The following message is a presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches where we're proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. More information about the NCFIC is available at www.ncfic.org. Is available at www.ncfic.org. If you have your Bibles, open them to the book of Colossians chapter 2. Colossians chapter 2.

I want to begin in verse 1 and we'll read down through verse 10. We'll be coming back to this passage. Paul writes, For I want you to know how great a struggle I have on your behalf and for those who are at Laodicea and for all those who have not personally seen my face, that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge I Say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument for even though I am absent in body Nevertheless I am with you in spirit rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ. Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed and overflowing with gratitude. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ.

For in Him, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. And In Him, you have been made complete and He is the head over all rule and authority. Let's pray. Our Father, we ask that you would unite our hearts to fear your name And that you would open our eyes to behold wonderful things from your word God like the disciples on the path To Emmaus Lord come alongside us and teach us about yourself Show us Christ God we pray that the site would be effective We ask it in His name. Amen.

Well, we are going to be looking at what I hope would be part two of the first talk. Christ has been made unto us by his Father, sanctification. And it is by being united to him, by being placed in him through the work of the Holy Spirit, through our embracing him by faith, That we become partakers of all that he is and all that he has done as a mediator and it is that Fullness that we're drawing on so that the practical outworkings of a separated heart are Constantly given sufficient capital But when we talk about the Christian life, I think we have to be honest. It's not what we thought it would be when we first became believers. If you are a Christian, you can remember when you first came to Christ and the high ideals that gripped you, I mean, how would it be otherwise?

You see the bigness of God and He's your God now. You see the infinite sufficiency of the cross and it's your cross now. You're alive from the dead. You've come out of the grave. It's like Switzerland, that's what I always think of.

And I want some of you who have ever been to Switzerland to find me an invitation to Switzerland. I wanna preach in Switzerland. I wanna live in Switzerland. It's like walking out of a grave where all the death and rottenness is and walking out into a Switzerland and Christ is there and he says to you, this is what I want you to do with the rest of eternity. I want you to Live as near to me as possible So you think that by the end of the month you will be fully sanctified I mean you just think that it won't be any other way but then the years pass And you become discouraged at your slow pace.

Rutherford described the Christian life like this. He said it's like at the beginning, Christ brings you up on top of a mountain peak. And he shows you the distant destination of heaven and perfect sanctification and conformity to Christ. And he says, that's where we're headed. And you're thrilled.

And so you start off on the journey and you hike down from that mountain peak. You hike up another and you hike down. But after a while, you really get tired after days and days and you look, and let's say at this point you're halfway down or halfway up a mountain or maybe you're in a valley between a few, and you look, you can't even see the destination from where you're at and you think to yourself, I've gone backward. I can't even see it now. You haven't gone backward.

All right? But that is the experience of the Christian life. There are times when we look at ourselves and we think I'm going backward and I'm discouraged. There are other times where the sorrow of sin that comes from other people, people we love, people in our home, people in our church, people we have poured out our hearts for and we have lost sleep over and we have pleaded with the Lord and it just appears He doesn't listen to anything we say at that moment. And they walk away from Christ and you have enough of those and you can become cynical.

There have been so many people that have come to the tiny church I pastor and they say things like this, oh wonderful teaching, oh this is so wonderful, oh we've been waiting for this all of our life. You know I used to believe them. And then they're the people that in a few years they go away and they say, well I don't mean to be critical, but John's a terrible preacher, you know, and we're not being fed. And I think, well I didn't change, did I? I asked my wife, did I change?

But I can't trust my wife, she likes me, so I ask the people that don't like me, did I change? Listen, I have had some of my closest friends in the church, one in particular, who came from atheism and kind of nominal Catholicism, grew up in Chicago, moved down south, hated religion, was witnessed to by a young man named Anthony Mathenia that some of you might recognize from the Behold Your God study if you've watched that. Came to the church, wept through the prayer meetings, wept through the singing, wept through the preaching, professed Christ. Seven years on the outside looked like things were right and then he said to me, look, I noticed a drift. I talked to him a number of times.

And he said to me, look, I faked it, I'm sorry, I faked it. I tried to make it work. I don't even believe there's a God. For two weeks I couldn't sleep through the night. I just had to get on a plane and went to a friend's, a pastor friend of mine that lives in Washington State.

I didn't even tell my wife I was buying the ticket. This made for a wonderful marriage. And I said to her, I'm leaving, I'm going to Washington, I can't cope. Alright, I'm just, I can't quit crying over this guy and so I went to Washington and just went and sat in the mountains out there and sat by the sea and just looked and felt how tiny John Snyder was and that it wasn't all up to me. But you have enough of those happen and you begin to doubt, Is Christ really enough?

We say that he's enough, but is he enough now? Let me make a clear distinction before we go any further Christ-centeredness the concept is not enough. It doesn't do anything for you Talking about the sufficiency of Christ is not enough. It is the application of these things that is enough. Well, what about you?

How far do you intend to go in the path of Christ-likeness? When you're an early believer, you say all the way when you're in your mid-forties or fifties you might say, I hope I'll go a little further. Recently visiting a minister friend of mine, he's an older gentleman, he's in his eighties, and he was teaching a little home Bible study And so I happened to be in the city where he lived My son was there working with him that summer. So I decided my wife and I we wanted to see you know our kids and so We went up there and we stayed for the Bible study of course. And it was on Colossians.

I don't remember a word he said. Don't remember anything. But I remember this. I remember an 83 year old man sitting there saying, I have in a fresh way come to see the beauty of holiness and I long to be more like Christ and I am like a little child in the candy store at the Realization that God has made it clear to me you can there's so much more yet to be taken. You're only 83, you know?

There's so much more yet to be transformed and it's there before me. To see a man who's walked with the Lord since his early teens in his 80s excited about the thought that he can become more like Christ before he sees him. It was a wonderful tonic for my own heart. What about us? How far do you intend to go?

We're tempted to lower our expectations and we're tempted to drop our expectations of what God would do in us. Now we know that God can work in other people, but we're very tempted to believe the lie of the enemy that yes, but that's because they're them. But you're a special case, you're a particularly difficult case, and I don't think you're going to make it any further in Christ-likeness. And we're tempted to accept that here's a good stopping place, but it's not. And there are certain times in the Christian life when we're full of the sense of our own sinfulness, when we're ashamed, when we're brokenhearted over other people, that we have to stop and honestly ask this question of God is is God enough I want us to get help from someone who had to ask that question a lot of times, and yet he continued to walk this path of holiness all the way to the end, the Apostle Paul.

And we find him here in prison writing about Christ to a young church. Now the first thing we want to see this morning is the trouble that was occurring in the Colossi, in the church at Colossi. In verse eight we find that they're in danger of being taken captive, that is they're in danger of being kidnapped. But the kidnapping is not a physical kidnapping, obviously, it's a spiritual kidnapping. So here's a young church in the New Testament, during the time of the book of Acts, such an extraordinary season of grace.

The dam of mercy has broken. We've murdered the Messiah. The Father and the Son jointly send the Spirit, but instead of sending the Spirit to destroy the murderers of the Son of God, He is sent to preach peace to those who are distant and those who are close Start with the Jerusalem Center Christ says the worst of them the one that murdered me the one that ignored me most Start with them but then spread out all over the world and It's now cities are being flooded with this grace, families, individuals. And at a time like this, Paul says to this new church, you are in great danger of being taken captive. Don't let anyone kidnap you spiritually.

Now, there's some disagreement among theologians and Bible scholars about it. What exactly was the problem? There's a thing called Gnosticism and I don't want to spend any time on it, all right? So you can go read the commentaries if you want to read up on Gnosticism. But when we read the book of Colossians, we can get it for ourselves.

Let's put it in a more modern term. The Colossian Christians were being tempted by those who were attending church, Those who were showing up and saying oh So you're Christians now? Wonderful You've got Christ Wonderful now with Jesus Plus what I'm bringing how you'll have all you need So the error that the Colossians were falling into was Jesus plus. Jesus plus for being right with God. Jesus plus for being holy on the inside.

Jesus plus for being able to resist the world or to be able to live in the world in the right way. All these temptations. Now that's always the temptation, isn't it? It's a very popular temptation in American Evangelicalism. Jesus plus is our way of life.

You have Jesus? Great. Now, if you want to be really effective as a church in your evangelism, you just need to add this. If you want to guarantee that your children will grow up and be godly and have wonderful marriages and produce wonderful grandchildren for you and it'll all be wonderful and your heart will never be torn. You have Jesus, that's wonderful.

Now you just need this book too. If you want to be godly and holy, you have Jesus, plus let me give you this system of ethics. Every group, every generation of Christianity has been tempted with some form of Jesus plus. There is another temptation we won't talk about this morning, Jesus but. I want to follow Jesus but.

That's not what we're tempted with. We're tempted with Jesus plus. But I haven't found any Jesus plus churches that ever put Jesus plus on their signs. And I've never found any Christian families that put Jesus plus over the door. As for me and my family, Jesus Plus is for us.

I've never found any book that said Jesus Plus. Listen, I'm being very serious in a silly way. We are all tempted every morning when we see the great march of human need and the struggles within, this hell within, we are tempted to say, God, I thank you for Christ, now I need Jesus plus something. So we have to be careful. I've never met any Jesus plus person that thought they were Jesus plus.

What they say to me is this, no, no, no, we're not adding to Jesus. This is just an application of Jesus, but here's how you spot it. When the thing that you're using Jesus to promote is really the thing that you're unwilling to do without. There was a young family in the church where I pastor who no longer attend there. They were not members, but they were attending for a while.

They come from kind of a rough background and then they became very religious. So you have that pendulum swing, you know, from wild nights to Amish life, you know. And I mean Amish life, they admired the Amish, especially the wife. She loved the Amish. So every time she showed up at church, she was talking to me about how wonderful the Amish were, how Christian they were.

I'm not convinced that the Amish are as Christian as she said they are. I mean I have talked to many Amish people and when you get to the gospel, it's not as encouraging. So I listen to her and I'm concerned. The ladies in the church start pointing her to Christ. She's offended.

You talk to me like I'm not a Christian, which is exactly what we thought. All right? But here's the thing. Christ was not the great attraction. Now that sounds judgmental, how do I know?

Because she had this very clear idea of how the family had to be. And she bought some of the books you may buy. But here's the problem, her husband wasn't as on board as she was with this family thing. He was a welder. He would get home after a 60 hour week and he's shot.

Well now he lives on a farm. He's a city boy who bought a farm to make his wife holy. So now he's got some chickens and a cow and goats running around in the backyard and he's got broken fences. And he gets home after 60 hours of working at the welding shop and he's got to be farmer guy and he doesn't know how to be a farmer but farming's what Christians are supposed to do. So, The girl would come to church and say to people in the church, do you go to Walmart?

And I think, I live at Walmart. I own Walmart, you know. So I'm listening as a pastor, whoa, what's going on? She would say, genuine, she meant to do well, She would say, we don't need to get our food from the supermarket, that's trusting in other people. We need to trust the Lord, we grow our own food.

So misguided. The treasure in her life was not Jesus Christ, it was that this family was going to be right. And this marriage is going to be right because I have blown 20 years living horribly. But I'm going to be right now. And the heart of my righteousness is this family.

But my husband comes home and falls asleep and doesn't do family worship. My husband won't fix the fence. My husband is ruining, he's wrecking, he's making our family a train wreck. So my husband is not just not everything I want him to be as a husband and as a dad, he's ruining my righteousness because my righteousness is his family and they constantly fought and she constantly left him. Jesus plus.

How do you know if you have Jesus plus? Let someone take away the plus from you and see if you are unhappy, if you're furious, and you realize that must have been what I really was treasuring. Well, in Colossae, It was very simple, all right? In verses 11 and following, 11 to 15, they wanted to add to Jesus Christ for the vertical relationship. So the Jews said, look, you need to circumcise your Christian children now.

You Greeks, you need to do this because that's what God wants. You need to be worried about these sacrifices because what about your sins? For the vertical, you need to add to Jesus. Then in verses 16 to the end of chapter 2, we're going to look at these quickly in a minute. They said, now what about the inner transformation?

So the vertical you need more than Jesus, but for the inside you need more than Jesus. Now we've got a lot of really great Bible laws that you Greeks don't know anything about, so let me tell you, there's a bunch of food you don't need to be touching, and there's a bunch of special days you need to be observing, and if you do this right, you have Jesus plus our rules, and you will be holy. Third, chapter three, We have the issue of worldliness. How do I keep my heart from gravitating to the world? Is Jesus enough?

All right. Now that's the problem. The church is in danger of being taken captive by Jesus plus. Now what's the cure? Very simple cure.

It is Christ alone counteracting the Jesus plus lie. But it is not a fuzzy distant Jesus that is sufficient. Has sin ever come to you like your old television set, those of you that can remember the old television sets where the channel was all fuzzy and dad was up there, he was trying to adjust the rabbit ears. Does that work? No, is that?

I can't see the football team. No, I can't see. Get out of the way. No. Oh, you moved it.

Does sin come to you with fuzzy pictures? Sin is HD. It's on a giant plasma screen in my brain. It is so clear what it's offering me. I cannot afford to have this fuzzy, distant, general idea that Jesus loves me and Jesus is God's son and I'm supposed to love Jesus.

I need to have a precise grasp of the immensity and the captivating beauty of Christ if it's going to counteract the high-definition temptations So Paul gives that to us Well in chapter 2 verse 9 before we get there. He says this Here's the cure verse 9 and verse 10 all the fullness of God is in a man now And that's the great mystery if we were to take all the energy of our son Sun and to try to through some scientific method try to permeate a clot of dirt with that energy. Try to penetrate it and to cause this clot of dirt to contain all the energy of the sun, not just what it has now, but all the energy the sun has ever or will ever generate. And we put it into a little clot of dirt and the clot of dirt is not destroyed, not changed into something else. That would be nothing compared to the Father commanding that the eternal Son would be united to a true human soul and body in the womb of a little girl named Mary.

Infinite God and real man. All the fullness of the deity is in him second all the fullness of the deity verse 9 and 10 Tell us is in him bodily. What does that mean? Well, probably the best way of understanding it is this The Jew understood a lot about fullness of God from the old covenant, but the old covenant fullness was symbolic, so you have a holy place, you have a holy of holies, and it's filled with the glory of God, but that is merely an external expression, it's just a symbol. You have the sacrifices, you have the feasts, you have all those things.

It shows the fullness that God has, but it's all symbolic in Christ. We have the real fullness of deity actually substantially united to humanity. It's not a symbol, it's not a ceremonial picture any longer. It's substantial. All the fullness bodily really substantially dwells in Christ.

No Old Testament believer had that. Third thing the passage tells us, all the fullness dwells in Christ permanently. Where do I get that? In the Greek We have two words for a dwelling place in this sense for a house. One is the one we have in John chapter one.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, glory as the only begotten of the father. But that's the word for tent. God came and he made a tent and he tented among us. He threw down a tent right here in our creation. But he's not here any longer in that way.

He's now in heaven. That was a temporary dwelling. But the description of God uniting deity to humanity, it's a different Greek word, it's the word for a house, a permanent dwelling. All the fullness of God has been permanently united to Christ. When Christ was raised and ascended back to heaven, He did not lay aside his humanity.

He did not go back to what he was He did again receive the glory that he once had with the Father the outward Expression of his deity is now his again. He is gloriously enthroned look at the book of Revelation But he is still the God man. There is a man seated beside the Father on the dual throne of heaven. The angels worship a man, the God-man. We have an elder brother who will always be our kinsmen.

There will never be a moment in time There will never be a moment in eternity Where we look at the throne of heaven and there is no longer one of us on it There will always be one of us on it. He is our mediator The fourth thing it says is this All the fullness dwells in him bodily truly Permanently then You are complete in him now. Here's the sad thing about this translation, but every translation has the same problem. It's the same Greek word, fullness of deity in Christ bodily, same Greek word, you are full in him or all the completeness of God is in Christ, the God-man, and you are complete in Him. It's sad that the translation doesn't reflect the same Greek word because it's the major point of the passage.

Paul is not just saying, look, Don't you worry about Jesus plus, Jesus is wonderful. He's so great. You don't need Jesus plus. He's saying this, don't worry about Jesus plus, Jesus is wonderful. He's so great.

And this fullness, this Niagara of deity that is poured into a human Man, the God-man is now pouring over the edges of the God-man into you You're not deity and you'll never be as full as he is But you are constantly receiving from the same source the same kind of fullness All the fullness of God is in Christ and Christ has made you full. All the completeness of God is in Christ and Christ is daily completing you. This helps us Understand what Paul wrote back in 1 Corinthians. God has made him to be sanctification. How?

All the fullness of God is in him and we are daily coming and we are drinking and the waves of the reality of Christ's efficiency for the little decisions, the thoughts, the desires, the way I talk, the way I act, all those little decisions are being constantly supplied by this overflow of divine fullness that comes from the mediator. Jesus Christ as the son of God, The Son of God in eternity past was fully God. He possessed all this fullness. We are not talking about an essential fullness. We are talking about what the theologians call mediatorial fullness, the mediator's fullness.

The Father has invested the God-man with all the fullness of deity because he is to represent the sinner and to supply the sinner. The fullness that is given to Christ in Colossians 2 is not the fullness that he had from eternity past, it is the fullness from the Father in order to be shared with the believer. It's a mediatorial fullness. Now, that's the cure. But before we go to the application of the cure, let's look at the fullness just in case our views are a bit dim.

Because we've never seen the fullness of God. We don't want the world to describe Christ to us. It doesn't have the right measurements. We don't even want our churches to describe Christ to us because they generally don't have the right measurements and you don't want to look at your past Christian experiences and say, I think God is this big. I think Christ is this big because I've seen him work this way in my life because no matter how wonderful your past experiences, your past experiences are too small a measurement for Christ.

So how do you measure the fullness of God in Christ? Well, look back at chapter one. Paul gives us seven sketches. Seven sketches in verse 15 and following. Let me read those and then we'll just quickly look at them.

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 the head of the body, the church, and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself will come to have first place in everything, for it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him. Now, let's quickly look at these. We'll only be able to whet our appetites. If you say to me that Christ is all I need for sanctification, that He is my sanctification, and that the fullness of God is in Christ to fuel my sanctification, how full is it?

Well, here we go. Number one, the fullness of God in Christ is sufficient for your sanctification because Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. We don't understand God. We don't know what he's like. We see the evidence of God in creation, we see things explained in scripture, but here is deity stamped into the wax of humanity.

And in the gospels we see what God would be like in everyday life here on planet Earth. In John chapter one verse 18, no one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him. The Greek word there is the same as an artist who pulls back a veil over the finished product. So he's painted a beautiful portrait, nobody's been allowed to see it. Finally the artist comes, he pulls the curtain back and you see it.

That's what Christ did with the Father. You don't really understand him, he says, but let me show you, and through his life, he pulls the veil back. Another way the Greek word was used, that's used in John 1-18, is for a lawyer who explains a confusing document. Yes, you've studied God, you've read the Bible, but you're still left kind of confused that just, I don't know, it doesn't make very much sense. It's too much.

Christ comes and he explains the difficulties. He unveils God in his explanation. It's also used strangely for a long rope and a bucket. There's a deep well. All the other shallow wells are dry, but this deep well is still full of fresh water.

So who has a bucket and a rope that'll go down that far? Well, none of us do. So Christ comes along and he drops this infinitely long rope that's into this well and he pulls up from the well all this fresh water for us. We don't understand God, he's infinite, he's incomprehensible. What would it look like if we saw God living our kind of life on planet earth?

Well Christ has drawn that up from the well Christ is the image of the invisible God if you've seen me you've seen the Father Christ says in Hebrews chapter 1 He is the brightness of the Father's glory because he is the exact representation of his nature. Could you possibly need anything more for sanctification when it comes to knowing God than what you have in Christ? Second, he's the first born over all creation. Now this is not talking about chronology on the timeline. He came first.

So you have God the Father, then later Jesus came along. That's not true. That's a heresy. Christ is fully God, the Son of God, the Spirit of God, and God the Father, all coexisting in one great being, one essence. So what it's talking about is not chronology, not first born like I came first, but first born in the Old Testament sense of Dignity, not chronology, dignity.

I am the firstborn. I am the heir of all. I have the greater share. All atomic particles. All the galaxies, all people, all families, all cities, all events, all places, all times, they're all His.

They're all His inheritance. There's not one exception. How could we possibly need anything more in our Savior than that? Third, He is the Creator and Sustainer of all. He is the heir of all because He made it.

All was made through him. The father entrusted the son with creation. John says it. Everything was made by Christ and nothing that was made was made except through Christ. It's all been made, it's all been sustained, later we read, by Christ.

It's being held together. And it's all for Christ. Everything, even the rebelling world powers are held in existence. They were brought into existence. Wicked men were brought into power by Christ to be used by Christ for Christ's purposes.

Sin has been in some mind-boggling way allowed by God. And God is ruling over all things in a way that we don't yet understand, but one day we will, and it's all for Christ. Satan still exists, he still labors, he still lies, he still deceives, he still leads astray, but he exists because Christ still holds him in his hand. And when Christ is finished with him, he'll be damned. How can you need anything more for sanctification than the person who has made all things, sustained all things, and is the reason for all things.

The fourth thing he tells us is that Christ is before all things. Now this is chronology. He preexists every aspect of creation because he's God. In John chapter one verse one, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God face to face. That means that little Greek preposition means an equal, looking at an equal.

He is equal with the Father and he is God. Now I want you to think about the chronology of John 1.1. John 1.1 and Genesis 1.1, compare them in your mind. What's the difference? They both start at the same place, in the beginning.

But Moses writes Genesis, he stands back at the beginning of time and looks forward and tells what God did as time began to be measured, creation. John stands right beside Moses and turns himself around and leaps into eternity past before anything existed and says, look, look into the great expanse of the infinite past when there was only God because that's where the Son of God is. How could we need anyone more than that for our sanctification? The fifth thing, he's the head of the church. Now there are different heads, aren't there?

There's a governmental head. He's the king. So let me ask you, do you go to a church that's a monstrous church? I mean, come on, it's Halloween time. I mean, I always forget when it's Halloween.

I only know when somebody knocks on my door and I think, oh, I forgot to turn out the lights. Now, I'm not claiming not to buy Halloween candy. I'm telling you I don't give it away after I buy it because it's for me. So none of that cheap stuff. But my computer told me this morning, Halloween's coming up, you know, whenever.

All right, I don't even know. I'm in conference land. Now, I don't even know why I told you that. Where am I? Right, monstrous.

Thank you. Try to edit this folks, whoever's doing this, just please. All right. Monstrous church. It's Halloween time.

Do you have a church with multiple heads? Some hideous deformity. Or do you have a church with no head Christ is sufficient He is the answer to all the Jesus plus lies because he is the king, the head, the only head. But we do have a head. Listen now, homeschoolers are great headless people, aren't we?

Homeschoolers, I'm part of a homeschool co-op. It's miserable being on the board of a homeschool co-op normally. Actually ours is very pleasant because we rule with absolute power, but other than that, we would be in trouble because every homeschooler is their own king. That's why they're homeschoolers. They say, we raise our children the way we want to we read the books We want to we say but you joined a co-op.

These are the books are reading. Well, we don't like those books Well, then I don't know what to do with you. You know, you're you got your own head. We're the head You're we have a multi-headed beast But as a church it can't be that way Can't be headless can't be many heads But he's not just the governmental head. He's also a representative head.

That is, he stands for his people before the Father in the same way Adam stands for all fallen humanity. Everything Adam is and did has affected everyone that came from Adam. If you don't like that, read Romans 5 and find that there is one other option. Get out of Adam and get into Christ, and then everything Christ is, and everything Christ has done will be placed on your account. Representative head, living head.

It is by this wonderful union that we are constantly supplied. The sixth description Paul gives is that Christ is the beginning of the church in the sense that he is the author Or the cause by his resurrection. He is the firstborn from the dead He is the forerunner into heaven. He is the first fruit. My daughter sometimes does a garden and she, I do the hard work.

I go buy all the stuff she needs and then she does the rest. I don't weed it. I don't do anything. I go out, I pick a few tomatoes, I eat them, that's about it. She has this little garden at times.

If I want to know what the year's going to look like, what's the tomato going to look like this year? If I go out and the first tomatoes are all rotted at the bottom, you know that end rot they can get, then I have very low hopes for the harvest. It's going to be bad all year. But if I go out and they're really great tomatoes, I think, oh, this is going to be a good summer. My tomatoes, my daughter's tomatoes are going to be great.

Nobody eats tomatoes but me, so they're all mine. Now, if you want to know what the end of the journey will look like for this limping, distracted church of Christ, Well, look at the first fruit. Raised from the dead, seated beside the Father, the Father leans over to him, and in Psalm 110, he tells him something that we don't have anywhere else in the Bible. If we didn't have Psalm 110, we wouldn't know it, he says to him, come, sit here until I make every enemy to be your footstool. If you want to know the ultimate end of the Christian life, look at the first fruit, Christ's resurrection, Christ's glory, Christ's ascension.

If you want to know, if you want to know what the family's gonna look like, look at the firstborn. Christ is the picture, his incomparable fullness is the evidence that we will reach the end, we will not fail. Seventh picture, he is of course because of this preeminent. He's not just most, alright? We need to quit using the word most when we talk about Christ.

He's the most impressive, most holy, most wise, most I know what we mean, but we ought to use the word all. He is all impressive. There's no comparison. There's nobody else in his category. One of the old Puritan writers on this passage said we need to omni-fi Christ.

I think he invented a word. Christ isn't just more than everyone else. He is all. He is all impressive, all power, all wisdom, everything is from him. How could we need anything more than the one that God has made preeminent?

Now, church tempted to be Jesus plus, Paul's cure, all the fullness of God is in your mediator, and He is making you full from that fullness. If you don't understand how full that is, listen, Colossian Christians, imagine hearing it for the first time. You've embraced Christ, but you've got very infant-like grasp of how big He is And then you read the Colossian letter that comes to your town and you see that the one you're trusting is this sevenfold majestic one and Then go back to the Jesus plus temptations. All right chapter 2 verse 11 and 15 Do you need circumcision? Paul says why do you want circumcision The kind that the Jews do with physical surgery.

You have a new heart. This sevenfold glorious Savior Hasn't just changed the outward markings of a physical body. He's totally renovated the interior What about peace with God with sins? We don't need sacrifices Christ has had all the certificate of your debt written above him and the sevenfold description of this person That's the person who was crushed under the wrath of God and raised from under that wrath for you What about triumph over sin? He's the one that made a public spectacle of every one of your enemies.

How can you add anything to Christ for this vertical relationship? It's so offensive to him. Second, What about internal holiness? What about this stuff here? Well, verses 16 and following.

Why do you go back to this silly old, I don't mean silly because, all right, let me say that again. Why do you go back to the old obsolete way of the old covenant where you're not allowed to touch, you're not allowed to do this, you have to have these special days. Look that was a picture of what Christ would accomplish but that's been accomplished. Look at what He says in verse 20 and following, if you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, these basic schemes of making yourself holy, why as if you were living in the world do you submit yourself to decrees such as don't handle, do not taste, do not touch? These all refer to things destined to perish with use in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men these matters Now this is what I want you to notice which have to be sure the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

In other words, why do you want to go buy the newest book on 21 things you have to do to be holy and to make your family holy? And I know it's going to look impressive to everybody in your church when you do it But it has no value for real holiness because it doesn't deal with your root problem Doesn't deal with your heart. It only constrains the externals So we're not talking about living this licentious, loose life and calling it Christianity. Paul was saying, you don't need that because I have just described to you with seven portraits the sufficiency of Christ, who has all God's fullness for you. Why do you want to go back to the shallow things when you have the substance and having Christ?

And here he says, living, connected to the head, receiving all that he has and then spreading it throughout the body, you don't need those old rules. Those aren't going to change your heart. The old covenant is past. Third, in verse five He says, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, chapter three, verse five. So he's going to begin a long list of outward changes in Christianity.

But before he gets there, dealing with worldliness, what does he say? He says, focus on the things that are above. Well, what things? Well, focus on where Christ is, not on the things that are of the earth. My favorite commentator on this passage is a Scottish guy named John Eady from the 19th century.

He said this, the earth, the grave that you once lived in, this spiritual grave, spiritual death. It's like a man or a woman that's raised from the dead and they look back and there's that filthy hole in the ground that was a grave. There's where all the rottenness of death is. Do you want to take, now that you're alive in Christ and God is placing all these sweet things in your hands, do you want to take these precious things and put them down in the grave? Do you want your heart to be down in the grave with the rot and the filth and the death?

No, We come up out of the grave and we set all these things. We focus them on Christ. The cure to worldliness is not telling your children how bad the world is. The cure to worldliness is showing them how good Christ is and he becomes the distraction. And we just find it hard to focus on what the world offers us because I just came out of my quiet time where I met him.

It's not all there is. Paul gives a long list, But that's the beginning point. I take the precious things he gives me and I turn my back on the old, rotted grave of self-centeredness that I used to live in and I set my affections on my captain. Living on that fullness. Now a couple of applications and we're finished.

We do need the clearest views of him. So as I said yesterday, let me give you this suggestion. When I was in seminary, I met a man that had an English accent so he could have been a heretic and I would have loved him. It wouldn't have mattered. He talked like he was from Oxford, you know.

Posh, proper. So, He was in his 80s. His name was Dr. Reginald Barnard. And he said this to me, I followed him around everywhere he went.

I just ignored all my other classes. I followed Dr. Barnard around. And he said to me, he said, when I was first brought to the Lord as a teenager, I determined that I would begin to pursue the highest views of Christ possible. So I began to read only those books which gave me clear views of Christ.

And then I sang, I got a hymn book and I marked the hymns and the verses and the phrases that gave me the clearest views of Christ. And I read Christian poetry, I read Christian history, I read theology, but it was all with that in mind. And I began as a believer at that point to determine I would not waste my life reading any books on how to grow a big church or how to have a successful Sunday school or even how to prepare a sermon which you may feel is quite apparent by now. But I decided that I would read everything I could get my hands on that was particularly beneficial in showing me Christ. Now that man in his 80s said this, I have kept these journals, I've kept these little notebooks, I've collected, I've ransacked scripture and history and theology and poetry.

But he said to me, John, when I die and I awake before him, I fully expect after a lifetime of pursuing the clearest views of his beauty To turn away and blush and say to my captain, to my savior, I knew you were beautiful, but I never knew you were this beautiful. Now listen, why not do that? Doesn't matter what age you are. Why not say to the Lord, between today and the moment I see you face to face? I Am NOT going to ignore everything in Christianity But I want the heart of it to be this I want to ransack this world Every book every passage in the script in the Bible.

I want to get the clearest and the most captivating views of you. Thomas Chalmers, religious preacher who later became a Christian preacher in Scotland, who later became the educator of a whole group of young men that led Scotland in a revival in the 1830s, one of them being one of my favorites, Robert Murray McShane. Thomas Chalmers taught the students this, and this applies to holiness, there is an expulsive power, do you know the quote? There is an expulsive power in the new affection. Listen, I remember when My family and I, we were in the UK, and I was spending, there was a peculiar season there where I really was trying to fast and pray, really wrestling with how much is a Christian allowed to have of God.

And during that time, I reached a point where I kept getting stuck because as I would pray, I would just think, God, but there are still these temptations, there are still these sins. It's like they cling. It's like the front room, all the old lovers have been kicked out. And the main rooms, but they're still living, they're all clinging, they're all hanging out in the back rooms and I can't get them out. And I don't know why you would listen to any of my prayers and then I came to this conclusion.

God, if you would walk in the front door, all those old lovers that I don't want, they would all run out the back door. So Christ come in a greater measure. Work, fill me. When the heart is aflame with love to Christ, not sentimentalism, but because you have carefully studied all the facets of his person and work, and God has made that to be an effective study, then the old lovers are expelled. John Barrage that I mentioned yesterday said this, sanctification is to daily live in the contemplation and admiration of the love of Christ.

Daily reaching after a sweeter knowledge of him Till I know by heartfelt experience the love that is beyond knowing In this ocean God, let me wade till self Finding no ground to stand on is swallowed up and You Jesus precious Jesus are all and all Let me give you another application so we start with pursuing these clear views of Christ second application What if you see that you've drifted? And this is my last application. What if you see that you're drifted? You are not captivated by Christ. You are not what we've been talking about this week.

But because of the kindness of God, maybe there is a little thing in you that wants to be. But you look at a holy God and you think, well I'm not going to him until I clean myself up. I mean, I'm a little embarrassed here. No, don't do that. The only thing that fits you, that makes you a fit person to go to Christ is the fact that you are so aware of how unholy you are.

Christ has been sent to be the friend of sinners, not of good people. If you're good people, forget it. Go somewhere else. If you're sick and you're sick of the sickness in your soul, of your anger and your bitterness and your pride, of your selfishness and your lust, and you know what's on the inside of you and you're tired of trying to hold up the mask and you're terrified that someday it's going to crack and someone's going to see what you are. Go to Christ and lay it all before him because he is the provision of God for the unholy people.

Now, if you're a Christian and you've drifted, Do not stay far away from Christ and complain that you can't seem to get interested in a holy life and you're cold and you've been cold and you're not changing. Rutherford again wrote from prison, he said this, We are a dry people and we dwell far from the well from Christ, far from the fountain and complain dryly of our dryness. We would do better to go and drink. There is a way of sounding so very righteous, isn't there? By talking about, oh, how sinful we are, how terrible we are, how weak we are.

Well, that's true. But Are you the kind of person that just has a scratchy throat and you're a bit uncomfortable and you're a little miserable and you're Christianity? You know, I'm just not really, I'm just not doing so well. I'm always kind of got this scratchy throat, a little thirsty. Or are you a person, so are you just a little dry or are you?

Thirsty and you get up and you say to God, I don't know if you're gonna let me come back But unless you tell me to stay away, I'm coming back for the honor of Christ. I'm coming back. God restore me and let me drink again. I'm tired of the dryness of religion. So the goal of the conference really is not ultimately for us to become very serious about holiness and go home and talk to everybody about holiness.

The goal is, of course, holy living. But in my mind, here's the goal that I have for me. Maybe it's one that you would want for yourself. I want to be captivated afresh by Christ in a way that makes me live holy, and I want to have, by the experiential application of the fullness of Christ in every area of John Snyder's little insignificant life, I want to have that fullness producing such changes, but I want to be able to say what Rutherford prayed when he first went into prison, oh that I might have new tales to tell of, not holiness, of Christ. May the Lord help us to follow that.

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