All right, I want to invite you to turn with me and your Bible to Colossians chapter 1. We're going to look at verses 3 through 14 this morning as we continue our sermon series on the book of Colossians. And if you don't have a Bible, go ahead and look in one of the chairs in front of you. There's hopefully one there and it will be on page 1251 if you're going to use one of our Bibles. Here now God's holy, true and life-giving word from Colossians chapter 1 verses 3 through 14. We always thank God the Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints. Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of this you have heard before in the Word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth. Just as you learned it from a paffress, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit. And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you asking that you, may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, may you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. This is the Word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Father, we do thank you so much that you would speak to us, even now, in and through your Word and through the Holy Spirit, applying what your Word says to our hearts. We do pray that you would be with us now, that we would feel, that we are in your presence, as you speak to us in your Word. And Lord, would you use this time to transform us, to grow our faith, that we might understand even more, the glorious, finished work of Christ, and have a longing to see it apply to all of life. So we pray for your blessing on this time, use this time to shape us, to mold us, and equip us to continue our mission, to make disciples of our neighbors and of the nations. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen. I think, most of you know, I'm not a native Floridian, I was born in the great state of Minnesota, which was just ranked number one for worst winters in the country. So there's that. And so when we got to Florida, people were talking about these natural springs, ones at Wakiva, there's a few other places, and so I remember the first time I went to one of these natural springs, and we got there, and everybody's swimming and having a good time, and we get in and we find out two things, one, the water is incredibly cold, but that's okay because it was a really hot day. And then another thing we discovered was that it's, you know, it all comes from this spring in the ground. It's always flowing out of the ground up into this spring, and it was a lot of fun. And as we're swimming around though, I discovered a third thing, and we're, you know, the water's crystal clear. We're having a good time. And then in the middle of the spring, all of a sudden I start seeing all these bubbles. And then shortly after that, I see scuba divers emerge from the water, and I'm standing in like knee deep ice-cold water, something where are they coming from. And so I borrowed a pair of goggles and I swam out and looking through goggles, I looked down and I could see that this spring had this big cavern that went down and down and down and down, so deep that that's where the scuba divers had come from. They had been exploring the depths of this spring, and I was blown away because at this point I had, you know, it's my understanding that you just go to the spring and you swim around on the top, but the real treasure was this deep, deep, deep spring. And so it was so excited by that, and I promised myself that I would get a hold of some scuba gear and go back and go down and explore, which by the way remind me to get some scuba gear, and go back and explore that thing. But you know, I think that really helps us understand something about the gospel. And that is what we're going to see Paul talking about today is that the good news of the gospel is not something that we just kind of get to know and then move beyond. But rather, it's like a spring in the sense that what really is the treasure of the gospel is found deeper and deeper and deeper inside of it. Paul's going to show us that we want to have not an idea that we know the gospel now we move on from it, but rather our understanding of the gospel moves on from us to the point that we understand that this is a cosmic thing that God has done in Christ. Our focus for this morning as we continue our sermon series in Colossians is that we flourish spiritually, not by moving beyond the gospel, but by going deeper and deeper into its inexhaustible riches, which is what Paul's aim is in this letter to the Colossians. And so to see the importance of not going beyond the gospel, but rather deeper in, we'll talk about three things this morning. Talk about Paul's gospel pattern first and see the way that the gospel came and that's what caused the transformation in their lives. And then we'll talk about Paul's gospel prayer. We'll see that he prays that what happens is they get a bigger picture of the gospel. And then we'll see Paul's gospel partner a few things about a pafferist that helps us know what a pastor's job is. So let's jump in. Look at verses three through six and let's see what Paul says here. And we're talking about Paul's gospel pattern and what we want to recognize is this. And the gospel is heard, believed, and understood. It transforms lives. That's what Paul is showing them. Take a look. Verse three, he says, we always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Now we could actually spend a lot of time there talking about this transformation that's happened in the lives of the people in the church at Colossae because that's what he's talking about. There has been some transformation that has taken place. He refers to their faith, their faith has transformed their relationship with God. They now know they're forgiven, they're fully accepted by God, they're loved by God. And he mentions love for one another. So not only do they have a transformed relationship with God, but they have a transformed relationship with each other. They are loving each other in incredible, powerful, tangible ways. And he mentions their hope. So not only has their relationship with God been transformed, not only has their relationship with one another been transformed, but their relationship with the world itself has been transformed because their hope now is not in something that's in the world, something that could be broken or something that could be taken away or destroyed. Our hope is in Christ and what he has promised them in inter the gospel. So Paul's just saying, we thank God when we hear about the transformation that it's taken place in your lives. And then he says exactly where it came from, look at verse 5, the rest of verse 5. And he starts talking about this fruit bearing power of this news, this announcement about what God has done for his people in Christ. He says, of this you have heard in the word of the truth, the gospel, which means good news, which has come to you as indeed in the whole world. It is bearing fruit and increasing as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from a paffress. There's another way to read that, smooth out the English, just a little bit, verse 6, you could say, since the day you heard it and truly understood the grace of God. So that's what he's getting at, all this transformation in their life flows through their hearing of this good news and believing it and understanding through the good news that God is gracious beyond our wildest imaginations gracious. So he's talking about, it's the gospel that came and transformed them as people, is transforming them as a community. And he's saying, what's happening to you is happening all over the world, wherever the gospel goes, that's what it does. When it's heard and understood and believed, it transforms lives. And the reason that he's doing this is he knows there are people in the Church of Colossae who are pressuring the Christians to move beyond the gospel for their spiritual fulfillment. And Paul is first laying this foundation, saying the pattern, no, all the transformation that has come in your life has come through you believing the gospel. Not about what you have done, but through you believing this message, this gospel. Because that's what the gospel is, it's good news about what Christ has done, about what God has done for us in Christ, that he sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. So through faith, we can be fully reconciled to him, promised eternal life, declared righteous. And therefore the gospel is not advice. The gospel is not, here's what you should do, here's what has been done and when it's believed and understood, it transforms people, families, communities. Now I was reading about the Emancipation Proclamation and hopefully we're all aware of that from our nation's history. On January 1st, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and it changed the federal legal status of 3.5 million African-American slaves. They went from being slaves to being free and it was what led to all the slaves being free eventually. Now what's interesting, you may not know this, but in the White House and the West Wing of the White House, there's a painting and it's by a man named William Carlton and it's called Watch Meeting. And it is meant to be a depiction of a number of slaves looking at a clock, watching on December 31st, 1862 for the day to come to an end because they knew that the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1st, 1863. I mean, can you imagine just looking, watching the clock ticking down to the moment that you are free. Now here's what's also so interesting about it. This was before, what's it called, Facebook and news, okay? And so when good news travels, it travels quite slowly. And so it was two years, two whole years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed that some people in Galveston, Texas found out about it. And that happened on June 19th, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger and his regiment arrived in Galveston, Texas to tell them the good news that the Civil War had ended and slavery had been abolished. And so, as you might imagine, in that moment when they arrived in Galveston and they're announcing this news, they got a lot of resistance from the plantation owners. But they also saw tremendous hesitation on the part of the slaves. I mean, just can you imagine that this regiment shows up and says, you are now free. And you're seeing your slave master here and you're seeing this regiment, I mean, just mind blowing. And when they believed that it had really happened and walked away from their slave masters, their lives, as you would imagine, were completely changed. It was the news that they are free, that's set them free. And this is what Paul is saying about the gospel. The gospel is the news that for all who trust in Jesus, we have been set free. He set us free from the penalty of sin by paying for our sin on the cross. He has set us free from the power of sin, we're no longer dominated by sin's power. And one day he's going to set us free from the very presence of sin when he returns and makes all things new. And Paul is saying, it's the news of this that has transformed your lives and your families and your communities. This is why a good friend and mentor of mine often said, TMT, ITK, TMT, TMT. TMT, ITK, TMT, TMT. You know what that means? The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. And brothers and sisters, the gospel is the main thing. And so it's not something that we actually move beyond. It's something that we move deeper into. If you lack transformation in your life, it's not because you're not doing enough, it's because you're not believing as deeply about the freedom that we have in Christ. So we don't want to go beyond the gospel. In fact, we want to go deeper in. Let's look at Paul's prayer. Look at verses 9-14. And what you want to see here is he's going to show us that transformation continues. Not as we do all these different things, but as we actually understand and apply the gospel to all of life. This word transformation continues in our lives as we understand and apply the gospel and see that it expands to all of life. Look at verse 9. He says, and so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you asking, here's his prayer, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Anything else he's going to pray flows out of that. This is a big, huge prayer. Look at it again. He's asking that they might be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Now, let's get something straight here. He's not talking about God's will in the sense that we often do. Like, what is God's will for my life? What is God's will for this situation for me? What is God's will for that? That's actually not how he's using the word God's will. Doug Mu puts it this way. What Paul has in mind is not some particular or special direction for one's life, but a deep and abiding understanding of the revelation of Christ and all that he means for the universe as well as for the Colossians themselves. Scott McKnight puts it this way, while the tendency of Christians today is discerning the specific will of God for one's life, Paul's letters see the will of God as the divine narrative of redemption from creation to kingdom. So what Paul is doing here is he's actually saying we want to go deeper into the gospel and understand how it's the centerpiece of the entire reason for all things existing. He wants us to see this is cosmic. This is worldwide. This is world transforming stuff. And therefore flowing out of that, then we see the results, the further transformation in 10 through 12 that there's, we live life differently. We bear fruit in every good work. We know God more. We have more strength from God. We can endure hard situations. We can be patient with hard people. We have more joy. We have more thanks in our heart because the Father has qualified us by what he's done for us in Christ to inherit all these wonderful blessings. He kind of sums it up like this, look at 13 and 14. He's wanting us to understand that God has delivered us from one certain existence, plagued with sin and misery and destruction and death, and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He wants us to understand the cosmic nature of what's happened that God in Christ has transferred people from one existence to another. And so he's teaching us that we don't want to move beyond the gospel. We actually want to let it move beyond us in a sense that we begin to apply it to all of life, to every aspect of our lives. And that's where the transformation continues, when we are big picture Christians with a big picture gospel. You know, one day in 1975, an executive with Johnson and Johnson named James Berg called a meeting of the other executives because he wanted to talk about this document called the credo. And the credo was a statement written by the founder of Johnson and Johnson, whose name is Robert Wood Johnson. And he had written it in 1943, so at this point it was a 32-year-old statement. And it read this, it started out like this. We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs, everything we do must be of high quality, and then it goes on for a few paragraphs like that. So James Berg calls this meeting because this document was plastered all over the walls, it was in frames everywhere around their company. But he thought nobody really knows about it, nobody ever thinks about it, nobody ever does anything about it. Let's get rid of it. So he calls a meeting. And 36 executives taught for a day and a half to try to decide if they're going to get rid of this credo and write something new and fresh. And some of the executives wanted to get something new, and others said no. It's foundational to who we are, let's keep it. And in the end, they kept it, but year after year, Berg would continue to bring it up that maybe they should get rid of it. Then on September 30, 1982, and some of you will remember this, normal life for the employees at Johnson & Johnson came to a crashing halt, Johnson & Johnson are the makers of Tylenol. On September 30, 1982, six people were found dead in the city of Chicago, and it was determined that they had died because they had taken Tylenol pills that had been laced with cyanide, with poison. And so panic breaks out. And police are going up and down the streets of Chicago with bohorn saying, if you have Tylenol, do not take it. Throw it out. If you have Tylenol, throw it out. Boy Scouts are going and knocking on doors, trying to make sure they elderly are aware that they shouldn't take any of their Tylenol. The next day, a seventh victim is found dead having taken Tylenol pills that have been laced with cyanide. Now, James Burke and seven other executives are trying to figure out what to do. They fly to Washington, D.C. to meet with the FBI and the FDA. And after a day of meetings, they have to make a decision on what they're going to do. And some of the executives of the company were thinking, we need to do a national recall here. We need to do a national recall, and the FBI and the FDA said, no, don't do a national recall. Just do one in Chicago. It will spread the panic too far, and it will cost you millions and millions. They had to make a decision. And James Burke and those executives decided to do a national recall. They pulled every bottle of Tylenol off of every shelf in every store in America. It cost Johnson and Johnson $100 million. And when the media came to interview these executives and ask, why did you do something so drastic? Why did you do something so huge like this? Burke's response was, we believe, our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. So in that moment, not only did they not go beyond something foundational to their identity, but they applied it on a broader scope than they ever had before. Now, you know what happened is Tylenol stock plummeted. And then six weeks later, Tylenol rolled out the first tamperproof caps. And all of the eyes were wondering to see if Tylenol would make it. And sure enough, day by day their stock went up, and up, and up, and up, and up. And that's why we still, you probably have Tylenol in your medicine cabinet today because they did this drastic thing. One pundit said, this is the greatest comeback since Lazarus. And it was because they decided not to get rid of something foundational to who they were, but actually to apply it on the broadest scope, thinkable. That's what Paul's getting at with us. He's saying, we don't go beyond the gospel. We actually apply it to everything, all of life. If our Christian spiritual formation comes from, how does the gospel apply to family? And Paul, we'll talk about that in this letter. How does the gospel apply to work? And Paul, we'll talk about that in this letter. So the gospel, not only is something we don't go beyond, it's something we go deeper in. It's something we want to see applied to all of life. And as we apply the gospel to every area of our life, to our marriages, to our family, to our work, to our neighborhoods, to everything we see. The transformation continues. The transformation continues. So God wants us to live with this hope, this transforming hope in our lives because of what Jesus has done. And so first the gospel comes and it transforms us, and then it comes even more as we understand it better as we expand the way it's applied in our lives. So we see that Paul had this pattern of how the gospel comes. Now he has a prayer that, not that they would go beyond the gospel, but the gospel, they would, they're understanding it would go way beyond them. Third, we see Paul's gospel partner. He's going to say a few words about it, a paffress, look at verses seven and eight. And one of the things that we want to take away from this then, and maybe me more so than anyone, is that a pastor's job is to preach and teach the inexhaustible riches of the gospel. Notice what he says. He says, just as you learned it from a paffress, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit. And I want to draw six applications for me, for all pastors, and for you to understand why Paul is praising a paffress in this moment. So what is a pastor to do, what will make a man a great pastor? Well number one, we see that he preaches the gospel. A paffress preaches the gospel. And when it says, just as you learned it from a paffress, that verb is actually more aimed at a paffress teaching. It literally says, just as you were taught it by a paffress, it's just easier to say just as you learned it. But literally, it's just as you were taught it by a paffress. So when a paffress came, he's going to plan the church there. He labored away at teaching the good news of the gospel, that in Christ through faith and Christ alone, not by anything we do, but through faith and Christ, we are free from the penalty of sin, power of sin one day will be set free from the even presence of sin. So a faithful, a good pastor preaches the gospel. Number two, he loves the congregation well. Notice he refers to a paffress as beloved. It's probably not an English word that captures the depth of that Greek word. It's a deep esteem. It's a dear person. And nobody becomes beloved without first loving really well. And so a paffress loved them so well that Paul refers to him as a beloved faithful servant. So a good pastor, a great pastor, preaches the gospel. He loves the congregation well. Number three, he serves the congregation. Paul calls him a fellow servant. That means a good pastor is there not to serve himself, but to serve the people that God has placed in his midst. Number four, he's trustworthy and reliable. Paul says a paffress was a faithful minister in that word, and you can translate it faithful, but it has the nuance of trustworthy reliable. Number five, it says that he's a faithful minister of Christ. And that word is a Greek word that was used in that time period to refer to the servant of a king. And so a great pastor is a servant of Christ. Above anything else, sees Christ as king, wants Christ's kingdom known. And sixth, a paffress we can see here, he humbly gives all credit to God. Look at the last verse, or last part of verse eight. Paul says, a paffress had made known to us your love in the spirit. Let me tell you why. This is amazing. Another way to translate that would be to say Paul is saying, a paffress told us about the way you guys are loving each other so well because of the work of the spirit there. Notice how he left himself out, a paffress did. So a paffress did not go to Paul, which was the impetus for writing the letter. He didn't go to Paul and say, you got to see the way these people are loving each other. I've done a great job. No, he humbly said, Paul, you got to see the way these people are loving each other. It's phenomenal. And it's all about the work of the spirit. So a great pastor humbly gives all credit to God. Part of a pastor's job is to apply the gospel, help apply the gospel, and help apply the word of God to situations that are happening even now. And so let's apply what we know about a paffress. Mike, where are you? Can you come here? I'm still your boss for a minute, so you got to come. I want to, I know that most of you hopefully will be able to come back tonight and we'll party together and thank the Lord. But I don't want to let today go by and let your presence here go away without us having an opportunity to, with our mouths and our hearts to thank Mike. Because if there's one thing we can see about a paffress being a great pastor, we can be 100% sure that Mike is and always will be a great pastor. So I want you to join me and even repeat after me as we thank our dear brother for these 18 years here as well as over 30 years of faithfully serving the Lord. And so I wonder if you would join me, just repeat after me and look at Mike and brother look at me for a second. Hear this. They might be repeating after me, but they're only saying what's true in their hearts. Let's do this. Repeat after me, Pastor Mike, thank you for preaching the gospel. Thank you for loving this congregation so well. Thank you for serving this congregation so faithfully. Thanks for being trustworthy and reliable. Thank you for serving Christ our King. And thank you for humbly giving all the credit to God. Let's stand and praise the Lord and thank for, say thanks for Mike. You can be seated. We're going to do that again, so pray with me, Father, yes you can go be seated too, Mike. Let's pray, Father, we thank you that you have revealed your son to us. We thank you that through faith in him alone, and not by any of our works or deeds. Will we spend eternity with you in your presence where there are pleasures forever more? We thank you for the gospel, and we thank you that we'll have eternity together to see all the ways the gospel transformed people all over the world. Help us to be a church that continues to keep the main thing, the main thing. And help us to trust you as we, as micro-tyres and as we enter into the next phase of the life of this church, and what won't change by your grace is our commitment to the good news of the gospel, changing us and changing others. So we thank you, and we praise you in Jesus' name, amen.