Colossians

Pastor James (our young associate pastor) has been preaching through Colossians since (I think) September. He's a good pastor and I enjoy his preaching. The last two sermons, though, seem to be above the rest, although that's just my opinion based on where I'm at right now!

Two Sundays ago he preached on the end of chapter 2. His sermon was about asceticism, and how we are not to practice it. He spoke about the problems with man made rules, and how they are intended to get us to a higher plane and closer to God....but we're already there! As Christians, out citizenship is in heaven already.

He also talked about how we practice a form of penance when we sin. We know we've sinned again (and all too often the same sin) and we know we need to confess that sin, but first we feel the need to feel bad about it for a while just so God knows how sorry we are and to make our repentance seem more real (rough translation). But, the thing is, that's not what God wants. He wants us to come to Him, confess our sin, and be forgiven. Not that godly sorrow over our sin is bad, but trying to deserve forgiveness because of how bad we feel is really bad.

I don't know about anyone else, but that's what I do sometimes. I've sinned again, and I don't think that I should go to God for forgiveness right away until I've felt guilty enough long enough or at least tried to fix things and fix myself so that I deserve forgiveness. But that's not the way it works, and that's not what God wants. The fact is that I won't deserve forgiveness no matter what I do or how I feel, but He grants it anyway.

I didn't really understand that I was doing this until the sermon and then I saw myself so clearly in what he was saying. I stopped and (since I was listening on-line at work) replayed that part. Then, the next day I listened again to make sure I understood.

Last Sunday Pastor James preached on the first few verses of chapter 3. Here he talked about living a spiritual life, about focusing on the heavenly. He said that if we are concerned with what we should not be doing (what TV shows are bad, what books we should ignore, etc.) then we're doing it all backwards. What we need to do is focus on God and on what we should be doing for spiritual growth, and a lot of the other stuff will fall away, and we may find that we don't care for it anymore. We will view things differently.

Again, I've always looked to rules for spiritual growth: don't watch this and don't read that and God will be happy. So right now I'm changing my perspective: instead of "don't do this" I'm saying "do this" to the good stuff and working from there.

Pastor James says it all so much better than this, so go to the church website (www.grbc.ca) and find those two sermons. Trust me: it will be worth the time.