Summary: Christ is Real Change Your Focus<br> Colossians 3:1-11<br> Christ is Real Change Your Focus – How we interpret what we see determines our feelings and our actions. Consider an example: from your yard, you can see two people, and one person is obviously struggling. If you interpret what you see as a crime in process, you rush into the house and call 911. If you interpret what you see as a person being rescued from an accident, you hurry down the street to help. What you feel if you think you are witnessing a crime and what you feel if you think you are witnessing a rescue attempt will not be the same feelings.<br> Christ is Real Change Your Focus – How we interpret God’s actions and how we interpret our struggle with evil determines our feelings and our actions. Consider an example: if our personal view of God is He controls everything including Satan and evil, then we regard every undesirable happening as God’s fault. God is either toying with us, or using us for amusement, or is unfeeling and unconcerned about our distress and suffering, or is just plain mean. Why? God is in control. God can do anything. God is doing nothing but ignoring us as we struggle and suffer.<br> Does God fight us, or does God sustain us? Is He our opponent who destroys us or our rescuer who delivers us?<br> Our view of God is the foundation of many of our struggles. People’s view of God always has been the foundation of their struggles. For the Christians at Colossae, their view of God was a major problem.<br> Read with me Colossians 3:1-11.<br> Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory. Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him– a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.<br> <br> * We must not rip this passage out of the context of the situation at Colossae.<br> <br> * I said it before, I will say it again many times: never forget that people divided the writings into chapters and verses long after the writings were produced.<br> <br> * The typical way that we read the Bible is chapter by chapter.<br> * The certainly is not wrong, but it can create a huge problem.<br> * If we read a chapter as though it is information isolated from the letter and isolated from the chapters before and after it, we are very likely to misunderstand that chapter.<br> * If we read this chapter as though Paul wrote to us in the twenty-first century instead of to the Colossian Christians in the first century, we will change Paul’s emphasis and message.<br> <br> <br> * It is extremely important to remember Paul’s point in chapter two: the Colossian Christians did not need Christ plus something else to be spiritual.<br> <br> * Jewish Christians did not need Christ plus Jewish ritual to be spiritual.<br> <br> * What their Jewish critics said about spiritual standards was meaningless.<br> * Christ was 100% sufficient to be spiritual before God.<br> <br> <br>
