Sunday Morning, January 13, 2019 AM

What a joy it is, Father, to be brought here together. Thank you for arranging all of this as a good, heavenly

Father, meeting the needs of your children. Father, I pray that you would help us to appreciate what you have put in front of us, that we would be a people full of thanksgiving.

I pray that you would bring clarity to our minds about what it is that you've called us to do, the reason why you've saved us, brought us together as a church.

Lord, I pray that you would fill us with your affections, your priorities, we would be a people zealous for what you're zealous about.

And although we may, in our choices and in our words and in our interactions, we may seem far different from the people around us, the culture that we live in, but in doing so, we would be the salt and the light that you so desire us to be.

And I pray these things, looking only to Christ, the one with whom you are well -pleased, amen.

Well, we're going to continue on thinking together from the Bible about the purpose of our church, the purpose of Sunnyside Baptist Church.

There is a handout, I think we've ran out of them by now. So I'll put some more out about the purpose statement.

It's just a few paragraphs long and it details some of the truths in the

Bible about why we exist as a local church. What is it that we're supposed to be doing? And last week, we began to think about that by way of explaining the underlying assumptions of our church.

When we talk about the local church, we talk about God, we talk about the gospel, we talk about the person and work of Jesus Christ.

These things need to be explained. And we did our best to talk about the designer of the church last week, that Christ is the one who constructs his church.

So what Matthew 16 says, Christ is the one who directs his church, as we learn,

Matthew 28, 18 through 20. And that Christ is the one who supplies his church, as we've seen from Ephesians four.

And now we should put our attention to the design of the church. And for that, we could look at very great, many different passages.

But I've decided to look at Colossians one, verses three through 20.

So if you would please stand with me as I read this passage. And these are the words of our Savior and King Christ.

They are from the Apostle Paul by the power of the Holy Spirit. But this is the word of our Lord Christ to us, who we are to be as a church.

Beginning in verse three of Colossians one. We give thanks to God the Father of our

Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you. Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you, just as in all the world also, it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God and truth.

Just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow bond servant, who was a faithful servant of Christ on our behalf.

And he also informed us of your love in the spirit. For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the

Lord to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience, joyously giving thanks to the father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, for he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is also head of the body of the church, and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself will come to have the first place in everything, for it was the father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.

Through him I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Do any of you know what kudzu is?

I've got a few pictures of kudzu. We can take a look at, yeah.

Kudzu is known as the plant that ate the south. Why is that?

It can grow up to one foot a day. Its roots can reach 15 feet down into the earth at a four inch diameter.

Each root can supply 30 vines. There's no quick way to get rid of kudzu.

You have to repeatedly cut it off as low as you can, try to burn it when it comes back, set your livestock on it, hope they eat enough of it, and hope you get it before it produces seeds, which can lay fallow in the ground for years before they sprout.

Some people try to disc down to the roots as best they can and pour poison all over their land, trying to get rid of the kudzu.

Others have embraced kudzu. They make dishes out of it, baskets, even jams and jellies, some throw it into some honey.

But how in the world does such an invasive species take over whole swaths of our country?

Kudzu came from Japan. It was introduced through the 100th anniversary celebration of the

United States in 1876 at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, and Japan had a part in that, believe it or not, and they built themselves a traditional tea house and garden and featured this vine, kudzu.

And from there, it spread and ate the South. Now, Japan was not trying to ruin the agriculture of the

South. Why did they bring this vine over and promote it? Because its root and flower and leaf are used to make medicine.

Kudzu is used to treat alcoholism. It is used to correct headaches, upset stomach, dizziness, vomiting.

It's used for heart and circulatory problems, including high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, heart failure, chest pain, upper respiratory problems, including sinus infections, the common cold, hay fever, flu, swine flu, skin problems, such as allergic skin rash, itchiness, psoriasis.

You can also use it for weight loss, muscle pain, measles, dysentery, gastritis, fever, diarrhea, thirst, neck stiffness, and also you can use it to treat poliomyelitis and encephalitis and migraine, deafness, diabetes, nerve pain, vision loss.

Never knew that about kudzu, did you? So while everyone's trying to kill the stuff off, some of us could use it and feel better.

It's amazing the difference of opinion on kudzu. You literally love it or you hate it.

It's very hard to keep it at bay. It's very hard to get rid of it. And it seems like, you know, this plant, so quickly spreading, so thoroughly expanding in an area, taking over everything.

You see how it hangs from the trees and it just, it completely controls an area. It seems like a menace to many, if not most, but it turns out it could be a very gracious gift from God.

When I think of the gospel described here in Colossians 1, constantly bearing fruit and increasing, in all the world, even as it has been doing in you,

I think of kudzu, going, growing, expanding, controlling, spreading, taking over.

And here's some good news. As Christians, we're called to plant seed, are we not?

I've got good news. We're kudzu farmers. We're not amazing farmers.

We are not agrarian experts. We just have one powerful seed.

An amazing, amazing growth of the gospel. Now, our purpose described this way.

We must proclaim Christ from all the scripture until his spirit renews all

God's people into his image. We are to proclaim Christ. We are kudzu farmers.

We're not coming up with something inventive. We're not cobbling something together that is manmade.

We are taking a very powerful seed that God has designed and saying what he wants us to say in the spirit that he wants us to go.

And his purpose is achieved in the church. Let's think about the design of the church and how important it is for us to trust in the message that God has given us.

The design of the church. We see a lot of the design of the church in Colossians 1.

We see it all throughout the scriptures, but here in Colossians 1, we are reminded of the father's purpose for our church.

We are reminded of the son's proclamation through our church and the spirit's renewal that happens in our church and our faithfulness that we are called to.

I'm talking about the Trinity. Obviously, we mentioned God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit.

We cannot speak of the church and think about the design of the church without recognizing God in his Trinitarian economy, the way that he in three persons relates.

There are different types of planning conversations. Some planning conversations are scheduled.

You have to meet with people you work with. Sometimes you meet as a husband and wife.

There are some things you have to plan out. These scheduled things can be somewhat reluctant, maybe dull, maybe even combative, hopefully not.

But other planning conversations can be spontaneous, born out of a passion that you have with these other people for something good, and that there is a spontaneous, joyful, unified plan that just unfolds to some great good.

And when we read Psalm 10 and John 17 and Ephesians 1, we get glimpses, just bare glimpses into the triune conversation, which joyously and lovingly and unanimously design the church.

All right, we need to think about the father's purpose. The father's purpose in the design of the church is highlighted for us in our text by way of thanksgiving.

We see in verses three and 12 that thanks is given to the father.

Paul says, we give thanks to God the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 12, giving thanks to the father, he says.

And Paul is giving thanks to the father because it is the father's purpose that the son faithfully performs, and the will of the father and the work of the son are faithfully applied, powerfully applied by the

Holy Spirit in our world. So Paul can easily give thanks to God, the three in one, but he also gives thanks to the father to highlight the father's purpose in the design of the church.

And we need to think about that a little bit. That what the triune God says in creation, let us make man in our image.

He also says of the church, let us renew man in our image.

And this, the father's purpose is accomplished through the work of Christ applied by the power of the

Holy Spirit. The purpose of the father is highlighted by the thanksgiving in our text, but I think you can see very clearly what this all leads to in verse 18.

That everything that God has done in saving us, in giving us the gospel, in raising us up in Christ, and then really giving us to Christ is all summed up in verse 18 at the very end, and so that, the purpose statement, so that he himself, that Christ himself will come to have the first place in everything.

And this is what the father is after, that Jesus Christ will have the preeminence in everything.

Perhaps you've heard of the chief end of man from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. What is the chief end of man? It is to glorify

God and enjoy him forever. This never happens unless Christ is preeminent.

You never glorify God unless Christ is preeminent in your life. You never enjoy him either unless Christ is preeminent in your life.

I want us to pay attention to the father's purpose by looking at the gratitude that is in the text.

We give thanks to God the father for what he's up to and what is he up to, exalting Christ preeminently.

And he does that through the gospel going and the gospel growing, so that he will glorify himself through his son.

That's what we're after this morning. And we begin with gratitude. We give thanks to the father of our

Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 12, joyously giving thanks to the father.

I've been thinking a lot about thankfulness lately. Thankfulness is the second most important thing we do in prayer.

The second most abundant thing that should be present in our prayer is thankfulness. The first is adoration of God.

You realize that there is way more air out there than what you're breathing.

And there's far more of God to adore than is restricted to the blessings he has given us.

So there's always more of God to adore than there is to thank him for. That's why adoration should be the most abundant thing in our prayer life.

But then comes thankfulness. And we should be full of thankfulness and thanking God far more than we confess our sins.

And we ought to be confessing our sins. We have a lot of things to confess, to repent of, to flee.

But where sin abounds, grace far more abounds.

So we've got more to thank God for than we do to confess to him. And when you think about the nature and the character of God and all the blessings he's poured out upon us and the degree of our sinfulness, which is great to behold, we realize that all these three are to be far more in abundance in our prayers than the last thing, which is simply asking

God for stuff, is what we tend to do the most. But back to the illustration of the air.

There's far more air out there than what you're breathing. Sometimes you get some bad air, you know what

I'm saying? And you got a cough. That's not all the time, is it? That's kind of like confessing of your sin.

Every once in a long while, you wonder, am I getting enough air? Or I better get some more air.

That's your supplication, that's your asking from God. We are to ask God for things, but what does that compare to?

The confession of our sin and the thankfulness that we offer to God and the adoration that we offer to God.

Now this thankfulness, notice what Paul is thankful for. He is thankful both for the subjective and the objective.

The subjective is in verses four through six. He says, he gives thanks to God our

Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you since we heard, we're giving thanks to God since we heard about some things about you that make us thankful to God.

We've heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven of what you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you just as in all the world, it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing even as it has been doing in you since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God in truth.

When I say subjective, I'm not talking about the radical individualized mysticism that is plaguing our church.

I'm talking about subjective in the sense of, I didn't know which way to go right or left the other day, but I got goosebumps on my left arm so I knew

God was telling me to go this way. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the experiential, personalized transformation that occurs when the gospel is growing in your life, like kudzu taking over everything.

There's fruit bearing in your life when the gospel expands in your life and that fruit is listed as faith, love, and hope in our passage.

Faith, love, and hope. This fruit is observable.

It is experienced by all Christians and it is observable by others. It's not something that is radically privatized that nobody would ever know about it.

The faith, love, and hope is obvious to Epaphras who sent the word, who gave this message to Paul and Paul is thankful to God that these things are evident in their life.

Now, faith, love, and hope comprise the Christian experience, what we personally experience as followers of Jesus Christ.

And for these three, we ought to be thankful to God, faith, love, and hope.

Now, think of a river. Maybe this is a river that you have floated in a canoe, a river you have driven over on a bridge.

Think of the river. There are three things about this river. There is the shape of it, the banks, the bar, the sandbar, the rapids, the rocks, the shape of this river, the curvatures, what this river looks like.

There's the stuff of the river, there's the water that fills it up. And then there's the flow of the river, this thing's moving.

There's the three things about the river, is the shape, what fills it, and it's on the move. And that is faith, love, and hope.

Faith is the shape of our Christian lives like the way the shape of the river, the banks of the river. It defines us, defines the way we think, that we think about Christ in this way, we think about the world in this way that we relate to one another in a particular way because of the things that we believe, because of the way that Christ and his person and work, the truth of that shapes our thinking, shapes our value system, our faith is the shape of the

Christian life. And the love is like the water of the river. What water is to a river, love is to the

Christian life. If you don't have love, you don't have the Christian life.

That's basically the letter of 1 John in a nutshell. Loving God supremely, loving others rightly, and by the way we love

God and love others determines how we handle the things that God has entrusted to us. I mean, that's everything, is the love that we have as Christians.

And also the hope that we have a direction. Now if you have a shape in the ground, a depression in the ground, but no water, you've got a ditch.

If you have a depression in the ground, a hole in the ground that's full of water, but it's not moving, you have a pond.

Only when it's on the move do you have a river. And Christians, we're on the move, we have hope.

We have a purpose, we have a direction that we're supposed to be going. We're not supposed to be static and still and not going anywhere.

We're supposed to be doing everything that we do in our life with the hope of what is yet to come,

Christ's return, the setting of all things right. Are we involved in the greatest work that he is doing?

So Paul says, I'm thankful for the faith and the love and the hope that is in your life. And we need to be thankful for these things in our lives, but we have to be honest about it.

To be honest about it. Is that truly your experience, that you have faith in Christ, that you love

God, you love Christ, you love the saints? Is it true that you have hope, that you're moving in a direction that Christ has shown us, that the hope laid up for us in heaven, who is

Christ himself, our resurrected Lord and Savior, the firstborn of the resurrection, that we too have this hope.

Sometimes it's hard for people to come to church and sing hymns. And it's not just because the hymns are no longer the representative of our cultural milieu.

It's because the things that the hymns say challenge us to wonder, is this true of what

I'm saying? Am I really praising God from the heart? Or is this just, no, you're just going through the motions, just voicing the words.

It's hard to sing hymns because they're convicting. There are courses that can be the same way, but the songs that we sing can be very convicting sometimes.

Am I truly praising God and giving him thanks for these things? Am I really grateful for that?

Is this true of my life? We need to be honest in our thanksgiving.

And notice our thanksgiving is heavenward. Paul says, I give thanks to the Father, I give thanks to the

Father for the faith, love, and hope in the Colossians. Now, faith, love, and hope are intensely personal.

The things that you believe are so personally worked in to your inner person.

What you believe, the faith that you have is so worked inside of you that it's incredibly personal.

So also is your love. How much more personal can you get? The love that you have for others, the love that you have for God, and the hope, the sense of purpose, and direction, and destiny of your life, how personal these things are.

But Paul says, when it comes to faith in Jesus Christ, and the all -defining belief that comes from the all -defining direction in your life that you have when you have faith in Jesus Christ, your hope and the love that you have for God and for the saints, that when it comes to this faith, and this love, and this hope that is so personally experienced in your life, he says there's only one place that you give credit for, the only one person you give credit for, and that's

God. This is not something that the

Colossians came up with. Paul's not writing to the Colossians, thank you so much for validating my missional efforts in training men to plant churches, and you all have such faith, and you all have such love, and you all have such hope that you are really making this program fly.

He doesn't give thanks to them, but for them to God. We gotta give credit where credit is due, and that saves us from being hypocritical in our thanksgiving, but humble, it helps us to be humble in our thanksgiving.

You know, we don't wanna be like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable of saying, I thank you, God, that I'm so full of faith, and love, and hope, not like that poor sap who can't get it together.

That's not very good thanksgiving. That's hypocritical, prideful kind of thanksgiving, it's a showcasing of ourselves not really giving glory to God.

But our thanksgiving is a showcasing that thanksgiving should be more like what Paul says, I am what I am by the grace of God, and that's all that I am.

He gets all the credit. We gotta be thankful for the subjective, the experience of the

Christian life, but also thankful for the objective. Notice that Paul gives thanks to God not only for the faith, love, and hope in the life of the

Colossians, but he gives thanks to God for what God has done to save them.

Not the experience of their salvation, but what God did objectively to save them. Verses 12 through 14.

It is giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

For he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

So what Paul is saying, I'm thankful to the Father for these things that God has done, and he lists doctrines of salvation.

These are the things that the Colossians had heard, that they had learned, that they had understood.

Paul gives God thanks for these objective truths. These objective truths are about the

Christian status, not our Christian experience. These things are true whether you feel like they're true or not.

These things are true no matter what you're thinking in the moment. These doctrines of salvation should not be treated like detached reference material, something that you go look up in a dictionary from time to time.

The doctrines of salvation are also not to be vague, unclear murmurs about, oh, yes, well,

God loves everyone, we're all his children, and we all go to a better place. But the doctrines of salvation are vital, clarifying, specific, and useful in a

Christian life. I want you to think about the status that is mentioned here.

We begin with rescued, verse 13. He rescued us from the domain of darkness.

Here's some good news, Christian. You have been rescued from the domain of darkness, from the authority of the enemy.

You have been snatched out of his hands. You have been cut free from his ropes.

You have been broken out of his prison. You have been rescued from the authority of darkness.

This is what God has done through Christ. Jesus says he binds the strong man and then plunders his possessions.

Also, we are transferred, not just rescued from the authority of darkness, but transferred.

It says in verse 13, transferred to the kingdom of his beloved son.

Transferred to the kingdom of his beloved son so that once that we were under the bondage of darkness so that we were always against Christ, that we would join the nations enraging against Christ.

Now, having been rescued from that, we are transferred to the kingdom of his beloved son so that we are subject to the authority of Christ and rejoicing in that authority.

That there is a full transition. And being in his kingdom, being in Christ's kingdom means that in Christ we have redemption.

We have salvation. We have the forgiveness of our sins. We are bought and paid for.

That's what redemption means, forgiveness of our sins. We are accepted to God, not guilty.

Our sins removed from us as far as the East is from the West. Here's good news.

Here are these objective truths. No matter what you're feeling and experiencing in the particular day that you're going through Christian, you have been rescued from darkness and you have been transferred to the kingdom of Christ.

That word transferred in the Greek was used to describe the practice of Roman generals who had had to reconquer a very tough area, a volatile area, a place full of people who were so tied to their land they would never give up fighting.

A place where insurgencies would break out again and again against the Roman empire. And so the

Roman general made a decision. These people will no longer live here and he would take them all by force and he would move them to some other land and settle them there and thus endeth the insurgency.

That transfer, that forcible relocation, that word is what's word is here.

We have been delivered from the domain of darkness, brought in to the kingdom of the victorious

King, Jesus Christ. Now this is an explanation. Verses 13 and 14 are explaining something of verse 12.

We are to give thanks to the father. Not only has he rescued us and transferred us, but we give thanks to the father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

And how in the world he would ever qualify a group like us to be inheriting what the saints inherit in the realm of light is explained by the rescuing and the transferring.

Verses 13 and 14. So this is really the third thing. We are rescued, we are transferred, and we are qualified for inheritance of saints in light.

We were in darkness, now we're in light. We were rebels against God, now not only are we subjects of the kingdom of his beloved son, we are counted as his beloved children as well.

You don't get an inheritance unless you're an heir. This is the language of adoption.

What do we do with these objective truths of salvation about our status?

We need to appropriate them by faith, first of all. Too often we berate ourselves for the lack of experience.

When we do so, we tend to forget what is true, whether we feel like it or not.

There are many times in every single day, I do not feel like God the

Father would ever say of me, welcome, I'm so glad you're here.

You ever feel like that? But the objective truth of the matter is that I've been rescued and transferred and qualified.

We need to appropriate these truths by faith and this immediately makes it applicable to our prayers that we pray this way.

Yes, when we're praying and adoring God, when we pray and thank him, let us thank him for these truths.

And sometimes we don't feel what we know that are true. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

And when we appropriate these things by faith and when we apply them in our prayers, do you know what happens?

The objective truths about our salvation become the snowmelt for our subjective experience of salvation.

When we hold fast to the objective truths of our salvation, justified, being sanctified, we will be glorified.

All the truths of the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the sovereign grace of God, the fact that he loves us as his own children because he's adopted us, that he's filled us with the

Holy Spirit, all of these objective truths, when we mount them up like heaps of snow upon the mountainside, they melt in the glory of God and become snowmelt for our river.

And it's the faith, love, and hope experience that we enjoy.

We ought to be grateful. We ought to be grateful. Paul is grateful to the

Father for the subjective and objective parts of salvation. And why does he highlight this?

Because when we are thankful for these things, when we are thankful for the salvation that God has brought to us, this forms us, this changes us, this helps our values to be in line with God.

When we are grateful for the going and the growing of the gospel, we ourselves will be involved in the going and the growing of the gospel.

Notice the gospel going in verses five through seven. First of all, it is verbal.

In verse five, we see it's a word of truth. And it speaks of the gospel, which is literally a good message.

And these things are verbal. Words are necessary. We hear that Colossians heard this word.

It was spoken to them. It was shared with them. They received this message. They understood it and they learned it.

So it is verbal. We're losing that as the church moves along.

We're losing the verbal necessity of the gospel. But I want you to see what a generous communication goes on here between Epaphras and the

Colossians. How he spoke to them again and again and helped them to learn and help them to understand so they would hear it again and again.

What a generous kind of communication. Why do you have to say things over and over, by the way?

I'll ask the wives. Why do you have to say things over and over again? My husband is hard of hearing, right?

Is that the only way? Yeah. Well, you know, it would be a very gospel thing for you to love the hard of hearing.

All of us are hard of hearing. And God says his gospel again and again and again and again.

That's how the gospel goes. That's how it grows in our life. It's because of the generous communication.

Also notice how powerful this gospel is that goes. This is what reminds me a little bit of the kudzu. It remains.

It sticks with them. Verse six, it says, which has come to you.

In the ancient Coptic translation of this, they use the word for abiding and dwelling, meaning this stuff has come to you and it sticks with you.

You can't shake yourself from it. You can't get away from it. It remains and it's global.

Verse six, just as in all the world, this gospel goes anywhere.

It's not indigenous to one place. It's transcendent to all the cultures. Look how powerful it is.

It can go anywhere and notice that it's constant. It is constantly bearing fruit.

It just doesn't stop. It just keeps on going. It's fruitful. It is constantly bearing fruit.

It's like a tree planted by rivers of water. It's spreading. The word increasing means spreading.

It's spreading in our lives and it's spreading in the world around us and it is effective because it does not fail.

It has been doing this in you since the day you heard of it. It didn't fail. The work that God began in them continued.

Look how powerful the gospel is. So why do we distrust it? Why do we distrust it?

I've lost count of the many times people have said that in very educated credentialed people, influential people have said that we've got to find a different way, a better way, a more contextualized way of preaching the gospel.

Look, we don't have to do anything to the kudzu. It's just gonna grow. We don't have to do anything to the gospel to make it better.

We don't have to add to it. We don't have to take away from it. We have to actually sow it. And if we sow it, then

God promises his work will be done. Notice that the gospel going is a personal thing.

Paul says over and over again, you heard it, you learned it, you understood it. It was a personal going of the gospel.

In fact, in verses three through eight, 10 times Paul talks about you and your, very personal.

And Epaphras came himself to teach them. It was a very personal thing. I'm not against the use of tracts or books or any other kind of impersonal media to spread the gospel, but you gotta see that it's a personal thing.

It's a personal thing. And Paul was always trying to be extremely personal in the letters that he sent. Remember that Satan deals personally.

Have you ever found anything in the Bible where Satan deals impersonally with somebody? He deals personally.

The enemy deals personally with people and we better too. Have a better reason to deal personally with folks in the going of the gospel.

Christ did. Christ dealt personally with people. Thirdly, the gospel going is cooperative.

Verse seven, Paul says, you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow bond servant, who is a faithful servant of Christ on our behalf.

So here is our fellow slave. We're all in this together, all following our master,

Jesus Christ, and he's helping us. Paul didn't have to do it all. We can't do it all.

It is cooperative. And as we unify in this, Christ has us doing his father's will by the spirit's power.

When we say that it is personal, it doesn't mean we're doing it in isolation. Do it cooperatively.

Thirdly, the gospel is growing, is growing. We're just never done.

And that's, you know, every time the Christian cake is taken out of the oven, the middle is still squishy and it hasn't pulled away from the sides and it's just never done.

Put it back in. None of us here are done. We'll die and be present, to be absent from the body is to be present with the

Lord and we're still not done because we're gonna wait for the resurrection of the body. Well, what are we gonna grow in?

We're gonna grow in the knowledge of God, verses nine through 11. For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the

Lord to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

So what Paul is saying, you need to grow in what you know about God. You're not done.

We need to grow in our understanding of the will of God, the direction that he has for us in our life. And the will is not secret that he has for us.

The will is obvious, it's in the word. We need to grow in the wisdom of God, the order that we are to implement in our lives.

We are to grow in our understanding of God, the way that he has designed us. We need to grow in our understanding of the knowledge of God, this ultimate reality in which we live.

What did Jesus say? This is eternal life that they may know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. To know him, to understand, to embrace his wisdom.

Also the goodness of God. We need to grow in the goodness of God. For this reason also, he says, we pray for you so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the

Lord, pleasing him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God.

So Paul is saying, I'm praying for you that you will, that the gospel will grow in you, that you will grow in your code of conduct, that you're gonna walk worthy of your master, your king,

Jesus Christ, that as you walk, that he will find many things about you that are commendable, that will be pleasing to him, that as you grow, you're not gonna be just kind of a one -trick pony, but you're gonna have all these different things that you can do for Christ, that you'll be abounding in every good work, that you'll be comprehensive as the gospel grows in you.

And that not just that you would have the right code of conduct and that Christ would be pleased with you and that you would be comprehensive in your

Christian life, but you'd be comprehending about what is going on, that you would get it.

And as his goodness is mediated through us, his glory will be manifested in us.

Also that he wants us to grow in the strength of God. Verse 11, strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience.

You see, these are the ways that we can grow. We can always grow in our knowledge of God. We can always grow in the goodness of God. And we can always grow in the strength of God, becoming more resolute and more steadfast.

And this is the way that Paul prays. You know, this is the way we ought to pray. This is the way we should pray for one another.

If we wanna be about the father's purpose for our church, if we want to proclaim

Christ from all the scripture until his spirit renews all God's people into his image, we gotta pray this way. We gotta pray this way.

Too often our prayers are simply for release valves from the pressure we're under. That's not what he's praying for here.

Do we see how Paul is praying for the church? We need to be praying for one another in this way, because this lines up with the purpose that God has to glorify himself through the church.

And that's really what verses 15 through 20 are about. After hearing that the gospel is going and growing, that we are grateful to the father for saving us, thoroughly saving us, that we are given to Christ.

Why is that such a big deal? Because Christ is such a big deal. He's the centerpiece of all of history.

And the father's purpose in giving us to Christ is so that he himself will come to have the first place in everything.

This is the gospel glory. You know, another way to say what our purpose is, is this way.

As the father exalts the son incarnate by the spirit's proclamation of the gospel through our church, we are renewed into the image of God, manifesting his glory.

This is the father's purpose. Let's close with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for the time that you've given us in your word.

I pray that it has been clarifying. I pray that it has been encouraging and helpful to our walks with Christ.

I pray that you would continually work your will in us, that the gospel would go through us and grow in us for your glory.