Colossians - The 4 Pillars Of The Christian Life

God Centered Theology

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I want to talk to you today about the four pillars of the Christian life. Now, I probably should have titled this a little differently.

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These are probably not the only four pillars, these are just the four pillars that I believe show up here in Colossians.

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And I think they are pertinent because Paul has just spent a lot of time in chapter 3 talking about how as Christians we need to direct our minds towards those things above, and how we need to, because we've put off the old self and put on the new self, we need to put to death the sins in our earthly body, and the things that we need to be putting on as Christians.

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And this section of Scripture is one of my favorites in all of Scripture because I really think that he puts a good bow on his thought here because these pillars he looked at, when you think of a pillar, and it is no mistake that Samson, when he tore down that structure, he went over to where he could put his hands on the pillars, and took them down.

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And that's what took everything else down. A pillar is a structure, usually wood, metal, some other material that is meant to be there as a support.

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And usually if nothing else holds, a pillar will. You could say pillars, you could even say the walls of the

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Christian life. Either way you want to go is fine. I think pillar conveys the strength and the urgency in Paul's writing here.

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But our foundation, we find this in 1 Corinthians 3, the foundation is Jesus Christ.

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And no other foundation can any man lay but that which Jesus Christ has already laid. So, whether you want to use the metaphor of the house, whether you want to use an understanding of some structure that involves pillars, the foundation is the same.

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The foundation is Jesus Christ, that is on which we stand. Romans chapter 5 says, we are justified and it is this grace on which we stand, the grace of Jesus Christ.

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That is how we stand. It is how we stand firm in the spiritual war, Ephesians chapter 6. And all throughout the

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New Testament it is Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. That is what we are to point the world to, is what we are to point ourselves to.

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It is Jesus Christ that is our identity. He is our life. His Spirit has been sent to us in the third person of the

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Trinity. It is upon that foundation that we rest. If people want to talk a lot about resting in God, and resting in Jesus, and one of the foundational precepts of the understanding of the

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Sabbath rest, or the rest that we have in Jesus, is one thing that as Christians is very hard for us to accept.

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See, resting in Jesus means that you are resting in the fact that Jesus by Himself is sufficient.

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He is everything you need. If you didn't have a house to live in, if you didn't have clothes on your back, if you didn't have all these things that He obviously promises to bless us with, if all you were were some naked person out in a field somewhere, if you had

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Jesus you'd have everything you needed. It's a little bit of an extreme example, but I think it makes the point.

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We put so much emphasis on these worldly material things, and clothes, and houses, and cars, and jobs even, and all these things.

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And churches even do it sometimes. They think, you know we just get the right pastor, we get the right Sunday school teacher, we have the right people in our church.

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That magic bullet syndrome is going to fix everything. No, it won't.

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There's no magic bullets in Christianity. You know what there is? Hard work, consistency.

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The Word of God taking root in your life, and over time producing further sanctification in Christ's likeness.

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And it takes time. What I love about this section of Scripture is that so much of life is hard.

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So much of the Christian life isn't easy. There is trial and persecution. We need God's grace in our daily walk.

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And it is these four pillars we find in Colossians that I truly believe, without a shadow of a doubt, will hold you up each and every single time.

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You see unlike pillars that man may create, unlike pillars that man builds and puts in buildings and different structures, as strong as they may be it is still a created thing.

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It can be destroyed. It can be burned to the ground. 70

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AD the unthinkable happens when Jerusalem is burned to the ground. Unthinkable!

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We would think 9 -11 could be unthinkable, but it happened, did it not? You can go to New York and verify it.

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But the reason these pillars will not fade, the reason they stand, the reason that they will never fail you is because they are not created pillars, they are eternal pillars.

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They are God -ordained, God -created, God -instituted pillars. And so we are going to look at the first one, pillar number one we find in verse 14, and this is the pillar of love.

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It says, and then we just came off the section where we talked about the renewal, and we talked about remember the heart of compassion, kindness, soul, and so forth.

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And he goes and he says, well beyond all these things put on love.

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And in case you haven't guessed it yet, yes this is agape love. Put on love, the preferential love, the love that says,

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I'm going to prefer you over myself. I'm going to meet your needs even if it means mine are not met.

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I'm going to put you over me. I'm going to humble myself and raise your needs as being more important. Seeing you as being more important than me.

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That love, we see this in marriages, the serving of the needs. I'm to love my wife as if I love my own body.

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And her subjection and her following of my leadership of the head of the home is in response to me correctly loving her as Christ loved the church.

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And that balance and that consistency there, that agape love, put on that kind of love.

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The 1 Corinthians 13 love. The John 13, 34 -35, this is the way the world will know you are my disciples by the way you love each other.

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Nothing in that verse despite how it is preached says anything about how we love the world. Now, obviously we should love our neighbors, and demonstrate godly love to those that are not saved, and to those we encounter.

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But the context in John 13 is how we love other Christians. See, the world is used to hatred.

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The world is used to backbiting. The world is used to all these kinds of sins. But Jesus said, the way the world is going to know there is something different about you, the way the world will know that you are truly different, the way the world will know that you are truly

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Jesus Christ's disciples is not in how you love them, but how you love each other. And Paul echoes

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Jesus' words when he says, put on love. Why?

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It's the perfect bond of unity. This word bond means glue.

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It's like glue. Think about glue. Anybody know what Gorilla Glue is? Let me tell you something that you already know.

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Don't put it on something if you don't want it to stick. This is not a public service announcement for Gorilla Glue, but it works.

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And in typical Andy -like fashion, back in Fuquay Verena we had a mailbox that was blown off of the post.

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And of course they said, well there is some way you do it where you've got to get a new one, and the bolts fit in the bottom, all of a sudden. I'd had duct tape wrapped around it for a couple of weeks, and by that time

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Gina's like, look, we ain't going to have no mailbox with duct tape on it, you need to make it work.

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All right, I'll fix her little red rag. She came on one day, you fixed it.

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I'm like, nah, a lot of Gorilla Glue fixed it. Let me tell you something, I tried to pull it off of there.

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And I'm not the weakest, I'm not the strongest, nor the weakest guy, but I put some effort. That jugger didn't move.

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Gorilla Glue works. It works. And it don't take much either.

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So tread carefully if you use Gorilla Glue. You have been warned. All of you in this room have been warned.

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So if you get Gorilla Glue on your hands or something, it's on you. The same kind of bond that Paul is talking about, even though Gorilla Glue did not exist at this time.

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You want to know what's going to bond and unify a group of Christians more than anything else, just like Gorilla Glue?

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Love. You know what kind of pillar is going to hold you up in the hardest moments of your life?

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When you really feel like you would rather just give up, and some of us have probably even thought, Lord just take me home now.

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I don't even want to get up and face the next day. Love. And it is amazing how

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God directs the hearts of Christians to come to you at just the point in time when you feel like nobody cares, nobody loves, and you get an email, a text, a call, somebody stops by your house, whatever it is in your life, you know how these things happen.

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And that love of Christ demonstrated in and through your Christian brothers and sisters towards your direction at the right time just when you need it.

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Now, sometimes that love is going to be demonstrated, and all you are going to be is in a prayer closet somewhere, and the Holy Spirit wraps

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His arms of love around you. And you know what, that's just fine too. But there is just, and this is one of those things as pastors, you think, man they expect me to have all the words, and preach eloquently.

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I don't even know how to describe this. There is just something about the love from your

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Christian brother and sister. I've got people on Facebook that I'll probably never meet in this lifetime.

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People like this guy named John, and a guy named Matt in Arizona, and these other preacher friends of mine that I talk to, and I'm getting to know.

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They've got this guy that rebounded a Bible for me. I probably may not ever meet him this side of eternity.

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And I was telling them, I said, you know as much as social media takes a bad rap, and rightfully so in some cases,

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I still wouldn't want to be without it. There is something about that bond, that gorilla glue that exists between Christians, even between Christians that I've never met.

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You ever, I don't know if this has been your experience, but you ever walk into a Wal -Mart, why does all my illustrations end up at Wal -Mart?

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God help me, I need repentance and faith in Christ. You ever walk into a Wal -Mart, and you start talking to somebody, and somehow in the conversation it becomes apparent that both of you are

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Christian. And if you could right now, I know I'm doing the preaching thing, but if we were having a discussion, all of you could tell me right now about how the air just changes.

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You just relax. You feel like, I don't know how to put it into words, but you feel like family.

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You know them. Am I the only one that's crazy? It's real, because it's the bonding, it's the bond of unity.

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What does he say? It's the perfect bond of unity. You can't speak it, you just know it.

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It's a pillar that will hold you up, the pillar of love. Number two, we have the pillar of peace.

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Verse 15 it says, "'Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.'" Now this word rule here is sort of like, anybody got any baseball fans?

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The umpire. Now, I know the umpire gets spit in his face, and gets yelled at a lot, and they do this thing with the dirt and throw their, but aside from all that, the umpire is there to be an arbiter.

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He's there to make decisions, to make a rule. It would be a lot like Judge Sherrod, and judges, they make rules and decisions to rule over, to rule.

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And it says, "'Let the peace of God rule in your heart.'" What this means is that the very peace, and Paul we've already covered this, we're not going to rehash it here.

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But the very peace of Christ that we have as Christians that Paul covers earlier in the book of Colossians. We're enemies with God.

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We're rebellious. We're sinful creatures. We're dirty, rotten sheep. We're sinful creatures, and we're saved, and we're made at peace with God.

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And oh, the thought that man could be at peace with his eternal Creator, despite our sin.

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That peace that we have, that is the thing that is to be the deciding factor in how we interact with each other.

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The peace of God, the peace that we have with God should be demonstrated and lived out in our interactions with each other.

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And it's hard. We all emotionally react sometimes. And we talk about this last time, that revengeful, retribution feeling of,

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I'm going to show them. I'm going to put Gorilla Glue all on their hands and do some mean things. Look, we're sinful, okay?

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It's what we think. God's Word says, no, let the peace of Christ rule, make decisions, be the arbiter, be the deciding influence in your life, and how you act and react.

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One of my pastor buddies told me recently, says, you know I'm realizing so much in my Christian life that you can't control how people sin against you.

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Because we would all love to just eradicate sin, and nobody ever does anything mean to us, or you know on the job, or at home, or wherever we find ourselves.

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You can't control that. Now, I mean there are certain things you can do to probably keep it from being worse. But you really can't control someone sinning against you.

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But if the peace of Christ is ruling in your heart, you can control how you respond to it.

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You can control your response. You can control how you respond to that person, and the response is in love.

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And this doesn't excuse, or mean that there is not a time for drawing lines and saying, if you have a particular relationship with someone, and they are either your accountability, or you are in accountability for them, you need to sometimes call people to the carpet and say, look,

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God's Word says this, why are you acting this way? Why is your marriage not like it should be? Or why is your life on the job not looking the way it should?

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Or whatever the situation. But even that in a confrontation, or in bringing someone to God's Word and telling them the truth can be done in love, and the peace of Christ can be the deciding influence.

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Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.

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We have local churches. Our local body of believers is called Calvary Baptist Church, and that is true, and we are our own body.

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But we are also part of the larger universal body of Christians which is called the Church today.

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That is actually the original meaning of the word, Catholic. It is not as Catholic Church has become today, but the actual textbook definition of the word,

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Catholic, is universal. It just meant simply when it was first being used in early Church, it just simply meant the

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Church at large, a universal Church. But we are called in that unity in one body, and He says, and be thankful.

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And we will come back to that in a minute. But let the peace of Christ rule in your heart. Number three,

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Scripture, the Word of God. Another great pillar to support us and hold us up, verse 16, let the

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Word of Christ, which we know from John chapter 1 it says, John is the unique in his writing, and he calls and refers to Jesus Christ as the

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Word, the Logos. And he identifies the Logos as Jesus Christ. So, every Word of God is

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Jesus' words. And he says, let the Word of Christ richly dwell within you.

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This word dwells steadfast, unmovable. The verse in Corinthians where it talks about be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the

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Word of the Lord, and in the work of the Lord. That's where this comes from. Paul is just the most consistent theologian

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I think that's probably ever lived, aside from Christ Himself. You read his works and it is the same stuff on every page.

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And he says here, let it be steadfast. Don't be moved. That anchor point, that place of truth, don't be moved from that.

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Dwell in it. Live it. Let it be your environment. Let it be your culture.

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Let it be everything that you are. Let it dwell richly within you.

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With all wisdom and teaching, the imparting of knowledge, the understanding of knowledge, the using of the knowledge.

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The whole thing they say, the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is knowing something. Wisdom is that knowledge in action.

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All those things working together. It's one thing to know the right, it's another thing to do the right. Christians aren't those that just simply know the way.

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We walk the way. We live in it because it's everything that we are. Christ's righteousness is credited to our account.

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When I stand before God, I'm going to be viewed by God as perfectly righteous in His Son.

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And it is to dwell in us. It says, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

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Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, all kinds of music, all kinds of instruments. Despite the typical version of a

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Southern Baptist Church, I'm sorry, but you can have drums in a church and you will not catch on fire.

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The church won't burn to the ground. Nobody will run screaming and die of heresy. You can have guitars.

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You can have harps. You can have pianos. If you want to get up here with a rock and just beat on that, if you are doing it for Jesus, it is probably okay.

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It's all about the heart, it's not about the instrument. I long for a day when we get past some of this pharisaical nonsense that says, you can only dress this way.

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You can only talk this way. You can only sing and play a piano this way, or play an instrument this way.

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You can only read your Bible this way. You can only pray this way. On, and on, and on, and on it goes.

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Where does it end? Freedom in Christ. If your freedom is playing a drum, have at it.

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If it is playing a keyboard, if it is standing up here and singing a cappella, have at it. It doesn't mean there is not order in the house of the

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Lord. Those things are important, obviously. But we need to be careful that we do not put our

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Sanhedrin pharisaical hat on and say, well that's not how I would do it. Who cares?

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When it really comes down to it, if that is your attitude, who cares? The image of God, the likeness of God is in that person.

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And if they are living and walking after righteousness, and they feel that God has so moved them to operate in a certain way, if it's not against revealed

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Scripture, who are you or I to tell them any different? If the

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Word of Christ is dwelling rich within them, and they are in conformity to the Word of God, and they are walking in submission, as long as the

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Scripture doesn't mandate against it, let them walk.

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Let them be who they are. Because that's a pillar that will hold you up. Because everybody's got an opinion.

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Turn on the TV, everybody's got an opinion. And everybody is going to want to tell you how you should live, and why you should dress, and why you should talk, and why you should do what you do.

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Stand on the Word of God. Say, when I go home at night I rest my head on the pillow, and I know that I didn't sin, that there was sin in my life that day,

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I repented of it. And I'm walking in righteousness, I'm discovering my gifts, I'm developing my gifts, and I'm using my gifts for the body, and for the benefit of others.

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And I'm walking in love, and letting the peace of Christ rule in my heart. And I'm standing on the

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Word of God, there is nothing in Scripture that I'm in error. Go walk. Live in that freedom.

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If you have love, if you have peace, if you are in sound doctrine, and you are in sound and under submission of the

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Word of God, God has no dealings with you. God would say, amen.

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Go, do it. There are churches I grew up in, and I know this because I won't say who it was, or where it was, but I've sat in front of a pastor that told me they stopped giving money to a missionary because they didn't use the

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King James Version of the Bible. Because they are a King James only fundamentalist church, and we can't have a missionary attached to us that is not a

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King James onlyist. Jesus didn't write in 1600's English.

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Languages change and evolve over time. I'm not going to get into that whole thing I have taught on this before. Be very careful not to go on my emotional rant here.

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But that's wrong, ok? That's not a reason to stop supporting someone. It's what we do, isn't it?

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We determine someone's worth by whether or not they stack up to how we would do things. Do we not do that?

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We do. That's not letting the Word of Christ ritually dwell within you.

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Our unity is not in external conformity. It's in sound doctrine.

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It's in the Christ who saved us. And if we are standing on the deity of Christ, authority of Scripture, justification by faith, the

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Trinity, and all those foundational and definitional issues, the rest of it is for diversity of gifts, diversity of effects.

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There is uniqueness in every one of us. We need to be promoting that, and pushing that, uplifting that, and walking in that.

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Our last pillar today, oh, did I get one wrong? Yep, I think

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I put three on both. I didn't change a number. That's actually supposed to be a number four, so disregard. Pillar number four, thankfulness.

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Verse 17 says, "'Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the

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Father.'" Now, go back with me and notice this last pillar is woven through all of this, ok?

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So, in verse 15 he says, at the end of it, be thankful. At the end of verse 16 it says, "'With thankfulness in your hearts to God.'"

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Verse 17, "'Whatever you do, word, deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.'"

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Why? Because it is giving thanks through Him, through Jesus Christ to God the

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Father. If you could sum up the Christian life, it is a life of gratitude.

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We don't do what we do to earn the Father's favor. We do what we do in response to the

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Father's favor, and not this Joel Stein brand of favor. I'm talking about the grace and mercy of God that died for you, that shed

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His blood for you, that saved you, that sent His Spirit to indwell you, that is going to help you walk and live the

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Christian life. And we do the things that we do because we are His workmanship. And we do them in response, and in thankfulness, and out of the heart of gratitude, towards God.

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Giving thanks through Him to God the Father, pillar of thankfulness. Why is this pillar so important?

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Have you ever noticed the difference between a thankful person, and an unthankful person?

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Someone that is marked by gratitude, and someone that is not. Do you think if you are unthankful, if you are not filled with gratitude, is that going to keep you going when times are hard?

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No. That's like the one in the Gospels where it talks about the one that built on the sand versus on the rock.

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It won't hold you up. Thankfulness will. A proper biblical gratitude will anchor you in the hardest of times.

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Because if you don't think they are going to come, you are lying to yourself. You are in denial. You are not looking at reality.

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And some of them always do the whole thing, why is God a little evil? I've said it many times. Who are you going to believe more?

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What's going to impact you more? Someone standing up here and say, oh, my life is so easy. I have all this money.

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Nothing bad ever happens. Oh, by the way, go serve God. Or someone tells you problem after problem, trial after trial, persecution after persecution, and their need, and their desperate need for the grace of God in their life.

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And how He showed up for them time and time again. And He says, not I, but your will. And we see how

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God's grace works in their life. And they say, even in those hardest of moments I find myself with thanksgiving, and gratitude in my heart for my

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Savior. Who does that? Christians.

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Christians do that. People that have the indwelling Holy Spirit do that.

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Why? Because they are thankful to a Savior that didn't leave us to ourselves, and He entered

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His very own creation to die for us, so that even while we were still sinners,

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He died for us, and He saved us, and He set us free. Our whole entire

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Christian experience, our whole entire Christian life, from the youngest among us, all the way up to Brother Pear himself.

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I don't know if he, and Ethel Golden was our oldest member, he may be the oldest now. All the way up to the 90's.

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And if God so chooses to allow it, if you go into your 100's, however old you have, how much time you have on this earth is irrelevant to the pertinent matter of the day that you can be thankful.

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And that thankfulness is contagious. You get in a room full of people bitter, or full of people that are just ungrateful, don't have gratitude, and that person walks in and they say, well,

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I'm just thankful God woke me up today. It's like being in a dark room and someone turns on the lights, and you are like, boy do

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I want some of what they got. If you want joy, if you want unity, if you want to see this church completely turn and pour you upside down, be thankful.

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Have gratitude. Let love, and peace, and the Word of God, and thankfulness dwell and rule your hearts.

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I don't know any of your stories. I know some of you, and some better than others depending on how much time

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I've had to talk to you, and how much time you've spent talking to me. We all, it's the same in everybody's life, you know certain people better than others.

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One thing I do know is that none of you know me like Gina does. And I know what I've been through, and I know how

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God's pruned me and changed me. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. Boy, it ain't easy saying that when you are going through it.

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What do we all do when we are going through it? Lord, take this trial away. And you know what?

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I'm just going to do one of those pastor transparency things for a minute. The book of James is just, you know what actually

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I may preach that one next because it troubles me so much. And I think it is good as a pastor to preach those things you have trouble with.

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The book of James just throws me through a loop. And some of you probably know where I'm going with this.

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Take joy in trials? That's got to be wrong, right?

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Surely that was not really what He meant to say. Because is that what we do?

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Is that what I do? No. I think of every possibility that God could have went to make this not happen.

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If you had just done this, God, this wouldn't have happened. If you had just done this, I wouldn't be dealing with this right now. Instead of taking joy in the fact that it is going to produce perseverance, and endurance, and make me stronger.

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And there may be somebody in front of me one day that says, Andy, I'm going through this, what do I do? Let me tell you what

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God did through me. Four pillars. And my friends, they are stronger than anything aside from the foundation of Jesus Christ Himself that you can have in this world.

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Hold on to them. Cling to them, because they will hold you up and support you every single time.