is that better? Yeah. All right. So again, quote from john Calvin, the pastor must have two voices, one for gathering the sheet and another for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves and the scripture supplies him with the means of doing both. Uh, in this letter to the colossians, we see paul doing just that. He’s using scripture to comfort the believers in colossi while simultaneously exposing the wolves and the thieves who seek to destroy this young church. In fact, um, in chapter two verse eight, we see the chief concern that paul wants to address in this letter. We see him warning the colossians against coming under the influence of these false teachers, who prided themselves on being wise philosophers and being deeply spiritual. And yet in all of their spiritual endeavors, they were departing from christ, which makes them wolves and thieves. And so paul comforts the sheep, he calls them to christ. And in chapter two verse 16, he begins the passage with the conjunctivitis adverb therefore, and you have to ask the question, what is it there for? Well, it’s there to show a cause and effect. And the cause and effect. Is this true gospel teaching and preaching faithfulness to the word of God keeps us in christ and false teaching will lead us away from christ. So he goes through all the chapter to unpacking very, very clearly, drawing attention to these false teachers. Their approach, their strategy to help the colossians to develop the discernment, to know what is true, who to believe, Who to trust. So. Chapter two is a very important chapter and verse 23 of this chapter, he tosses out a phrase self made religion and by that he simply means any form of spirituality or religion that did not originate with God. It is man made, it is of the devil, it is not of christ, it is self made religion. And so the title this morning is say no to self made religion. We just came off a midterm election. There are all these different things you have to vote on people trying to get your vote to say yes to this no to that. Well here paul is saying to the colossians, you need to say no to self made religion. And we’ll see here from this passage that paul, his argument against these false teachers and how to discern who these false teachers were and who the true representatives of the faith are. We see him making his argument come clear into the light in this chapter, but I wanna kinda, before we read the passage, I want to show you how he’s been building this argument. He’s been building this case against these false teachers. He’s been building a case to show that the reason why he’s writing this letter is to help them to see the truth to know who to trust. And he’s been building a very strong and compelling case, beginning in verse three and four, when he celebrates the colossians chapter one, verse three and four, he celebrates their faith in christ and that just may seem like ball is being nice, that kind of occurred, so to speak. But no, he wants them to understand the false teaching is taking them away from christ. He wants to celebrate faith in christ, not the departure from christ. And then in chapter one verse seven, he reminds them that they learned this faith, that they heard the gospel preached through a path chris who was beloved a faithful minister of christ again, in contrast to the false teachers. and then in Chapter 1: verse 23, he talks about the the suffering, the affliction that he was experiencing and what the Gospel Ministers experience as the world pours out its hatred on these faithful ministers who are who are preaching christ, right! These false teachers, pulling out hatred on these guys, preaching christ. And then in verse 28 of chapter one, he reminds them that it’s christ that we proclaim its christ, that we wa…