Colossians 11:14 (Abbie Sawczak).

If you have your Bibles with you, you can turn to Colossians chapter 3 today. And if you don't have a Bible, we have one for you in the back, so you can totally run back and grab one if you'd like.

We are continuing our series through the book of Colossians. If you've missed one of the recent weeks, you can actually listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast. You can find my voice there through the past couple of weeks. So if you missed a sermon, you can catch up.

We're continuing in chapter three of Colossians. This is kind of part two from last week's message. Last week, we talked about what was the whole point? What was the so what? What are we taking away from this?

And it's this: we are alive in Christ to live like it. Today we're talking about the same thing. When you ask Jesus into your heart and he is your Lord and Savior, you are now a new creation. You are made alive in Christ because of his death and resurrection. So live like it. Live like Christ.

Living like Christ

Last week we talked about how we do this, and we said to live like Christ we must set our eyes on things above. This is all in chapter three of Colossians, and Paul who wrote it is telling us this. We have to fix our eyes on things above, on heavenly things.

To live like Christ, we too have to first die. So Christ, through his death and resurrection we are made alive. We too have to die to ourselves. We have to die to our old lives. We have to continue to die to ourselves in order to live with Christ.

And then to live with Christ, we must continue to change. It is an ever-growing process of us becoming like him. And then we have to clothe ourselves. And Paul talks about this, to clothe ourselves with compassion. To clothe ourselves is a very active thing.

We have to proactively be putting on our clothes and we have to clothe ourselves daily to live alive in Christ.

So we're going to continue reading now in Colossians chapter 3, starting in verse 13. I am reading today out of the New Living Translation:

Make allowance for each other's faults and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. And let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body, you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful. Let the message about Christ and all its richness fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts. And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.

Colossians 3:13-17

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much today for your word that is alive and active. We thank you that we get to hear directly from you through the word that you have left us. We just ask that your Holy Spirit would come. Would you reveal to us what it is that you want us to hear today, God? What ultimately would it lead us to truly living like we are alive in Christ, like you have created us to live? We love you, Lord. We ask all this in your name. Amen.

Make allowance for each other's faults

As I read passages of scripture, I'll go through and maybe highlight or circle different words that kind of stick out. Some of the words that I did as I was going through this is right away in verse 13, where it says, make allowance. That word allowance really stuck out to me, for each other's faults. So to be like Jesus means that we have to allow people to have faults. That's not so easy to do, right?

Sometimes as Christians, we want to say, well, now everybody else, because I'm choosing to live like Christ, we expect everybody else around us to also live like Christ. But what Paul is saying here is that we actually need to make allowance. We need to make room for people to not be perfect around us, for people to have faults.

Forgiveness

This sermon just about wrote itself because Paul is such a good writer here and such a good pastor that he is just walking us through all the hard stuff in a few verses. Last week we talked about sexual immorality, about foolish talk and gossip and slander. Now we get to talk about forgiving anyone. That's real fun.

The Bible has a lot to say about forgiveness. In Matthew 5:23 through 24, it says this:

If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Matthew 5:23-24

The Bible is very clear all throughout Scripture that harboring bitterness is a sin. We learned even last week when we talked about having to die to ourselves, that if we are not actively seeking to kill bitterness and kill unforgiveness, it will kill us. And it will kill not only our relationship with God, but our relationship with others.

Our lack of forgiveness can be one of the biggest barriers of growth for us personally and growth for us as a community if we don't take care of it. God is essentially saying, so you're going to come and you're going to worship me? He says, don't even bother if there's people in your life that you need to be reconciled with, that you need to go and forgive.

Forgiveness leads to freedom. You've probably heard it said many times that when we're not forgiving someone, it's doing us more harm than it is them. Now that is true, but it doesn't make it any easier to forgive, especially when you've been hurt, especially when you've been offended, especially when someone has wronged you.

So how do we forgive? Something I think is really important to understand about what I believe God wants for us in forgiveness is that even Jesus on the cross, he says the words before he dies, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing. He was forgiving people that didn't know that they were hurting him.

Sometimes we want to wait to forgive people until they fully understand the wrong that they did to us. We want to wait to forgive people until they have paid the price for what they did to us. But Jesus is setting the example of saying, forgive them. You go first, even if they don't know what they did to you or they don't know how much they hurt you.

Jesus is the one that paid the price for all of our sins, and he is the one that did that to set us free. He wants us to live in freedom, not stuck in unforgiveness.

But I want to be clear about this: I realized that not every relationship is safe to go back to. Not every relationship is always necessary to go back to. But I do believe that unforgiveness can steal our unity, it can steal our relationships. Unforgiveness can stunt our growth for the greater church and us as individuals, and it can create that distance between us and God.

So what does it look like for there to be a way for us to forgive and to have restoration and reconciliation without the same relationship? Because I believe that there is a world where we can coexist as a community of God, as the greater church, as the local church, as family with one another. We can learn to forgive while also knowing that things don't have to look the same. But we can still practice that forgiveness.

In Matthew 18:15, it says:

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

Matthew 18:15

This is saying to go to that person. For us to have the freedom that comes from forgiveness, we have to proactively pursue it. It can't be something where we're just always waiting for the other person to come to you.

Here's just a few tips for forgiveness. One is when you are in a place where you know, okay, there's someone in my life who's wronged me. There's a situation that I just can't let go of, and I know that it's keeping me stuck. Ask the Lord to show you how he sees that person. More times than not, what you'll see is what we hear often said, that hurt people hurt people, healed people heal people.

When we take a moment to sit back and we say, God, would you show me how you see this person? It can totally change our heart and our posture and our perspective on how we go about restoring that relationship. Because the Lord will start to show us that they are a child created in the image of God that more than likely hurt us because they too are broken and are suffering and have things going on in their life. Or they're just dumb and they said something stupid that they should have never said. But either way, for us to see people how God sees them helps us to not demonize people, isolate people, and turn them into something that they're not.

Next is to ask the Lord to show you why did it hurt so much? Did it hurt not because of what they did but because of something in your life that you haven't allowed Jesus to heal yet? Why were you so offended by those words? Was it because of the words that were spoken, or was it because of the things that you're not allowing Jesus to speak over you?

And then ask the Lord to show you how to respond. Is it a conversation? Is it going to your brother or sister and saying, I need to forgive you? Or is it just letting it go?

Love sacrificially

To live like Christ is to love sacrificially. In verse 12, it says:

Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourself with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.

Colossians 3:12

And then verse 14 says:

But above all else, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.

Colossians 3:14

One theologian says this: the other virtues pursued without love become distorted and unbalanced. If you try to pursue mercy without love, it's distorted. If you try to pursue kindness without sacrificial love, it's unbalanced.

The kind of love that's talking about here comes from the Greek word agape love. Agape is affection, goodwill, love, benevolence, brotherly love. This word also means love feasts, which I just think is so fun. Let's just get together and have a love feast. You should invite someone to do that this week.

This was a practice of the early church where they'd get together and they'd all bring something and they'd have these meals together in this time of communion. It was a love feast. Agape love is a love of choice. It's not out of attraction or obligation. Agape love is the type of love that Jesus has displayed for us on the cross when he took the place for our sin. It is sacrificial love. It is the highest type of love where so much sacrifice is put into it.

I think about this type of love that Paul is saying. If we love like this, we will be bound together. He wants us to be bound together with this type of sacrificial love. He wants us to live in perfect harmony. He's writing this book to the Colossian church, to a community similar to ours.

Whether this is your first Sunday or you've been here a while, welcome to being a part of this perfect harmony that Paul's asking us to live in. I love this word of talking about these feasts and these meals because more than likely it was a place where everybody would come and they would bring something to share and to have together.

One of the things that we can often get stuck in, and that sometimes can stunt us from living in this perfect harmony, is when we all start practicing self-love rather than sacrificial love. Think of it this way. God knew what he was doing when he created the body of Christ. He knew that we were going to need each other. He didn't want us to live alone. He didn't want us to have to fend for ourselves. So he gave us a physical representation of his love through each other.

When we get in the mindset of when I'm alone and when I'm hurting and when I'm struggling, that I just need to find ways to take care of myself and I'm not going to let anybody else in and I don't have time to care for others and I'm just going to keep working on myself. And if everybody did that, we would never have anyone to help us. Because the reality is we can't do it on our own.

But what does it look like if instead we all said, I am not going to practice self-love but sacrificial love, and I'm going to go above and beyond and out of my way to love everybody in my community? Some days we're all going to be able to do that perfectly. And some days some of us are going to fall a little short. But then we know that everybody else is there for us to pick up the pieces, to sacrifice, to step up when we need them to.

That's the type of love that Paul wanted us as a church to have. To say that we were all about sacrificing for one another. Because he knew at times that some of us were going to be stronger than others and that we were going to need everybody.

But when we all have the mindsets of we're just going to isolate and try and take care of ourselves, it's never going to work because that's not how God designed it to be. That's probably one of my favorite things I think about our church: I see that happening all the time of people going out and helping one another and serving one another and bearing each other's burdens in that way.

1 John talks a lot about this agape type of love:

If anyone claims I am living in the light but hates a fellow believer, that person is still living in the darkness. Anyone who loves a fellow believer is living in the light and does not cause others to stumble. But anyone who hates a fellow believer is still living and walking in darkness. He does not know the way to go, having been blinded by the darkness.

1 John 2:9-11

He says it twice there just to make sure we get it.

I am writing to you who are God's children because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus. I am writing to you who are mature in the faith because you know Christ who existed from the beginning. I am writing to you who are young in the faith because you have won your battle with the evil one.

1 John 2:12-13

Whether you are new to the faith or mature in the faith, this is for you. We have to learn to love one another.

1 Corinthians 13:1 says:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

1 Corinthians 13:1

Everything else is going to fade away. We have these earthly cravings. We have these desires that we are always going to be tempted to fulfill in the wrong ways. Because we were created to be fulfilled fully in Christ. But here on earth, we're going to be tempted with physical pleasures, through pride and through possessions. But all of that is fading.

If we don't have love, if we don't learn to sacrificially love, John 13:35 says:

By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

John 13:35

I often think that if we truly understand that as followers of Jesus, we are disciples who are sent to go and to make disciples of Jesus, then we have to be so committed to loving each other, to forgiving one another, to living in that type of harmony. So that people from the outside looking at our friendships, they look at our relationships, they look at our community, and they say, I want to be a part of that.

The world is filled with false promises and broken relationships that are never going to satisfy. But as the body of Christ, we are called to offer something different. And so it's going to take us proactively pursuing that, having those hard conversations of forgiveness, having those hard moments of sacrifice.

Live in peace

To live in Christ is to live in peace. Verse 15 says:

Let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body, you are called to live in peace and always be thankful.

Colossians 3:15

Peace in the body of Christ goes along with that love. When we're talking about that love, it's saying that we are all a part of the body of Christ, so it's all of our jobs to keep the peace and to make peace with one another.

You were created for the kingdom. You were needed in the kingdom. You were valued in the kingdom. Sometimes you might even be seeing things and you're saying this is going to disrupt the peace, and you're committed to saying we, as the body of Christ, to be alive in Christ, we need to live in peace. So we have to continue to be proactive in that.

One commentary said this: the Greek word here means let it rule. So whenever there is a doubtful issue to be decided and by one course your peace may be disturbed, well by another it be maintained, choose the things that make for peace, whether for yourself or for other. Let God's peace act as umpire.

Peace is proactive and peace is a practice. Peace is a choice. It's something that we have to choose. But it's proactive in the sense that we first need to decide, are we going to be people of peace? Are we going to be people that choose in a moment where we can have peace or not have peace? That peace is the final rule. That peace has the final say.

Because if you make that choice and you start to tell the people in your life and say, I'm a person of peace. And every time anxious thoughts come flooding you, you can say, nope, I choose peace. Peace rules my life. Anytime there's some conflict among you, you're quick to take care of it because you know, nope, I choose peace. Peace is the rule of my life. But peace has to be proactive for us and we have to constantly choose it.

Surrender to Christ

To live like Christ is to live surrendered. We read this in verse 16:

Let the message about Christ and all its richness fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts.

Colossians 3:16

Some of the words that I was highlighting here is saying, let the message about Christ and all its fullness or all its richness fill your lives. This is one that was just kind of coming off the page for me.

What do we let fill our lives? What do we allow? If to let is to not forbid, then maybe the question is, what do we not forbid? What is in your life that maybe you haven't said, hey, come on in. You can rule here? Anxious thoughts. Yeah, you can come in. Critical spirit. I welcome you. Bitterness. Yeah, you're my friend. You can live here.

Maybe we haven't let those things, but have we forbid them? Have we proactively made choices to keep them out? Because to let is to allow, but to let is also to not forbid. So if we are going to live surrendered to Christ, then there are other things in our life that we are going to have to forbid. That we are going to have to not allow. And we are going to have to work so hard to do that.

Because more times than not, we live in a way where we want the peace without the surrender and we want the freedom, but we don't want the forgiveness. And it goes on and on and on. So we need to be aware in our lives of what we're allowing.

When it talks about teaching and counseling each other with all wisdom he gives, I want to remind you of some of the things that the Colossian church was walking through. They had lots of wisdom from the world. They had lots of people coming in with all of these ideas. Paul is once again reminding them of saying, hey, when people are coming to you and they're asking for advice, don't just go quoting the latest thing that you see on Instagram, because you don't know where that came from. But look to the word of God.

There are so many times where I hear things, and the more that you're in the truth, the more that you know the word of God, the more that you just recognize things that are so off. I had a moment recently with someone where I gently just said, hey, can I ask you? And they said something to me that I hear said in Christian circles all the time. They said, God doesn't give you more than you can handle.

And I just gently said, hey, can I challenge you on that for a minute? I know you've probably heard that a lot. Maybe some of you have heard that. Maybe you've even said it. I have a point in my life. God doesn't give me any more than you can handle. However, I challenged her. I said, then how do we explain the book of Job?

The story of Job is his entire life was essentially taken away from him. Long story short, he was rich. He would have been on the cover of Forbes magazine. He would have had private jets. He's living the life. Next thing you know, all his riches, all everything was taken away. His family was killed. Everything was gone. And in that moment, he grew closer to God.

What I would challenge sometimes when I hear that phrase, God doesn't give me more than you can handle, is that sometimes God does give us more than we can handle. So it can show us to really learn to rely on him and to trust him. Because in the end, we should never be the ones handling anything. Instead, we should be the ones surrendering everything to him, because it was never ours to carry.

We hear these things, and then you think, oh, that sounds good. God never gives me more than I can handle. No shame if you've ever said that, because again, I've said that at points in my life. But you look and you're like, wait a second. Isn't that the whole point? That we're supposed to do nothing on our own strength and do everything surrendered to him? And let him be the one to carry every single burden? Because he already did. He already handled it all when he went to the cross.

The point is we have to be so careful of what we are saying and is it wisdom from God, or is it other people around us?

Live thankful and represent Jesus

To live alive in Christ is to live thankful. Thankfulness truly does shift our posture from inward focused to upward. When we seem to praise and we seem to be thankful, and when we fix our eyes on things above in that way, then we have greater ways and greater strength to then live outward for others.

And finally in verse 17:

Whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.

Colossians 3:17

To live alive in Christ is to represent him. Paul again is such an excellent writer because all of these things that he's telling us to do, to forgive, to have peace, to love sacrificially, they all help us represent Jesus a lot better.

But the reality is for all of us to know that we do represent something or someone. I represent being a part of my family. I represent being a pastor and I'm very aware. We all have those moments where you hear one person say something and then you're like, every pastor says this or every pastor thinks that. It's sometimes something that I process of what are those things that we're doing that are then representing the communities around us.

Because you all have different things that you represent. Your family. You represent maybe the school you go to, the place that you work at. I represent New Culture when I drive around with a bumper sticker. And you better believe if I drive differently knowing I have that bumper sticker. I'm not about to be that person that gets pulled over with my New Culture Church bumper sticker. That has yet to happen. I need to knock on wood somewhere.

But most importantly, we represent Jesus. I hear it all the time where people will say, well, do you know Christians think things like that or Christians think things like this? And it's sad to me because a lot of times it might be one or two or it might be the loudest that are thinking that and are saying that and not representing Jesus well. But it causes us to look inward and to think, again, if I'm the only Jesus that someone's seen, if the things that I'm saying in the life I'm living is the only thing that they have on display in their lives when it comes to someone that follows Jesus, am I representing him well?

What would it look like in our lives if before we spoke, before we acted, we asked the Holy Spirit through these questions: is this something you would say, Jesus, if you were here? Is this something you would do? What would happen if we got our "what would Jesus do" bracelets back and we looked at that every day? What would that look like if we paused before we spoke and said, Jesus, would you say this? Am I representing you well in this moment?

Response and closing

If we're alive in Christ and we have to live like this, last week we talked about practicing mindfulness and being aware of our thoughts. This week I want to talk about thankfulness. How we can practice thankfulness.

Because if we learn to live thankful and we are centered in that and we are rooted in that, and even when we're thankful for the people around us, it's gonna be a lot easier to forgive. Thankfulness will help us love. If we are truly thankful for the things that we do have, we will more freely be able to give them and to love sacrificially.

Thankfulness is gonna help us live in peace. When we're thankful for where we're at, we're gonna be less anxious. We're gonna be less worried about tomorrow. When we continue to go back and remember and thank God for who he is and what he's done.

Thankfulness will help us surrender. Thankfulness will help us represent Jesus.

What we did today is we went and we just kind of walked through the scripture and we pulled out, okay, what is Paul saying? I want to encourage you that you can do that at home. You can walk through and say, what does this mean? You can phone a friend in the room and get a study Bible. We also have resources on our website. If you go to our website and you click the resource tab on how to study the Bible.

I want to encourage you today that you were created for a relationship with Jesus. He wants you to have a relationship with him and to live fully surrendered with him in a way that you're no longer living like your old self, but you're truly living alive in Christ.

If you've been walking around in this world feeling stuck, feeling maybe in this place of, is there something else? Is there something more? I want to remind you of the promise of Jesus of eternal life and relationship with him. That experiencing his goodness can start now. It can start today. You can start to live the life that you were created for. The life that you're craving. Maybe you don't even know that that's what you're craving because you don't have the language to put around it yet. But you too can live alive in Christ. You can live free and not stuck in unforgiveness. You can live in peace. You can live in love and experience his sacrificial love.

It's what you were created for. To be whole. To be healed. It's what you long for.

The Bible tells us that anyone who does the will of the Father will have eternal life. And Jesus, he's our access to that eternal life. If you're here today and you have yet to say yes to this relationship, I want to encourage you and invite you that today could be that day where you just talk to Jesus and you say, Jesus, I surrender my life to you. I want to turn from my old ways and I want to walk alive in you.

Because the scripture tells us that if we believe in our heart and if we confess with our mouth his death and his resurrection, that he'll come in and he's going to live with us. And we can be alive in him today. And can I tell you that that is what is going to satisfy you? That is what is going to answer all your questions. And is when you take that leap of faith and say yes to Jesus.

But I'm going to invite everyone to stand tonight. And for our response time, I'm going to have a slide that's going to come up. It's going to be a little bit of a choose your own journey. It's gonna be a little bit of a choose your own journey. The link is gonna play for a few minutes. And I'm gonna invite you to just spend a few minutes processing these questions.

If you have a journal, I would encourage you to journal during this time. If you wanted to take a note on your phone. One of the reasons that we do this is because we don't want you to just hear something and not respond. This isn't a show, but this is something that we get to do together. We get to experience God.

So ask God: forgiveness, is there anyone that I need to forgive? Love, is there anyone that I need to sacrifice for that maybe I have totally neglected in my life? To live in peace. Where do I need to let peace rule in my life and find the final say? Surrender. What do you need to forbid? Is there something you need to forbid in your life because it's toxic? Or is there something you need to allow God to come in? To be thankful. What do you need to be thankful for? And then finally, represent. How do you need to represent Jesus better this week?

We're going to just take a few minutes. I want to encourage you that if you have a journal, to write this out and just ask the Holy Spirit any question you're led to. If you're an overachiever, you can go through them all. But I'm just going to pray. Holy Spirit, we're going to take a few minutes.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word that is spoken. We just ask that your Holy Spirit would come and would you show us how you are asking us to respond? If there's someone we need to forgive, if there's someone we need to sacrifice for, if there's a way we need to let peace rule, God would you show us in this moment whatever that is?

And Lord, if this is the moment that you are asking us to finally surrender our lives to you, we ask, Lord and Savior, God would you come home and would you live with us in our hearts? Would you help these moments lead to transformation? And would you help these moments lead to us living fully alive in Christ, free, whole, healed, like what we were created to live?

So Lord, we come before you and we ask you to speak. We love you, Jesus. Thank you.