee to Christ, serving Him, proclaiming

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Him, putting Him first. And you know what I found out? I'm actually accomplishing a lot more than I ever did trying to do it on my own.

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Far more. Everything that I said I wanted, everything that I said I needed, everything that I said

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I wanted to accomplish never happened the entire time it was about me. The entire time

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I've been proclaiming Him, everything I've ever wanted to see happen in my life is happening. And you know what? It's because it isn't about Andy.

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It's about Christ. So, I say, if I see my ministry, you should see your ministry the way

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Paul saw his ministry. No matter how big or small the world outside looking in may see it.

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They may see the thing that you do in the service, or wherever it is, and say, it's not really that important.

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It's not that big a deal. Hogwash! It's not true. If you're doing it for Christ, and you're doing it with the only motivation to serve

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Him and please Him, I don't care what the world says, you will be rewarded in Heaven for it.

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And whatever crown, whatever reward you get, you will immediately lay it right back down at the feet of Jesus.

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Because you'll realize just as Paul did that the power and the energy you need to do it did not originate in yourself.

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He says, striving according to His power which mightily works in me. Now this, every

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English, NIV does a pretty good job, but every English translation gets a little clunky here because it's kind of a weird thing.

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I like the way the Numerical Standard puts it, His power which mightily works in me. But if you were to put this a little bit more literally, what the last half of verse 29 is literally saying is this, it is the energy of Christ working in us which empowers us for the work of ministry.

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So, let's follow the train one more time. It's the energy of Christ which works in us which becomes the power we need to do ministry.

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Hence, striving according to His power which mightily works in me. So, there are a lot of different ways you can say that and still capture the essence and the meaning.

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So, is it according to His or our power? Is it according to something natural?

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Is it according to something we bring to the table? No, my friends. One of the most powerful things a

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Christian can ever accomplish, one of the most powerful things Christianity can do, one of the most powerful things a church can do is to be completely sold out for Christ, and just completely

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His will and not my own, and say, Lord I will obey. I will do whatever you tell me to do, but I'm going to need your energy.

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I'm going to need your power. And I'm going to need it to mightily work in me because there is going to be a lot of things God is going to ask you to do despite your age, despite your role, despite your ministry.

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There's going to be a lot of times God's going to require something of you that is going to be so beyond your strength that you're going to know going into it, there's no way this will happen unless God's in it.

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Say, Andy, those times are tough. Those are hard. I don't know that I like facing those things.

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If you've never been through anything like that, I have a challenge for you today. Find somebody in this church that you know has been through something that required more strength than they could have ever mustered on their own.

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Take them out to lunch. Go by their house. Call them. Well, you might not go by their house, people don't really like it when you just show up.

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But call them. Get in touch with them. And say, how did you do it? And they'll tell you that some of the sweetest moments in their life, some of the closest moments with Christ, some of the best, most exhilarating, wonderful times in their

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Christian life have been those exact times when they were completely without strength on their own.

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But Christ energized them, and worked in them, brought them through. He accomplished

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His will in you and in me. And when you get done with it, you look back and you say, that was

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God. That was Jesus. That was the Lord. It wasn't Andy. It wasn't you.

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It wasn't Calvary Baptist Church. It was God. That's when it really matters, and that's when you truly understand that both the point and the power of ministry has nothing to do with you or I.

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You say, well Andy are we not important? No, that's not what I'm saying. We're very important. We're so important that Christ left

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Heaven's glory to die for us. But our part in the equation is our obedience to Christ, and proclaiming

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Him. So, the last thing I want to say to you about how Paul viewed ministry is this,

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I want to do it through the form of a question. So, overall, the summation of all things over the last three sermons we've had, how did

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Paul ultimately view ministry? As a way to proclaim

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Christ, to bring Christians to maturity in Christ, and to see the power of Christ working in His saints.