Shelbyville Community Church

In the book of Colossians, Paul teaches husbands and wives how they should conduct and order themselves in a marriage in light of what Christ has done for each of them. In fact, there is very similar teaching about marriage in another book of the New Testament, the book of Ephesians. But in Ephesians there is a summary statement about marriage that is missing in Colossians:

“However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Ephesians 5:33 (NIV)

Once again, research confirms the wisdom of God’s word. The University of Washington did a study on marriage in which they studied 2,000 couples over a period of 20 years. They found that the two most vital ingredients to a healthy relationship are the two mentioned by the Apostle Paul over 2,000 years ago: love and respect. In fact, over 7,000 couples were surveyed with this question, “When you are in marital conflict, do you walk away feeling disrespected or unloved?” 83% of the men reported feeling disrespected, while 72% of the women reported feeling unloved. While its certainly true that men and women each need both love and respect, respect is often the felt need for men, while love is most often the felt need for women.

In reality, a Christian marriage should be a submission competition. It should be a race to the back of the line. What if there is more to Paul’s command that husbands should love their wives? If you’re single, you’ll be able to filter Sunday through the lens of all of your important relationships.

One’s responses might be, “I’ve tried!” “I’m still trying.” “I’ll trust that I’ll be forgiven, so just won’t There is an Outer You: your skin, your hair, your face, your body. Then there’s an Inner You: your character, your heart, your soul. The Outer You is what everybody sees. The Inner You is invisible, at least to those who don’t know you well. The Outer You is temporary; the Inner You is eternal. Paul puts it this way,”Outwardly, we are wasting away.” (2 Corinthians 4:16)

From about the age of twenty-five on, certain changes start to kick in to the Outer You. Your bones start to lose their calcium, and they get brittle. Your skin starts to lose its elasticity and shrivel up. Age spots begin to multiply. You will look down at your hands one day, and say, “When did the hands of my parents show up on my body?” As you age, you start losing brain cells at an alarming rate. If you’re over thirty, you lose 3,000,000 brain cells a day. For some of us, that explains a lot.

As you get older, the weight starts shifting from the poles of your body towards the equator. Hair will stop growing where you want it to and boldly go to places no hair has gone before. People will begin to buy you things like nose hair trimmers for Christmas. You won’t ask for them, mind you, people will just start buying them.

I know some of you reading this are in your teens or twenties, and you are thinking, “That will never happen to me. I will never grow old like you.” Those of us who are older want you to know we understand, and we love you. But it will happen to you. And frankly, we’re looking forward to it.

You can exercise your body, starve it, Rogaine it, stretch it, lift it, nip and tuck it, tan it, dress it up in expensive clothes, but one day our bodies will fail all of us. The Outer You is temporary, but the Inner You is eternal. It is your being that will never cease to exist. Your spirit—the inner character and the real you—is in the process of becoming something. It may be something really good, or something really dark, but you are becoming something. That something is what God sees when He looks at us, and that is what matters most to Him.

Join us this weekend as discuss the critical importance of tending to your inner self, not just the superficial stuff on the outside.

Baptism is a picture of a new life! During All Things New Celebrations, we have the amazing opportunity to celebrate what God is doing here at SCC through the ancient practice of baptism.

We’re used to thinking that baptism day is about the other people who made their declaration of faith alongside us, but nothing could be further from the truth. Baptism celebrates and pictures Christ’s loving work of salvation on the cross. It points us to His grace and power in our lives.

One’s responses might be, “I’ve tried!” “I’m still trying.” “I’ll trust that I’ll be forgiven, so just won’t worry about it.” We'd get lots of different answers, angles, and maybe even arguments over how to respond to that question.

Yes, God’s Word definitely tells us what to stop and what to do. One of the big keys that we’ll unpack tomorrow is his command to “put off the old self” and “put on the new self,” What does that even mean? What does that look like?

If you are a Christ Follower I‘m confident your desire is see Him more clearly, love Him more dearly, and follow Him more nearly. That has the ring of song to it. Seriously, God is always at work in our lives, changing us to be more like Him. The Apostle Paul called it, “being changed from glory to glory.” (2 Corinthians 3:18) It’s a Day by Day thing!

I hope to be sharing some helpful practical applications from Colossians 3:5-11 tomorrow.

While in college, one of my good friends, Alex, got a job working as a barista at a Starbucks near campus. Not long after he started, he'd come back to our dorm talking about a guy named Tony who came to his Starbucks twice a day. He'd come early in the morning, play a round of golf, and come back in the afternoon. He had a specific morning order and a specific afternoon order. And every day, Alex would make the order and hand Tony his drinks.

Tony was a topic of conversation not because of his order, but because of how he tipped. Twice a day, he'd stop in, pick up his drinks, and hand Alex a $50 tip. Why on earth would someone tip a barista $100 a day to make two coffee drinks?

It turned out that Tony was Tony Kukoc, a three-time NBA Champion who played with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and the rest of the ‘96, ‘97, and ‘98 Chicago Bulls. He still lived in Deerfield, where the Bulls have their practice facility.

This Sunday, we'll continue walking through the book of Colossians. Paul makes a point that the Christian life should look so different than the world; people will be confused by how you live.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite restaurants was The Old Country Buffet. Anytime my grandma made the trip from Florida to Wisconsin, I knew we'd be hitting the "OCB!" Was the food quality?…Meh, but you could eat as much as you wanted. And for me, that meant unlimited fried chicken and several bowls of gummy bears!

I once heard a pastor named JD Greer refer to the city of Colossae as the Golden Corral of worship. Any god, any practice, as much or as little as you'd like. This culture made following Jesus pretty challenging. When I look at the culture we're in, it's not so different.

I can't wait to spend Sunday morning with you, as we continue looking at who Jesus is, in a buffet of beliefs.

When you read through Colossians 2:8-15, two things stand out. The first is how difficult it is to work through this passage. It’s very technical with terminology that is hard to fully understand. But the second observation is that these verses ooze grace.

If you were to squeeze this passage, grace would come out. If you bumped into this passage, grace would spill out. In fact, if you look at this whole letter to the Colossians, it begins with grace, it ends with grace, and everything in between is just grace. Paul never recovered from the wonder of grace. Grace changes hearts, changes minds, and transforms our wills.

Without grace, religion is just an exercise in discipline. Without grace, marriages wither and die. Without grace, children grow resentful and frustrated. Without grace, souls shrivel and harden. Without grace, God seems distant and cold. The best definition of grace I’ve come across is this one, in the form of an acronym:

God’s

Riches

At

Christ’s

Expense

In other words, He was punished so that we could be pardoned.

He was put to death so that we could live. He was called a criminal so that I could be called a saint. He was rejected by the Father so that we could be accepted by the Father. That’s grace, and it is so important. You can know the right thing, you can even do the right thing, but the world is so tired of Christians who say they know the right things but in whom there is no grace.

Join us this weekend as discuss the critical importance of grace in the Christian life and how you can continue to grow in it.

In Colossians 1 Paul tells us that his goal is to present everyone mature in Christ. Beginning in chapter two, he will lay out what that looks like. He will encourage us to live “rooted” to Christ. Living this way is so important that it is one of our core values as a church:

Live a Rooted Life

Prayer, Scripture, and worship are the heartbeat of our relationship with God. Through scripture and prayer, we seek God’s presence, listen for His voice, and align our hearts with His will. Through worship, we respond to who God is with gratitude, reverence, and joy.

This weekend, we’ll explore the question, “What is going to happen in your life if you live this way? What kind of person are you going to become if you make prayer, Scripture, and worship a priority in your life? What kind of person does God want you to become? I will suggest three things will happen right out of this passage.

God will give you a crazy love for others, He will grow a big faith in you that crowds out fear, and He will create in you a grateful heart. Join us this weekend as we delve into what your life could look like as a result of living the rooted life.

What should be the main thing at a church? What should be the focus? Paul makes it crystal clear.

“He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.”

(Colossians 1:27–29, NIV)

That means we do not proclaim clever human insights. We do not proclaim self- improvement, stress-management, life-balance, or career advancement. We do not proclaim a system of beliefs. We do not proclaim a political agenda. We do not proclaim a set of traditions. We proclaim Him. We proclaim Christ because He is the light of the world, because He is the creator and sustainer of all that exists, and because each of us has been created for his good pleasure. We proclaim Christ because He is the kingdom-bringer, and the sin-bearer. We proclaim Him because He is the death-defeater, the life-giver, and the hope- bringer.

TO say that we proclaim Christ is to say that Christ has changed our Facebook status from enemies of God to friends of God. To proclaim Him means we are betting the farm on Him and staking our lives to Him. Notice too that Paul says the Christ is proclaimed to “everyone.”

We want everyone to grow up into Jesus, to become fully mature in Him. This is why we gather on Sunday morning and why we gather in groups throughout the week. It was why we encourage things like serving and generosity, and why we insist on living the rooted life.

We may live in a medium-sized town in central Indiana, but God says we also live in an invisible kingdom that supersedes and controls our lives here in Indiana. It is an amazing truth that an invisible God took on a visible human body so that we could become a part of His invisible kingdom. Every kingdom has a king that rules from somewhere.

Scripture says that King Jesus rules from Heaven and, through the Holy Spirit, also rules in our hearts. The Apostle Paul spent several words describing our King to us in Colossians. I’ll look forward to “unpacking” some of those tomorrow at SCC. If you can’t be there in person, I hope you will watch online, on Facebook, or on our YouTube Channel. Both services are viewable at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM.

Also, we will have our second “Sign-Up” Sunday tomorrow as we prepare to start our fall session of small groups. There are many new group opportunities. Come in person to sign up or check out “groups” on the “InsideSCC.org” website.