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Published March 4, 2012

Putting On Our New Nature – And Keeping It On!

Over the past month we’ve been looking at Christianity in a Nutshell as we’ve been studying the book of Colossians. What are the core basics of Christianity? We’ve looked at who Jesus really is and what He did for us on the cross. We’ve talked about what it really means to be a Christian and just last week we started looking how we can live continuously in a close relationship with God. And this morning we are going to continue on that theme – this is kinda a “part 2” to our message last week.

Last week we talked about the battle between our two natures. We have our old sinful nature that just wants to please me – and we have our new Christ-like nature that wants to please God. And these two natures are constantly in conflict with each other. We always have this struggle between doing what I want – and doing what God wants. And this battle is the reason that so many Christians feel defeated. Time and time again, they really want to do what is right, but they inevitably do what is wrong. So they feel like failures.

But Paul tell us that we don’t have to live that way.

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Published February 27, 2012

A Continuous, Close Relationship with God

These past few weeks we’ve been looking at Christianity in a Nutshell as we’ve examined Paul’s letter to the Colossians. And we’ve been talking about some good stuff. Stuff like who Jesus really is. Stuff like what Jesus really did for us when He died on the cross and rose from the grave. Stuff like what it really means to be a Christian. And if you’ve missed that or just have a poor memory, let me give you a quick 3-point summary: #1. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. #2. He died on a cross and rose from the grave to take away our sin and our punishment so that we could be together with God. #3. Being a Christian means you have accepted what Christ has done for you and now, with Christ living within you, you have life together with God. That’s what we’ve been talking about.

We ended last week on the theme of having a relationship with God. And of course, that leads to the question: How? And not “How do we begin a relationship with God?” – we’ve talked about that already. It begins by confessing with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believing in your heart that God raised Him from the dead. That’s how we start our relationship with God – But the question I want to talk about today is, how do we live in continuing, close relationship with God? What do we do? What does God do? How does it all work together? What is life together with God supposed to look like?

I don’t know if you’re like me – but I struggle with this. It is difficult for me to understand how exactly to experience a continuing, close relationship with God. And maybe that surprises you, but I’m just being honest. I don’t have it all figured out – but I’m learning.

And one of the greatest privileges I have as your pastor is to be able to stand in front of you week after week and share with you the lessons that I’ve been learning. That’s not to say that I’ve mastered it all. In fact, if you hear me preach on the same topic several times, it’s probably because God hasn’t got through to me yet. But I’m learning, and I’d love to have you learn with me.

Today we begin chapter three of Colossians.

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Published February 19, 2012

What Is A Christian?

What does it mean to be a Christian? What’s Christianity all about? And forgive me if that seems to be a silly question to ask in church on a Sunday morning. After all, don’t we all know what Christianity is all about? What it means to be a Christian? Why, just last Sunday we talked about how Jesus is the Son of God and that He died on a cross in our place and how because of that, we can be completely forgiven of our sins if we choose to accept God’s forgiveness. The Bible tells us that if we confess with our mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and if we believe in our heart that God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved. Isn’t that what it means to be a Christian? Being saved? Having eternal life? Being forgiven?

Well, yes. Accepting Christ as our Saviour does mean that we are saved, that we’ve been forgiven, and that we have the hope of eternal life. But what does that really mean? I mean, how does that affect your life right now? What difference does it make? Is Christianity merely a ‘get out of jail free’ card for when you die? Is it just a ticket to heaven? Is the Christian life about collecting heavenly airmiles by our good behavior so we can cash them in for a bigger mansion when we get to heaven? Is that what Christianity is all about?

Or does God have something else in mind? Is there something more to being a Christian than just being saved?

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Published February 18, 2012

Who Is Jesus?

Who is Jesus? As you can see, you can find a wide variety of answers to that question. That clip that we just watched was taken in Baltimore, USA, but I’m sure if you asked the same question in Red Deer, you’d get the same variety of responses.

We talked last week a little bit about counterfeits and how tragic it is when people get duped – not just out of their hard-earned money – but in matters of eternal consequences. And judging by the wide variety of responses in this video, it’s clear that many people are getting duped about Jesus Christ. They’ve been deceived about who He really is.

And that’s not just in the secular world. If you were to ask that same question – “Who is Jesus” to people who have gone to church for years, I fear there would be many people who could not give a full and accurate answer of who Jesus is and what He’s done.

And this was the exact problem that the church in Colossae was facing in 60 AD. There were people in the church who were being confused and deceived about who Jesus Christ is. False teachers were spreading counterfeit beliefs about Jesus. And so that’s one of the main reasons that Paul writes this letter (what we call the book of Colossians) to the church in Colossae. To address this issue, Paul’s gives them – what I’ve called Christianity in a Nutshell – and He spells out for them in no uncertain terms the truth about Jesus Christ.

And so that’s exactly what we want to look at today, because quite frankly, I don’t want to get duped. I don’t know about you, but I want to know the truth – especially when my eternal future is on the line. I want to know the truth. What does the Bible say? Who is Jesus Christ? So that’s what we’re going to look at this morning.

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Published February 8, 2012

Nutshell Truths

Have any of you ever been duped by counterfeit money? I’ve never experienced getting stuck with counterfeit money and I hope I never do. But I know others have. And that’s got to be a terrible feeling.

Imagine that you’re selling your car on Kijiji for maybe a couple thousand dollars. Some guy comes and checks it out and want to pay cash for it. So he gives you 20 one hundred dollar bills. He takes the car, you take the money and when you go to deposit it in the bank, the teller tells you that it’s all counterfeit. It’s fake. You got ripped off and there’s nothing you can do about.

That would stink big time! Wouldn’t you be mad? Mad at the guy for ripping you off and mad at yourself for not checking the money closer? No body likes getting duped.

But you know, people get duped all the time. Not just with counterfeit money, but with all kinds of things. We get duped by the “no-money-down” commercials on tv, or the “drink this beer and life will become a party” advertisements. We’re likely to see several of those during the superbowl this afternoon. We get duped by the big promises of the lottery tickets or by investments too good to be true.” You read in the news about people who have invested all their life savings with a certain investor only to find out later that the investor was a fraud and all their money is gone. They were duped and now they have nothing.

And while its certainly painful to get deceived out of your hard-earned cash, it’s tragic when people get duped in areas of life that are far more serious.

We live in a world where many people have been duped about God – about who He is and what He’s like – About the meaning of life and realities after death. Our world is full of counterfeit religions and counterfeit beliefs. And getting duped by those are far more serious than getting duped by a used-car salesman. I mean, we’re talking about life-changing, eternal consequences here. So it is absolutely imperative that we can sort out what is true and real and what is counterfeit when it comes to our beliefs about God.

And what makes it increasingly difficult is that many of these counterfeits are very convincing. I mean, that’s the nature of a counterfeit – it looks like the real thing. If it wasn’t convincing, no one would fall for it.

So with so many convincing, yet different beliefs about God and life and death out there, how do we make sure that we know what is really true and real? How do we keep from being duped?

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Published January 26, 2012

Building Our Relationship With God

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about our 2012 Discipleship Action Plan. The goal of this plan is to draw our community into life with Christ. That means you, that means me, that means the people in our community that have never darkened the doors of a church – all of us, being drawn deeper into life with Christ. That’s the goal. And our strategy for doing this, in a nutshell, is to build relationships. We’ve repeated this many times that life is all about our relationships. It’s not about our career or the wealth we accumulate or our popularity – it’s about the relationships that we build with God and with each other. And it’s through these relationships that God changes lives.

Last week we looked at the example of the paralyzed man and his four friends. And how God used those four friends to bring about a radical change in that man’s life. God did the changing, but He brought it about through those four friends.

And originally, the plan for today was to look at another example of how God uses people to bring about change in people’s lives – however… This week, God brought about a change in my message. I was going to talk about David’s Mighty Men – a group of 37 men that gathered around the leadership of King David and did mighty and amazing things. But by Wednesday this week, I came to the conclusion that this was not the direction that God wanted me to go with the message, so I had to figure out what the right direction was. So as I was thinking and trying to discern what God wanted me to preach about this morning, I realized that there was a key part of our 2012 Discipleship Action Plan that I had just sorta taken for granted. I just presumed it was in place and so I hadn’t talked much about it.

In fact, if you remember back to January 1st, we started this whole series by looking at what Jesus said was the greatest commandments. It was Mark chapter 12 – verse 29-31.

 29 Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord. 30 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ 31 The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31

And because we were launching into our growth groups, we naturally focused on the second part – loving our neighbors as ourselves – Building relationships with the people around us. But I don’t want to neglect the first part. After all, Jesus said the most important commandment is to love God with everything you’ve got. So we’ve kinda gone about this in a backwards fashion, but that’s ok. We’ve talked about loving our neighbors and building relationships with them, but now we want to talk about loving God and building our relationship with Him.

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