Grace and Peace

Christ’s Sufficiency Against False Additions

Well, turn your Bibles, if you would, to Colossians chapter 1. This morning, if God wills, I will begin a short series in the book of Colossians, which I hope to go through in eight messages, morning, afternoon, for this Sunday and the next three.

Following.

And obviously, if I'm going to go through so rich and complete a letter as that in eight messages, we're going to leave a lot on the table. But God willing, what we say will be according to what the Apostle Paul had for us.

So I'd ask you this morning, is Christ sufficient for you? Is Christ enough? Is Christ enough to keep you from falling away from the pure and simple gospel that He has given us and by which we've been saved?

Is Christ sufficient? We like to have superlatives added to that. He's overabundantly sufficient. He's incredibly more than we could ever expect or imagine, and these are true enough. But it becomes almost a contest of who can come up with the most adjectives and the most superlatives and the most glorious language.

And for these eight messages, I'm simply going to say Christ is sufficient. He is sufficient to accomplish that for which He was sent. Now, if we want to add the superlatives, that's great. I think they're wonderful.

But for these messages, we will call Him sufficient because that is Paul's point to the Colossians as they were being helped and motivated to resist these incursions against the purity and simplicity of the gospel.

We'll get to that as we go through this. And Paul's answer to them is Christ is enough. You don't need these others. Now, if we want to add the superlatives, let's not look at how He accomplishes, let's look at what He accomplishes.

Your salvation, your sanctification, your redemption, your adoption by God because of faith in Him. Let's add the superlatives to what He is sufficient for. So my point this morning is to present to you this sufficient Jesus, this Lord Jesus that we know is sufficient, we know He's enough, we believe in Him.

Let me simply strengthen our confidence that He is enough for whatever comes across our path, for whatever compromises are set before us. We can reject them. We can eschew them. We can say no because Christ is enough.

Well, this morning I'm going to preach on just the first two verses, the opening of this letter, but I want to read to you verses 1 through 14 to begin us. And then this afternoon, with God's help, we will preach verses 3 through 14 and go through Paul's prayer.

But this morning, the opening to the letter, the introduction, which sounds so common, so much like all the introductions, it becomes almost a platitude. Oh, sure, he's going to write in the Greco-Roman style of letters of the day.

There's so much more to it as a sufficient Christ is set before us. So with that, please stand and let me read to you verses 1 through 14 in the book of Colossians. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and Timothy, our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace you in peace from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epiphras, our beloved fellow servant.

He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit. And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saint in light.

He has delivered 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. God bless that reading of his word. Now the proclamation of his word, please be seated.

So something was making incursions into the Colossian church or was in danger of making an incursion. It hadn't gotten there yet. It doesn't seem to have been some great heresy or something that would pull them completely from the gospel, detach them from Christ.

And were that the case in Colossae, we would have a more alarmed tone as we do in Galatians, which is, I think, the book, the issue that alarmed Paul more than any other. But something was in danger of coming in there.

There's something that Paul saw in that place, in that town, in that city where this new church was, there was enough of a risk that he had to write to them, to encourage them, to strengthen them with this one core message, to remind them, not to teach them, but to remind them of something they knew, that Christ is enough, Christ is sufficient.

So it was coming in some kind of falsehood, some kind of heresy. Were they Judaizers? Were they peddling the law of Moses with circumcision and everything that would come along with.

That?

We don't know. Were they Gnostics with the secret handshakes and the mystic keys to the true meaning of.

Scripture?

We don't know if it was that either. We don't know for certainty what it was that alarmed Paul. We've got some hints. We have some clues, and we'll go through those in other messages as we go through this book as quickly as we're going to go through it.

But there are some things we know about what was coming into this place where this church was, call to say, at least two things. First, whatever it was, this thing that Paul was concerned about coming in there was something that would devalue the gospel of Christ.

It would add some kind of man-made requirements. It would somehow make Christ less than sufficient by adding some sufficiency of me, of you, of them. So it devalued the purity of the gospel of Christ and our total dependence upon Him, or their total dependence, I should say.

So maybe circumcision, maybe the entire law of Moses, which would come with circumcision. Maybe that special key that unlocks for you the true meaning of Scripture hidden to all but the elite who've learned that secret handshake.

But whatever it was that concerned Paul, whatever it is that concerns your pastors here in this church and we try to keep away, it was something that was worldly. It was something that was fleshly. It was something that was a man-made addition to the gospel and full reliance upon the promise of God in that gospel.

So that's one thing we know about this, and we pick this up from the clues as we go through this letter. The second thing we know about whatever was this incursion is that the answer to whatever it was, and you should be able to answer this already yourselves with just this short introduction, the answer to it is Christ, and Christ is enough.

Christ is enough. Christ is sufficient. Not overabundant sufficient, not super sufficient, not overflowingly, though He is those things, but sufficient simply means able to accomplish that for which it's sent.

He's sufficient.

You know, one of the best movies of all time, I think, was Martin Luther from 1953. Believe it or not, that's before I was born, but a 1953 movie, Martin Luther and a man named Niall McGuinness plays Luther, and at one point, his confessor, his teacher in the Catholic tradition, von Staupitz, he's asking Luther, he sees where Luther is going with his new theology, with his understanding of scripture, he says, but Luther, if you take away the symbols and the processes and the priests who give absolution, if you take away all these marks of faith from the people, what will you give them instead?

I didn't quote that perfectly, but I got the gist of it. But this I'll quote correctly, because in that movie, Martin Luther looks at him and he says simply this, Christ, a man only needs Jesus Christ.

I love that from that movie. That scene is worth watching. You can get it for free on YouTube, actually, the whole movie. That scene is worth the price of admission of whatever time you would take. Christ, a man only needs Jesus Christ.

We don't need anything else. We don't need any new understanding. We don't need to change the definition of words. We don't need to parse out the scripture to a point where it's so confusing and it becomes so complicated that nobody can get their arms around it.

We don't need anything new from what the apostles gave us. What we need is faith, and faith in Christ, and Him alone, and Christ as sufficient one who will bring us to where He wants to bring us, because He is sufficient for that.

A man only needs Jesus Christ. You only need Jesus Christ. And with all the things that the media and society around us are constantly pushing, are constantly bringing to us, we hear this new term almost, a narrative.

I don't even know what it means anymore to have a narrative, but there's narratives out there, and they're subtle. And if we grasp onto them, if we hang onto those, if we start giving those too much credence, if we put too much time into even understanding them, we're in danger of being where the Colossians were, of gaining sufficiency of self.

And ever so slight, sufficiency of self is too much. The slippery slope argument is not really a logical argument, it's a logical fallacy, but in experience, it works pretty well. And it's a slippery slope, and this is why the apostle Paul wrote this letter to the Colossians and to us.

So what's the answer? The answer that we get from the book of Colossians, the answer that we need today, with all the things that are encouraging, making incursions against our pure gospel, our pure Christian faith, our apostolic faith, we could say, is this.

The absolute sufficiency and supremacy of Jesus Christ is the answer to any and all alternatives. I understand that when I use the word alternative, I don't mean alternative ways to God. There's only one way, one truth, one life.

There's only one sole means, sole person, by which and through whom one may come to God, and that's Jesus Christ. So when I use the word alternatives, I don't mean alternative gods, alternative paths.

That's not what I mean at all. I mean alternatives to sanctification, alternative ways to understand the scripture, alternative views of Christ that diminish Him ever so slightly, just enough that we can accept it and say, well, I didn't do anything wrong, it sounded good.

We need to be careful. Man-made means, artificial paths, broad byways, easy to find, a pleasure to travel, all leading from the pure, simple reliance on whom? Jesus Christ, and Him alone, He who is all we need.

Paul, the Apostle by the Will of God

So we begin with the introduction of the letter, which is the first two verses, verses one and two. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother, to the saint and faithful brothers in Christ, I call to say, grace to you and peace from God, our.

Father.

So let's start with who was this Paul? Who was this Paul writing to them? He was the apostle to the Gentiles. He was the apostle to the Gentiles, personally appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ. He was, in his former life, named Saul, the one who, in Acts chapter 7, guarded the cloaks of the men as they murdered Stephen.

And we read of his testimony in the later part of Acts, that he actually approved, didn't just watch their clothes so nobody would steal them, he approved of what they were doing. This Paul, this Paul who was the apostle to the Gentiles, writing to the Colossians, was that Saul.

And we have no record of when he changed his Hebraic name, Saul, to the more Grecian, Paul. Now it might be that he wanted a clean break from his former life, from all that he was before Jesus accosted him on the way to Damascus.

And maybe he started using Paul so he'd have an easier entrance with the Gentiles, that less Hebraic name, and the Gentiles being his assigned mission field. Whatever the case, this Paul is the same man, humanly and physically, as the Saul who approved of Stephen's murder, and then dedicate himself to the destruction of what they then called the way, the way of following Jesus Christ.

He had been a Pharisee, a member of the strictest party of that faith, of that religion. That's Galatians 1 .14. Excuse me, that's Acts 26 .5. In Galatians 1 .14 it says he was advancing faster than all his peers as a Pharisee, moving ahead of them, gaining more accolades.

Philippians 3 .9 says that what became of all that. It tells us where all that advancement was, where all that prestige ended up when he met Jesus Christ on that road. He was now found in Christ, not having a righteousness of his own that comes from the law.

In other words, not coming from a righteousness that I achieved because I am sufficient to achieve this. Not coming from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith.

Can we say, for my purposes this morning, that righteousness from God that depends upon the sufficiency of our faith that God gave us to believe in him who is sufficient for our needs, which is Christ Jesus and him alone.

Now what I quoted from Philippians has some bearing on Colossians. Christ is sufficient. We like the superlatives. We like to give 110%, but you know, if we know math, 100 is all. You give 100%, you cannot give 110 of yourself.

In the same way, sufficient seems like too small a word, but we're going to stick with.

It.

Christ is sufficient for what he was sent for, but the superlatives come in that vein. What was he sent for? Your salvation, your justification, your adoption, your sanctification, all this being overflowingly, superabundantly, incredibly, mind-bendingly more than we could ever think or imagine.

The Saul had been raised in the certainty that he could gain the righteousness promised in the law by dint of his own efforts. Those efforts were energetic. They were zealous. He was very bright. He was very determined.

If Paul had any attachments to Saul, it was those very qualities, that energy that he had towards Phariseeism, it was those very qualities that God sanctified, excuse me, in Jesus Christ and turned away from destroying and towards establishing his church.

In his conversion to Christ, his self-proclaimed sufficiency was exposed for the uselessness that it was and gave way to Christ's all-encompassing sufficiency. You see, brethren, wherever you are before or were before conversion to Christ, the Apostle Paul's story is really the same as ours, isn't it?

Now, you may plead, you may object and say, well, I wasn't a Jew. I wasn't a persecutor of the church. I never murdered anyone. I didn't do any of those things. I didn't persecute Christians. But no matter wherever we were before Jesus Christ, whatever you were doing before Christ came upon you, as he did upon Paul, as he did upon me, wherever you were in that way, it was as useless as Saul trying to gain a right standing with God by his own efforts.

Whatever we were doing before Jesus Christ came to us, it was that useless because we put ourselves up as a sufficient one and had no view of God. That's a short introduction to this Paul Apostle who was Saul Pharisee.

He was an apostle. Let's ask ourselves for a moment, and again, this is old ground for most of us, what was.

An apostle?

Well, you know, there are actually many, many apostles, countless apostles, because the word apostle in the Greek apostoleo simply means one who is sent. So a governor, a ruler of some kind, an emperor might apostoleo someone, might make an emissary of them to an emperor.

A father could apostolize a son, say, go check the sheep as Jacob did to Joseph way back in the Old Testament days. So how many apostles were there? Well, countless, countless people who were sent by men of authority to accomplish a task.

But in the Christian framework, when we in this church say apostle, when the Bible names someone not just someone who was an apostle, was sent to do something, but an apostle, I'm an apostle of Christ Jesus, when we use the word in that way, well, now we're narrowing it down quite a bit.

He's an apostle of Christ. He's one who's sent into the world by Jesus' personal appointment to bear eyewitness testimony to Jesus' resurrection, and on the veracity of that historical event, found his church.

That is what we mean by apostle, not just the generic one who was sent by someone. When we say apostle, we mean one personally appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ to bear witness to his life, death, and most importantly, resurrection.

So now we've narrowed it down quite a lot, haven't we? So what do we have of apostles? Very, very few. In all history, 14 apostles. There are actually 14 apostles. Now we begin with 12, Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed.

Him.

Now that's 12, right? So Judas hangs himself, we all know that, and Matthias in Acts chapter 1 replaces him. So there's 12 apostles living, but he's the 13th apostle who was ever named, right? I said there's 14, obviously Paul, one untimely born.

So he's really the 14th apostle, though when he was number 14 ever named, there were 13 apostles in existence. Although if we line the chronology up really well, they might have been executed before Paul, so 12, 11, but you get my point.

In all history, 14 men were named by Jesus Christ as apostles, and that's pretty elite. I always like to think of Formula One drivers as elite. Do you know that there are more than twice as many active astronauts in the United States than there are Formula One drivers?

There's 20 people in the world, they're all men by the way, but could be women if they could ever handle those cars, but there's 20 people in the world today who are qualified to handle a Formula One race car.

Now that's pretty elite. In the United States of America, there's only ever been 58 of them, and only two of them, Phil Hill and Mario Andretti, have ever been the world champion Formula One driver.

I mean, that's elite.

There's more astronauts than Formula One drivers, but the world is fairly infested with them as compared to apostles. Only 14 ever named by Jesus Christ to be his apostle to whatever field he sent them.

Apostles were rare. There were men appointed to a particular task, which is to establish the church.

Extremely rare.

And may we say, and I'm preaching to the choir here because we believe this, the apostleship, as we understand it biblically, is over. There are no modern day apostles in that vein. There's apostolic churches.

I would say we're an apostolic church. Why so? Because we believe and we hold to the apostolic word that we have in scripture, the word that the apostles handed down to us as they wrote by inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

So Paul was one of them. Paul was an apostle. And it's true that 2 ,000 years ago, there were many, many witnesses to Jesus' resurrection, which is the primary qualification of an apostle. Paul even writes in 1 Corinthians 15, 6 that the resurrected Lord appeared to 500 brothers.

So there's 500 people that say, I saw the risen Lord. Why are they not apostles? What's the difference between them and the 13 who are alive in Paul's day? Well, the answer is there in that introduction to our letter.

By the will of God. By the will of God, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, appointed by God. You know, it's not God's will that any should perish, but that all should come to a saving knowledge of faith in Christ Jesus, the one who the apostles proclaimed.

Nor was it God's will that each and every witness to the resurrection be an apostle, but only those who are named, like Formula One drivers in the world, a select few. So who does Paul mean when he says, by the will of God?

Who does he mean?

Well, he means God, whose will it was that he be called out of darkness and into light, and then to guide others along that same route. But who called him? He says, I've been called by the will of God, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of.

God.

Think about this for a moment. Who called him? Well, he says that God did. And there he is on the ground at the gates of Damascus, so to speak. He's on the ground. He's been knocked off his horse. He's been blinded by the light from heaven.

That's Acts chapter 9. And he's at last coming to his senses. Sort of reminds him of Nebuchadnezzar. He's out there eating grass and lowing with the cows. And then he comes to his senses. He regains his sanity.

And Paul's like that, this madman going to destroy the church, going to imprison and.

Beat.

And sometimes he said to himself, murder, believers in the way. But he winds up, he ends up blinded by the light, on the ground, coming to his senses, sane possibly for the first time in his life. And do we not again enter into the apostle's experience?

I can tell you in my conversion that I can relate to this because I did go from an insanity, a misunderstanding of God, an almost hatred of God, though I wouldn't confess it that way then. And then when he brings your mind into a right understanding, when he gives you a heart to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, when he says in essence, hey dummy, I'm right, you're wrong, stop resisting, come to my son because that's for which I predestined you.

That's the experience we all had. For some of us it was a bit more violent because we resisted it more. For others less so, raising a Christian home, it was a more smooth transition. And yet the miracle of conversion is the same for you as it was for me and for the apostle.

Paul.

Perhaps our stories are not quite as dramatic, but dear ones, it is the same story. And here's this apostle, knocked off his horse, blinded, and he says, who are you Lord? Who are you Lord? Now hold on a second, remember what I said from the introduction, by the will of God.

He's an apostle by the will of God. When he met God, he said, who are you Lord? And who answers to him? Colossians 1 .1 says, the will of God, so God answered him, God, Yahweh, God whose will it was that he become the final apostle.

Who answers him? God answers him. He's an apostle by the will of God. And Acts chapter 9, when he says, who are you Lord? He knew that it was the Lord who knocked him off his horse. He knew it was the Lord who blinded him.

He knew it was the Lord who just changed his whole life. Who are you Lord? Who answered him?

I am.

Say it with me.

I am.

I am. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now give me the answer. Who called him? God did. He said, who are you Lord? And what did he say? Answer it with me.

I am who?

Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Is there any doubt that our belief from the scripture is absolutely concrete and correct that Jesus is God? That the Lord Jesus Christ is all that God is? That God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit are all equally the attributes of God and all that it means to be God is them?

Or He the Spirit or He the Son or He the Father? Three persons. Know that our faith is based upon the will of God. Know that this scripture that we have, Paul writing as he's moved along by the Spirit, John writing, moved along by the Spirit, Peter writing, moved along by the Spirit, James writing, moved along by the Spirit, and Matthew and Mark and Luke and all the others.

This word that we have is by the will of God. Who are you Lord? I am Jesus. Who saved him or who called him the apostle? The will of God. Know that our understanding of Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, is right and correct and something upon which we must stand, something we must defend, something we must hang on to dearly because it's a dear and precious doctrine that we have that's plain and given to us easily in the scripture.

I'm Jesus whom you're persecuting. I am God, he could have said, Yahweh who you're persecuting. That's this Paul who writes this letter and this idea that it's Jesus who called him to be an apostle, it's God who called him, the will of God that called him to apostleship.

It inheres something, it means something to this letter, to all his letters in fact. In fact to the entirety of the New Testament. If Paul and the others was an apostle of Jesus Christ, God himself, then what he wrote carried then and carries today prophetic and divine authority.

The apostolic word we seek to understand and obey is directly to us, directly to you the very word of God and it's a word sufficient for your needs. It's words of life from the Holy Spirit to Paul, to the Colossians, the Romans, the Galatians and all the rest and then to us, a living and powerful and active word that we have by the will of God that reveals to us the will of God.

Paul says to the Thessalonians, this is the will of God for you, your sanctification that you abstain from sexual immorality. The will of God throughout, but it's not just, we need to think of it in these terms.

That is the will of God that we have this word and this word reveals to us that will of God and how we should live. It's a living and active word that exposes the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

It's a word that portrays Jesus Christ and him crucified. It's a word, 2 Peter 1, verse 3, that grants us all things that pertain to life and godliness. James 1, verse 21, a word that can save your soul.

Are you here today without Jesus Christ? Let me tell you now, at this point in this message, this word can save your soul. This word is powerful. This word is active. This word reveals that Jesus Christ, who called Paul and will call you out of darkness.

This word reveals him to you and the gift of faith is something that God gives. Faith to believe this message, faith to repent and believe in Christ Jesus is something for which you must plead to God, give me faith.

As with the man who met Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. I have faith, help my unfaith. I want to believe, Father, help me to believe in this Jesus Christ being proclaimed because without him, I have no hope.

Without him, I face only eternal condemnation when I see him as he is and that's a whole different message for a whole different day. But if you know not Jesus Christ, this one whose will was that Paul be an apostle and write this letter to the Colossians and to us, if you know not this Jesus Christ who Paul, when he was Saul, was persecuting, you're in the same shape that Saul was before he was converted by Christ and turned into a Paul.

This word that I preach to you, as stumbling and fumbling as my words are compared to the first time, the first letter these came directly from the Holy Spirit to the man, as I tried to explain it to you, these are the words of God insofar as I'm making them accurate and noble to you, a word sufficient to save your soul and a word sufficient to we whose souls have been saved to accomplish that for which it was sent.

Think of Isaiah chapter 55, for as the rain and the snow comes down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out of my mouth, it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that for which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

In a word, the word is sufficient to do that for which God sent it. The superlatives go for the purpose to which he sent it. Okay, so Paul writes to saints and faithful brothers in that city of Colossae, and I prefer saints to be translated by an adjective to the holy and faithful brothers.

You see, Colossae had been an important, thriving city some three centuries before Jesus, and at that time his textiles were famous. There was this dark red dye that was known as even Colossian wool, about 120 miles east of Ephesus.

It used to have a major north-south trade route, and that's how it became a cosmopolitan, very mixed, diverse city. That trade route was eventually moved over to Laodicea, which is about 12 miles to the north.

But it was a cosmopolitan, a very diverse city, coupled with a large number of travelers, and that made the city a hotbed for new and innovative religions. Now, Paul had never been there. We have no record of him ever having been there.

Even so, his apostolic credentials and his authority seemed to have not been questioned, which could be one reason he calls them holy and faithful, which is a couplet that we only see here and in Ephesians.

Epaphras, whose name comes up later, was from there, and he probably founded the church after being converted by Paul's preaching in Ephesus. So Colossae, surrounded by diversity, we might look at them and say, well, yeah, the Colossians, boy, you know, they didn't have it so bad.

I mean, look, 2 ,000 years ago, well, more than that, but 2 ,000 years ago, and what did they have to deal with like we do? Well, let's look at the Colossians for a moment and think about the Greco-Roman world in which they lived.

Well, did they not have rampant paganism all around them? Was not sexual sin considered something to be lauded and tolerance, something that was common? Were they not surrounded by those who would not just detract from but hate the Christian faith?

Were they not being persecuted for their faith? We think we have it so rough here in the Silicon Valley. Pastor Owens made a great point once that a lot of the things that this country believes, a lot of the liberal tendencies, a lot of the ungodliness that the country is heading for emanate from this place, right here where we are, Silicon Valley.

I don't know if anything emanated from Colossae, but I know that that city was no better, it was no worse than San Francisco, no better or worse than Sunnyvale, no better or worse than Sacramento, no better or worse than Boise, Idaho.

I know it was a rough place for a church to be, and the people had a hard time hanging on to the faith, surrounded by friends and loved ones and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and so on who didn't believe what they believed and would always be trying to pull them away from it.

And with all that happening, they had somebody coming in, somebody bringing in some version of Christianity that just wasn't quite as pure as the gospel that had converted them, which is why Paul wrote this letter.

Remember, dear ones, when you read Colossians and Ephesians and Romans, when you read the letters to the churches in Galatia, to the Hebrews who are in dispersion from James or from Peter, whomever, those people are people or were people just like we are, and they lived under the same constraints and they lived with the same challenges to their faith that we do.

Or it could take different forms, maybe different intensities, and maybe different amounts of government sanction, but it wasn't that different from what we have today. Do not look upon this period of church history when these letters were written as some pure Camelot kind of period.

They had it tough. And I would argue if there's somebody at this pulpit 2 ,000 years from now, as I'm 2 ,000 years from them, he's going to look back on us and say, you know, in 2024, those guys had it tough.

Those men and women had a hard time hanging on to the faith, and yet here we are, preaching this gospel, awaiting Christ's return. See, it's the glory to God, it's all glory to God when a church thrives when surrounded by falsehood.

The under shepherd protects the sheep by warning when he sees the wolves. We cry out when we see heresies, and it could well be that it was he, that it was Epaphas, who sent to Paul, seeking help for whatever it was that was encroaching and might have.

Misled them.

His report then included the good news that they were staying true to the gospel. They were saints, they were hagios, they were holy. The base meaning of holy is separate. And the Christian today, we are surrounded as they were, yet we must remain what God made us.

And as Paul reminds them, to the saints and faithful brothers, again, better, to the holy and faithful brothers. To you, holy, faithful brothers and sisters in the Lord. Faithful because God gave you faith to believe, but holy because when Christ comes upon you and says, you are mine, we are his, and no longer citizens of this world.

Holy meaning separate, not sanctimonious, not a bunch of hermits out in the desert. Holy in our faith, holy in our conduct, holy in our belief, holy especially in the way we treat brothers and sisters, and especially the way Christian brothers treat Christian sisters within the church.

Holy, not worldly, holy saints, and they're faithful. They continued in their belief. They stood their ground in the face of the pressures that society brought against them and against Christ. And you need to remember that if you're in Jesus Christ, you stand for something that no other religion does.