Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, New Life Gillette Church, we are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes, newlife gillette.com here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Good morning, New Life.
How are you? Cold?
Yeah, it's beautiful outside today.
So, for those of you that I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Brooklyn. I'm the youth director here at New Life. And so typically, you'll find me on a Wednesday night back in the West Wing with your teenagers, which, aside from being a wife and a mother, is one of the greatest joys of my life. I love hanging out with them.
But to get the ball rolling this morning and to make me feel more at home, like I'm back there in the West Wing, if a few of you wouldn't mind, would you please just, like, take out your phones and be on them the whole time that I'm speaking up here? Or if you would just turn to the person next to you and talk really loudly like, I'm not even here, that would make me feel more at home.
No, I'm just. I'm kidding. They are amazing. If you have a teenager that is in New Life Youth, you should take it as encouragement, because I am amazed every time that I'm with them, and I see the way that God moves through them. And I could honestly talk about it all morning, but I might not have my job if I choose to do that. So let's jump into the message today. Today we are moving into Colossians chapter two, if you brought your Bibles.
CJ has been working through chapter one the last couple of weeks. And so today we're moving on from that to two. But before you do that, would you mind bowing your heads and praying with me?
I have a prayer that's based on Psalm 119 that I'd like to pray with you all.
Lord, open our eyes that we may see wonderful truth in your word.
Teach us your ways, guide our hearts to you, and only to you.
Help us to not only hear your word, but to live it, not only today, but every day that follows through Christ, who is our Lord and our precious Savior. Amen.
So as we move in, I want to start with a question that I have been pondering a lot lately, and it is, why is it that some Christians stay strong in their faith their entire lives and never seem to waver, and yet other Christians seem to slowly drift away? Not like an obvious disrupt, but like a slow A slow drift.
And in Colossians 2, Paul actually answers that. He says that it has nothing to do with our personality. It has nothing to do with our intelligence, has nothing to do with how emotional our faith is. But Paul says that it comes down to the roots.
So Colossians chapter 2, verse 6 says, and now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.
Is there anyone here today that gardens?
There's like, two people. So that's good.
So, yeah, I attempt gardening. My grandma is way better at gardening, but I give it my best every year, and someday, hopefully, I'll be as good as her. But if you garden here in Wyoming, those two other people, you know that our growing season is roughly two and a half weeks long, so there's not a lot of time. So unless you have a greenhouse, which. Side note, I'm asking my husband for a greenhouse this, this year for my birthday. So if you see him in the lobby later, feel free to tell him or remind him. I would appreciate that. He's tall and handsome, so if you want to let him know, I would appreciate that. CJ's like, I should not have given her a mic right now.
Anyways, okay, so because I don't yet have a greenhouse, and because of Wyoming's short growing season, I start my flowers and my vegetables inside my house.
So I start them in this little tray, and then I have a little UV light over it and a heating mat under it. And just like a garden outside, you just dig little holes with your fingers and you sprinkle two or three seeds. And if God's blessing is upon me that year, I usually will have a few plants sprout up like that.
And so the first year that I did this, I opened up my gardening book that I was reading, and it said that I had to thin them, which was really disappointing because I was so excited that anything came up. If you don't know, thinning is basically picking the strongest plant out of each hole and then pulling the others so that that plant can grow strong enough roots and that it will hopefully eventually produce vegetables or fruit or flowers. And then after you do that, you wait about a month or so and. And you move your plants outside and you space them even further out. And when we do that, we are creating, again, roots or room for the roots to grow.
If I skipped this step of thinning them, which I was tempted to do, if I would have skipped that, or if I skipped this step of putting them out there and I just left them in this tiny box, they would eventually die because their roots would not have room to grow.
So that's what Paul is saying here, right? He's saying, yes, you have accepted Christ as your Lord, but we're not done.
There's more. There's more that we have to do. We've accepted Christ as our Lord, and now we must continue, as Paul says, to follow him so that our roots grow deep into him, so that our lives are built on Him. And then once we have a strong enough foundation, once our roots are deep enough to uphold our faith, like the roots plants grow strong, we will overflow with thankfulness, which to me, when I was reading this, I thought that that was a very interesting word to use, thankfulness. We would overflow with thankfulness. He doesn't say, once your roots grow down deep into Jesus, you will overflow with success. Or, once your roots grow down deep into Jesus, Jesus, your life will be so much easier.
He says, once your roots grow down deeper into Christ, you will overflow with thankfulness.
Why?
Well, the Paul. The word Paul uses here for thankfulness in Greek is euch.
I practiced this. Hold on. Eucharistia. Eucharistia. There we go. Maybe, I don't know. Which comes from two Greek words, though. It comes from eukaryotic, which is good and well, and charis, which is grace.
So the word eucharistica. I don't know. You're going to have to YouTube that later. It means gratitude that comes from grace.
So in other words, when our roots grow down into Jesus, thankfulness naturally overflows from seeing God's grace.
When our roots grow down deep into Christ, the storms of life don't stop coming. They continue, however we see God's hand in them.
And when we fail or we mess up, like all humans do, it's inevitable. We don't just see our failure, we see God's grace and his mercy.
And when we lack, we see where God provides and it fills the space with his perfect power and stands in the gap for us.
So essentially, Paul is saying, once your roots grow down deep, your perspective changes, your perspective shifts.
You can go to the next slide.
So how do we do that?
How do we let our roots grow down deep into Jesus so that our faith will grow strong and change our entire perspective on life?
Well, it's similar to watering or giving your plants nutrients to help them grow. I have this plant here today. CJ's wonderful wife and my Friend Jen let me borrow it because actually, I don't actually currently have any living plants, so this one is hers. I'm not going to take credit for it, but. So as we water or we give our plants help nutrients to grow the fruit and vegetables or flour or whatever the plant is supposed to do is just a natural product of that.
But metaphorically, we need to water or give nutrients to our souls so that the naturally the fruit of his spirit and the overflowing with thankfulness is a natural product of that.
I think sometimes we can become quick to think that the work is done when we give our lives to Christ.
And do not get me wrong, that is an incredible step. That is an important step. There's people being baptized later and it is exciting and we will cheer for them because it is amazing.
But we are not done yet. We have to choose to continue to follow Him.
So I want to get practical with you guys here this morning, if that's okay.
And some of us are in this room because we want to grow closer to Christ or we want to learn about Him. And some of us in this room were actually made to come or dragged here by our wives or husbands or whatever. It's totally fine. There is no judgment and we're happy to that you're here regardless.
But for a lot of us, it's really easy to sit here on a Sunday morning and let the worship band play worship and for us to sing the songs and pray the prayers and feel filled up and encouraged for the week, and then wake up Monday morning and slip right back into our normal life, our normal patterns or our normal routines.
And when we do that, suddenly Jesus becomes something that we visit once a week instead of who we build our lives upon.
Paul is saying, don't do that. Don't go back to what your life was before.
In fact, if we go a few more verses down, in Colossians 2, in chapter 12, it says, for you were buried with Christ when you were baptized, and with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of Go, who raised Christ from the dead.
We were buried, our old lives were buried when we gave our lives to Christ, when we were baptized. And we need to live out that new life. Yes, on Sundays, but also on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays and all the days.
But you and I as humans are very forgetful. And God knows that. God knows that about us. And honestly, that's basically what the Bible is in a nutshell is this. I made A little thing, it says, God saves human.
Human is grateful and praises him. Human forgets, human messes up. And then we think our ways are better. We try that and then we realize they're not. And then we get in a sticky situation. And then we become desperate for God to save us again. And then say, God save us, and then he saves us again. And then we just. The Bible kind of repeats that over and over.
And honestly, we're not any different than that.
We go to church on a Sunday, you're here. But then on Monday someone says something, we're due at work. Or on Tuesday, your kids are just outrageously defiant. Or maybe that's just my kids, but sometimes that happens. And then on Wednesday, our spouse says something snappy to us and it hurts our feelings. And then all too quickly, we forget that we were just praising Christ a few days prior for what he's done in our lives.
We forget who we are in Christ.
So God, because he does know this about us, because he does fully know you and me, he gave us this lovely book.
And it's not just a book. It's the living word of God.
It's a way that God speaks to us and turns our forgetful hearts back to him throughout the week so that when we leave here, we can turn to this.
And we turn to it over and over, ideally daily, to remind ourselves who our foundation is. In that, waters your faith plants so that it grows your roots deeper.
And if you don't have a Bible, we live in an amazing time. The first time ever that you can have access to a Bible if you have a phone or if you have access to the Internet. I actually have a QR code here.
And it will download. You can pull your phones out. Like I said, I'm used to that. So you can download it right now. And it will download the Bible onto your phone. And you can read it in many translations.
There's plans on there. There's a lot of good stuff. It is called YouVersion Bible App. So if you don't have a Bible, there really is no excuse because we just have it at our fingertips now.
So one for growing our spiritual roots is to regularly read scripture, to regularly be in God's word.
And number two is prayer.
We have the ability to talk to God anytime we want. And some of you in this room, some of you know this already and we hear it so often that some of you are gonna wanna tune out right now. And I'm just saying just stick with me because I think that we take for Granted that we can pray to God anytime. And I think we take it for granted because we have these right, like we have the opportunity or are able to get in contact with anyone at any time.
But prayer is big and we need to put it into perspective. So I was thinking about it, and if you were handed a phone and someone was like, this is the President's phone number, he. You can call him day or night, whatever time you want. He will listen and he will act on your behalf.
You wouldn't treat it like nothing. You would. God is so much more than even that.
For generations, people didn't actually have access to God like that. And I imagine when I read through the Old Testament, that they longed for that.
God was separate from humans because of our choices and our sinful nature.
And he was, and still is, far too good and far too holy. People couldn't just approach him whenever they wanted.
We can, but back then, there was a temple, priests, sacrifices, and once a year, one person on one day a year could go into the most holy room.
But when Jesus died on the cross for us, for me and for you, it tore the veil in the temple in two. It was God saying, call me anytime. I will answer it. I want to listen.
The people in the Old Testament would have understood the depth of that. And I want us in this room to be able to understand that too.
And one of the most extraordinary things about prayer that I think is so wild is that we can. We can speak to God, yes, but that he actually wants us to call on him, that he actually wants to hear us, that he wants us to come to him, and that no matter where we are, in what moment, how we show up, he just wants you to be near. He says, draw close to me and I will draw near to you.
And in my opinion, and you might agree with me, is that what's even more wild, let's keep building here, is that he answers us. He speaks to you.
And some of you might be uncomfortable by me saying that. Some of you might say, oh, that's too spiritual. But it's true, and it says it so many times throughout the Bible.
Dallas Willard said in his book Hearing God, he said hearing God is not a special skill for a few spiritual people.
It is a part of a normal relationship with God.
However, he does speak to people in different ways. So sometimes some of us do hear a still, small voice. It's not audible, but you feel it. And sometimes it's through His Word and sometimes it's through worship or a friend he brings to you to speak to you truth. But no matter what what way it is, the basis of it is that the king of kings wants to talk to you and then becomes a very important action step on our part that we often forget. And that is that we need to listen.
Listening requires us to slow down. It requires us to be available to sit in quiet with open hands, ready to receive whatever it is that God wants to speak to you without distracting ourselves, which some of us, that's scary. That's scary to be alone with our thoughts.
But I want you to think for just a minute.
What would your life look like if you asked God what his will is?
And then you waited for a response.
What would it look like for you to start your day with speaking to God and hearing from the Lord vs. The latest news feed or.
Or the latest Facebook post or for my teens in the room, whatever's on TikTok, reading the Bible and prayer, they sound so simple.
And I think that a lot of us, I think that a lot of us hear it so often that we forget the impact that it has because they truly do deepen our roots in Christ.
And I want us to be able to understand even a glimpse, even a glimpse of the depth of what that means and to look at it with fresh eyes and fresh hearts, even if you've heard it a hundred times.
I think as humans, we try to create these elaborate formulas to make things more meaningful.
I think that we want. We think the harder you have to work towards something is like it means that the reward is greater.
But God truly did make it simple for us through Jesus dying. Jesus did the hard thing and now we just have access to him.
But simple doesn't mean that it's meaningless.
In this case, it's actually the very opposite. And while most of us in this room know to pray and know to read the Bible or be in the Word, and while I know that there's still days that I don't do that, and I'm so, so, so thankful that we have a God that is so loving and gracious and merciful that he stands in the gap for me on those days.
But why do we do that?
What it all boils down to is a choice, right?
Do we choose to spend our time doing these things to nurture our faith, or do we choose to mindlessly scroll on our phones or our tablets?
Do we read our Bible or do we binge watch Netflix?
Do we call a friend first or do we call on God first?
It sounds harsh, but we get to choose whether we Move closer to God.
Or we choose to drift from him, to drift from the source of life.
God loves you so much that he gave you free will.
Because if we were forced to follow God, if we were forced to be in the Word, if we were forced to speak to him, it wouldn't really be love.
We get to choose whether our roots grow in him and bear his fruit, or whether we grow them in shallow worldly things that won't last.
That when the strong winds come and the unavoidable storms of life hit, we get toppled over because only one of those things is strong enough to withhold you.
Jesus says in Matthew 7, 26, 27. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn't obey it is foolish. Like a person who builds a house on sand.
When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.
Logistically thinking, none of us want to be toppled over with a mighty crash.
God doesn't like to watch that happen. God doesn't like to watch his children suffer.
I personally hate disciplining my kids. I do it, but it's not fun.
I know that I need them to know right for wrong, to avoid pain later.
And that's kind of what God is doing with us. He wants that, a good life for us. He wants us to come to him, to weather the storm and get through it differently.
So why wouldn't all of us be reading our Bibles and being in prayer 24:7 if we knew that? If we do know that.
Well, if we look down back at Colossians 2, we move down.
Let me get there to chapter two, verse eight. It says, don't let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high sounding nonsense that comes from human thinking, from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.
So let's take this back to gardening.
Paul is saying something really important here.
He is saying that just because your faith has roots doesn't mean that nothing is trying to suffocate them.
It doesn't mean that there aren't things in this world trying to cut you off from the source of life.
So if we go back to gardening and I move my nice little plants outside and what seems like the very next day, what happens? Does anyone know?
I can't hear you.
Well, it does get cold pretty quick. But weeds grow was what I was looking for. It's okay. Weeds grow. It seems like it happens literally that afternoon after I plant them, I walk back outside and there's weeds in my garden. So weeds grow, and they try to choke out my innocent little plants that are just trying to give me food.
And what's even worse is that some of the weeds are pretty. And I am tempted to keep them because they look pretty. They have flowers on them, and they look nice.
But if I did that, what happens when you don't pull weeds? We'll see if you can get this one.
They do kill the plant. More of them grow, more of them grow, and then more grow, and then they suffocate your plant. Yes.
So in the same way, there's things in the world that look pretty, they look nice, they look good and comfortable.
They might have flowers on it, but they distract you just long enough for your roots to begin to be suffocated.
But it doesn't happen all at once. It's not obvious. And most of the time we don't notice. You might see a couple weeds in your garden and think, I'll just pull those in a few days.
But like I said, when we don't pull them, it grows more weeds.
A theologian by the name of John Scott said the Christian mind must be alert to recognize error. For the most dangerous ideas are not those that deny Christ openly, but those that subtly replace him.
So it's not the things that are so obvious. It's the things that are subtle.
And I know that we love to talk about how distracted teens are in this age. I hear it all the time with social media or on screens.
But adults, adults struggle with distraction, too. It just seems more sophisticated.
Not everything that pulls us from Jesus, though, is in itself sin.
They're the big ones, like idolatry and addiction. But then there's smaller ones, more discreet things like busyness, self sufficiency, comparison, or jealousy, bitterness, unforgiveness, stress, worry.
And slowly those things crowd our roots and they stop growing.
But the truth is, a plant doesn't die overnight. It dies when the roots are cut off from what gives them life.
God isn't ultimately interested in our outward, outward fruit we produce. He's also interested in our roots, our core, what we're feeding our core.
And I'm not saying this to shame you or to make you feel guilty. I'm saying this because I myself and you need to be aware of what is crowding our roots. We need to be conscious of and name what is taking us away from Jesus.
Because when we name it and when we are aware of it and we share it with others, then it's not discreet anymore. We can't. It can't hide anymore. And we can begin to remove those weeds from the soil of our lives.
And thankfully, by the grace of God, we don't have to do it alone.
Paul gives us encouragement in the next verse, in verse 9 and 10. And he says, he says, for Christ lives in all fullness, all the fullness of God in a human body. So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler in authority.
Our roots aren't in our effort. They are in Christ.
Christ alone.
Everything we need for our faith, plants, if we're gonna keep on that metaphor, to grow, is found in Jesus.
And I, like, I know because I do this myself. We add things. It's Jesus and like Jesus and striving Jesus and control Jesus and rules or making things complex. Then Jesus and self help, Jesus and the world's advice.
But really, Paul is saying it is only Jesus.
The goal for U.S. church as Christians isn't trying harder.
It's continuing day in and day out to stay rooted in the one who gives us life.
And that is why it's crucial to be surrounded by a strong community.
Which brings us to number three of growing spiritual roots community.
Has anyone. This is weird.
My sister actually told me this and reminded me of it, and I was like, I don't know. That sounds weird, but has anyone ever heard that talking to your plants kindly helps them grow?
You have. You've all heard that.
I have tried it, and my plants still die. So I don't know if that's true or not, But I do know that we as humans were created for community.
I mean, first of all, the Bible says so numerous times.
But also what's funny is science is catching up to what God already said, which is one of my favorite things, because it's like, researchers are there, and then we're like, yeah, we already knew that. And they're like, oh, huh? But anyways, I love it when science catches up with God or the Bible.
So researchers were studying over 100 different studies and discovered that people with strong relationships in community were 50% likely, more likely to live longer than those that were isolated, which I feel like a lot of us learned that in Covid. But that's basically saying that the effect of loneliness on humans is about.
If you compare the studies, it's about as dangerous as smoking.
So my plants, well, Jen's plants, we'll say Jen's plant. Jen's plants has her to notice the weeds and to pull them.
Just like we need people to notice the weeds around us because we can't Always see it. We need people there that are willing to say, hey, this isn't the best. Let's look back to God. We need those people that will point us back to Him.
So let's go back one last time to our plant. I feel like I'm going to name it. What should we name it?
Earl. Earl.
Okay, Earl. So Earl, if we look at Earl, it's not just trying. It's not striving right now. It's not trying to. People, please. It's not trying to get my attention by growing. It just is staying connected. What gives it life, which is sun, soil, water, and it. And it just naturally is growing. Right? Because Jen takes very good care of our all.
But in the same way we, as we stay rooted in Christ, our life will bear fruit.
And it's fruit that we can't ever authentically produce on our own. In the same way, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self control.
Those things overflowing with thankfulness. That's all a natural product of staying connected to what gives us life, which is Jesus.
So maybe, maybe this morning the question for you isn't, do I need to follow Christ? Maybe you already do. But maybe for some of you, that is the question. Maybe it's, do I want my life to be built in something strong, something that can withstand storms? Do I want to give my life to Christ so that he weathers them with me?
But maybe you've already decided that maybe, maybe you want.
Maybe the question, or more so evaluation, is where are my roots currently growing?
What am I connected to?
The good news is, unlike our growing season is that there you are always allowed to replant your roots.
God is always ready for us to draw near to him. And he will draw near to you. He is always ready to draw us back to Himself.
And on. It doesn't matter how dry the soil has felt, we are able as Christians to start over every morning. It says in the Bible that his mercies are new every morning, single morning.
And when we realize that when our roots grow through Jesus, we get to recognize what a gift that is and overflow with gratitude as our perspective changes.
Will you pray with me, Heavenly Father?
We're grateful. We're just so grateful because you.
You do. You give us life. You give us.
You give us everything we need.
Forgive us when we search in other places.
Forgive us when we forget to look to you.
Help us to be vulnerable and speak with those around us about the weeds in our life that we need to pull.
Help us name them because you've already won. You've already defeated evil. And we can put our hope in that.
Lord, I thank you for everyone here that is being baptized today. It's so exciting. God, I know that your kingdom is just cheering.
I hope that we never forget, no matter how many times we see a baptism, no matter how many times we pray, no matter how many times we read our word. I hope that we never forget how big that is.
That you show your love for us through that.
We love you so much. We pray all of these things in your Son's holy name, Amen.
