114. Winter Sermons - James Safrit

Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now here are your hosts, James Saifert and Brett Martin. Man, he is worthy of praise this morning. If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in the book of Colossians again. Week 4 in Colossians chapter 2, verses 16 through 23 this morning. Colossians 2, 16 through 23. If you're a young person, first grade and younger, we have Children's Church provided for you. If you want to send your child, it's absolutely voluntarily. It's up to you if you want to. That'll be provided for you as well. Over the last couple of weeks, we've talked about knowledge is power. We talked about how Jesus rules over all and being alive in Christ. Today, we're talking about being free from your past. Freedom from your past is where we'll be at. And so if you have your Bibles, we'll turn and we'll stand and read in honor of God's Word this morning. Colossians 2, if you're willing and able. Again, you don't have to, but if you're willing and able, we'll stand and read these verses. The verses will be provided for you on the screen as well for you to follow along. The Bible says, It says, Let's pray. Father, thank you for this day. Lord, we love you. We praise you for your scripture. We praise you for your holy word this morning. I pray, God, that we would honor you in our words that are said and our things that you have given me to be ministered to this morning. We thank you for what you've done. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. The notes are provided for you in your bulletin this morning. And me and this passage particular in all four of Paul's writings in Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. He has a moment in all of them, whether a small portion or a large portion, where he talks about this thought of legalism. And freeing yourself from the rudiments of the world is how it's mentioned several times in this passage and in other passages as well. And so me and my wife, we come out of this thought of legalism. I've shared my story a little bit. And so we want to share a little bit of what the Lord has dealt with our life through this passage over the last several years. And I hope it'd be a help to you this morning. But how many of you in here enjoy watching crime or true crime shows or SVU or some type of law and order shows? Raise your hand. All right. A couple of you. All right. Me and my wife, we have really enjoyed SVU and Law and Order and some of these shows. And one of the things that's so appealing to us as humans is when they have these shows or true crimes where someone who is found guilty of a crime is then later on justified that they weren't guilty of that. Right? The underdog comes out and begins to get out of prison and leave and get to go into a normal life. And they're found justified that they did not commit the crimes that were charged against them. And we sometimes enjoy that. We enjoy watching that. And I've never yet to see in any of my watching of these shows where someone gets free and cleared from their charges and says, You know what, Judge? I just feel like I just want to stay in prison for a couple more years. You know, I want to go back into that bondage that I was in and sort of you give me the meals. I know I'm innocent. I know I'm free and clear. But can I just go back and just sort of live in jail for a little bit? I've never yet seen that happen before. But so oftentimes in our Christian journey, in our spiritual journey, this is what happened. Christ clears us free and clear, gives us new life. We're alive in Christ as we talked about last week. But then yet we say, But I want the bondage of the past. I want the rudiments of the law to still bear in my life. And that is what Paul is saying here. He is conveying this thought of the law and the rules of man have taken us captive in our life. And he's saying we need to break free from these laws. We need to break free from these things that hold us back so that we can prevail in Christ. And so this is the thought of taking the law captive and breaking free from it. And so as we look at that two points and a couple of sub points underneath that this morning in verses 16 to 19, we see that Paul says we are released from the law. We are released from the law in these first couple of verses. He says, Let no man judge you. Let no man have a burden upon you. And as we think back from last week, being alive in Christ, this is a direct correlation of what it means to be set free. Okay? Never to be put back under the yoke of bondage. Okay? We know the story of the Old Testament. We know that the children of Israel were set free from Egypt and set free from the bondage. And when life got hard, what did they say to Moses? Send us back. We would rather be prisoners than we would be out here in the freedom and we have the problems. Because somehow in human nature, sometimes in our life, we are comfortable being under the rules and regulations of man. And over and over again, the children of Israel were given everything they could ever want. I mean, imagine you wake up in the morning and you walk out into your dining room and there's a freshly hot now dozen Krispy Kreme donuts sitting there waiting for you. Right? That's what manna was. Okay? Manna was Krispy Kreme donuts. Okay? Go back and read in the book of Exodus and Leviticus. Okay? It talks about a warm dough-like substance that had honey dripped on top of it. It's Krispy Kreme donuts. Okay? That's all I can imagine is Krispy Kreme donuts. And then they get those Krispy Kreme and they get tired of eating Krispy Kreme every day. Who can get tired of eating Krispy Kreme every day? Okay? I'm not tired of eating Krispy Kreme every day. And all of a sudden, they begin to complain. They begin to grumble. And they say, well, God, all we're eating is Krispy Kreme. And he goes, you know what? I know Krispy Kreme wasn't good enough, so I'll give you Chick-fil-A as well. Okay? And quail became their daily... So they had Krispy Kreme and they had Chick-fil-A every day. And yet they still had reasons to grumble and complain and say, God, send us back to Egypt. And God says, no, no, no. I gave you freedom from that. I set you free from the bondage of Pharaoh. Look at the things that I've done for you. Why would you want to go back to that? You've been released from the law. You have been released from the yoke of bondage. And in our life, as Paul writes through this in the first couple of verses, he says there is a freedom from the shackles of our past. Our past is there to hold us down. We all have a past. We all have something in our past that we wish would have never happened. Right? Can you agree with me on that? There's something that we've said. There's something that we've done. There's something that we initiated in that we could say, you know what? If I could go back in time, I would tell my former self not to do that. And God says here that unfortunately, we can't escape the effects of the past, but we can escape the shackles of the past. The Bible says here, he uses this word beguiled. Let no man beguile you. And this is simply meaning this is someone who is trying to trick you or allow this to hold you down. You see, there's the scars that we have to live with. I've got some scars on my body from football. I've got one specific scar on my hand here. Brody, I talked about a couple weeks ago, has a scar sort of on his hand from when he touched the motor. But the one on my finger here was when I was a little kid. I was at my grandma's house and I went to pull myself up into the van and my sister didn't know I was holding on to the bar and she slammed the door. Okay. And it cut open pretty good my middle finger and my ring finger. And there's still a scar there. And every time I see that, I'm reminded of that event that happened. Okay. Now that event has not hindered me for the rest of my life. It's just a simple scar. And so oftentimes we allow those scars of the past to hold us back and to hold us down. Today's shackles are not necessarily what the shackles of what Paul was writing to these believers. But today's shackles are more like this, people's expectations. They are self-imposed standards on our own life. Or maybe they're unrealistic expectations that we have for ourselves or that other people have for us. And when we begin to live in these shackles, we are of none effect to Jesus Christ. Because Jesus says that our death in Christ has given us a new life that has freed us from these shackles to live in freedom in who he says we are meant to be. And so he freed us from the shackles of the past, but he also freed us from the bondage of religion. Verses 18 and 19 in the Colossae church here, he says that this is what was going on. All of a sudden, Paul is writing here because people began to come in and they began to teach false things. Look at verse 18. Let nobody begin to beguile you voluntarily, humanly, of worshiping angels, intruding into these things which you have not seen, or vainly puffed up of the fleshly mind. And he began to say, listen, you are having a burden of false teachers and you are beginning to get into a situation where you're in a merit-based religion. A merit-based religion where all of a sudden you are doing things just so you can get the gold star on the piece of paper. All right, how many of you remember, maybe, I don't know if Pleasant Grove ever had this, but I never had this in my church, but I walked into other churches that had this. And in the back when you would walk into the church, they would have every member's name. Okay, did Pleasant Grove ever have this? And beside their name, there were stars that you would put on if you came to church, if you brought your Bible, if you came to Sunday school. And you would put these stars on there beside your name. And all of a sudden, you would come in and you'd go, pretty good. See how many stars I got back there? Mine's almost full. Ah, well, you know, Allison over there, she hadn't got as many stars as I do. She's probably a little more wicked than I am. And all of a sudden, inadvertently, I'm not saying that the churches were wrong by doing this, but inadvertently, we began to have a merit-based religion set up where we began to judge our spirituality based on how many gold stars we had on our name in the lobby. And all of a sudden, Paul was saying, this is what's going on here. You are being puffed up with your fleshly mind. And what merit-based religion does is it simply says, what can I do to make myself better? Where Christ says, death to yourself so that Christ can be lifted up. And that is where we must be in our life because false teachers are going to come in and they're going to hold us back. And Paul was saying here in this statement, he makes this statement by saying in verse 19, what he is simply saying here is he's making a massively bold statement. And he is saying, you have crucified Jesus. You have decapitated Christ. And he makes this statement in a startling way because he wanted to get their attention. He said, you've set up these false teachers. You've set up this merit-based religion. And in essence, what you have done is you have cut Christ out of the church. And you are no longer worshiping Christ. You're worshiping the things that you can do in order to make yourself feel better. And Christ is, through Paul's writings here, is saying, listen, Christ is still the head. And we cannot crucify Christ in the church. We must live for Christ. And we are making ourselves greater than Christ. We are making religion and church attendance greater than Christ. And he wrote this letter by starting out in Colossians 1, if you can remember back a couple weeks ago, by saying this, Christ is supreme. And he must have the preeminence in everything we do. And church this morning, we must understand that if Christ is cut out of the church, we will begin to starve. Nobody can survive without their head. And if we take Christ out of it, how can we survive? We cannot survive. And so Christ must be preeminent in all things that we do, because that is how we live our Christian life and our Christian journey, through living for him and getting rid of the bondage that happens in our life. And then he says this, not only are you released from the law, but now you can relish in the freedom. You can relish in the freedom that Christ has given you. Verses 20 through 23 says that we have this freedom that we have been given. When it comes to freedom, typically there are one of two responses that happen, right? Think about someone who was sentenced to maybe a life in prison, and they've been given that freedom, that prison has been taken away. This is typically what happens. One of two things happen. They surrender, and they give in to whatever is before them. They have this sense of hopelessness, where I've got this bondage, freedom's given, but man, my life's already of none effect, and so I'm just going to surrender, and life is hopeless, and I'm just going to figure out what happens, and there's no hope in the world anyways. That's one way. The other way is the prohibiting of life. They figure out that the path of legalism and the path of extreme hardship is going to be hard, but you know what? I'm just going to buckle in, and I'm just going to take everything away from my life, and I'm just going to live this life, and I'm going to prohibit everything. So it's either just a hopelessness or an overbearing in life. But Paul says this, and he gives this very unique approach, and he says we can avoid all of these things altogether because we can live in this one amazing word that's five letters. He says you can live in grace. And he begins to talk about this revolutionary thing here of grace and what grace is. And I heard this this week, and it has not been able to leave my mind. I have not been able to stop meditating on it, but one of our pastors and our pastors, I believe it was H.P. Charles, made this statement. He said grace always flows downhill, which means it doesn't matter where you're at in your life. Grace can always come to you. If you're at your lowest low, grace can come to you. If you think you're at your highest high, grace can still come to us. And we must live in the form of grace to where God says that there's grace in all of our lives. And he begins to walk through a couple of things that happen with legalism and why legalism is wrong in our life. The first one here is the incompatibility of legalism. The incompatibility of legalism in verses 20 and 21. The Bible says, Wherefore, if you're dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though you're living in the world, are you subject to these ordinances? Touch not, taste not, handle not. He said the traditions of man do not make any sense today. I want to give you a practical illustration. The American government is set up in a sense of mimicking the British government, right? The parliament and British. A lot of what we do, a lot of our customary bringing in of different people are mimicking what that is. The one thing that America did not mimic was a really, really old tradition that British parliament will not get rid of because it's tradition. This is what it is. Every single house of parliament has a name tag with a coat. And beside their coat, beside this name tag that's a coat holder, is a little ribbon. Okay? And so when a parliament would come in and have order, they would take their coat off. They would hang their coat up beside their name. And then they would take their sword out. And they would hang their sword up on that little red ribbon. One person in British parliament still takes his sword out and hangs it up on that red ribbon. But no one carries swords anymore. But no one's afraid, everyone's afraid to take that red ribbon down. So it's this sort of like symbol of, well, we've got to hang our coat up. And we can't get rid of this red ribbon because maybe someone's going to bring a sword and they need to hang it up. And so one guy does it because he just wants to make a joke out of it. But he's like, listen, we are keeping this in there. And it's silly. But in our Christian journey, in our Christian life, there is a deeper level to this because we do this in our own life. Jesus said it like this. He said, in your Christian journey, don't allow man-made religions to hold you back. But if a soldier comes to you, and man-made religions and man-made authority for the Jewish nation was, if a soldier came to you and said, carry my armor, carry my baggage for a mile, he said, fulfill your obligation, but then live in grace and do it another mile. And it would have been so countercultural for a Jew to do that. They hated that first mile. They would grumble, and they would complain, and they would argue, and they would talk under their breath. And they would just be in such type of humility because they were having to carry this army's soldiers that oppressed them for a mile. And Jesus said, do something that the world would never expect you to do. And say, you know what? I'm going to do it for another mile. And take that next mile in grace. Take that next mile in mercy. Take that next mile in a way that the world's going to say, what is this person thinking? Right? As Carrie said this morning in Sunday school, she said that when someone comes to you, Jesus said this as well, when someone comes to you and slaps you on the face, what are we supposed to do? Smack them back? No. Jesus said, do something that's countercultural and turn the other cheek. And say, you know what? I'll let you have one more shot at me. Because this thought of legalism does not work in what? When we live in love and grace. And Paul was saying here that if we're going to be bound to anything, be bound to Christ. Take his yoke upon you for his burden is easy and his yoke is light, his burden is easy. I think I mixed that up a little bit. But we must live in the bondage of Christ and say, Christ, if you say for me to do it, then that's where I'm going to live. I'm going to live in that. I'm not going to live in legalism. I'm not going to live in man-made rules and ideologies. But I'm going to live where you want me to live. In verse 22, he continues on. He says, which are to perish with the using and after the commandments and the doctrines of men. And he simply says this, the nature of legalism. The nature of legalism. The nature of legalism is this. It's worldly to be religious. You see, Jesus came and he preached the hardest messages that he ever preached. Look it up. The hardest he ever preached was not to the sinners. He didn't go to the woman at the well and preach about her harlotry and preach about her prostitution and beat her down for being married to five men, the one she was living with isn't the one she's living with now. No, what did he do? He said, grace is here for you. But when he went into the temple, when he went into the church of the day, that's where he preached his hardest messages. He went in and he turned the tables over. And he said, you've turned my father's house into a house of thieves. That's where he preached the hardest because there was no relationship with God. There was only religion. And Jesus says here through the writings of Paul, the nature of legalism is bearing, is hard, and we must live a life that is saying, I'm going to live fully for Christ. Christ came into this world and he saw the Christ came into this world and the religious people saw Jesus. Christ came into this world and he saw the truth. They felt him. They experienced his miracles. And what did they do? They killed him. The religious people, after seeing him raise Lazarus from the dead, they said this, this man has got to die. Because this man is going against what we think is right. And we've got to get rid of this man. And the religious people saw him. They felt him. They heard his teaching. And they said, we must kill him. And if we say, this is the thought of what we say. The lights are going crazy right now. I love it. I'm waking you up a little bit. When we say, if only we could see Jesus. If only we could talk to Jesus. If only Jesus were to come into the church today and be here and teach us and train us, everything would be different. Oh, the world would be changed. The world would be saved if only Jesus came. And yet we look at when Jesus did come. And Jesus did teach. And he just did train people. And he did miracles after miracles where the Bible says if every miracle would have been written down, the words could not fit in any library in mankind. Because it would have been too much. And the religious people of that day said, we don't want this person. Because it didn't fit in their picture of religion. You see, this is a lifelong battle. We must constantly evaluate everything we're doing. And we must ask ourselves, is this from man? Or is this from God? Is God saying that this is how I should live my life? Or is this just something that someone said one day and it sounded really good? And that's what we follow. Because you see, that's where I lived at for 30, almost 25, 27 years of my life. I lived a life that was man-centered, that was man-rules followed because it was easy to do. I was thinking about this morning as we were in Sunday school. What did the Jewish people, what did the Abraham nation, the Israelites, what did they say so often times in the Old Testament? Give us a king. Give us a king. Every other nation has a king. We want a king. Why? Because they wanted to be under someone else's rule. And Christ, through the scripture, says, you don't need a king. You have a perfect king right here in Jesus. And they said, no, no, we want an earthly king. And they wanted to be under the bondage of someone else. And we must ask ourselves, and constantly, this is something that me and my wife constantly do because of our background. We constantly say, okay, why are we disciplining our kids like this? Why are we raising our family like this? What is the areas in my life that I'm doing, and why am I doing them? Is it because I see a command in scripture that says, love your neighbor as yourself, and I'm going to love my neighbor as myself? It's great. It's biblical. Or am I just saying, we're not going to do this because I don't want to do it? What is it in our life, and is it founded in the scripture? And so it's a lifelong battle. Let's constantly evaluate what we're doing and why we're doing it because that's the nature of legalism. And the last one here is the irony of legalism. You see, in verse 23, it says, Which these things have indeed showed a wisdom in its worship and humility and neglect in the body, not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh. It simply is this, that we claim through this thought of legalism, claim through this thought of man-made rules and ideology, that the world would be a better place if we can just follow these things. And yet, the more rules and regulations that happen in the world, the worse off the world is. And the Bible says here that we must have total confidence, total dependence on Christ for our life to be a true Christian. We must live our life in total confidence and total dependence on who he is and what he's done for us. And no longer live in the bondage of the past because it's easy to live there. I came across a story by Martin Luther, one of the reformers of the early church. And he said this, he said, As I lived my life, I began to understand and began to follow how could I become the most spiritual monk that there was. That was his goal. And so in 1510, he said, I'm going to go to a cathedral, St. John's Cathedral, and they were what is considered the most holy steps. These were the steps that lead up to Pontius Pilate's house. And he said, I'm going to go there and I'm going to say a prayer every time I go up one of these stairs. It was the same prayer over and over again. Because the tradition was, if I go and make this pilgrimage and make this prayer, I'm going to be closer to Jesus. Because Jesus walked these steps. And so he said, you know what, I'm going to go even one step further. I'm going to climb these stairs on my knees. And so he started at the bottom of these stairs, and he got on his knees, and he prayed the Lord's Prayer. He went up the next prayer, the next step, on his knees, and did it again. Until he got to the very top and had achieved this amazing feat that in his time, no one had done before. And as he's telling this, he says that eight years later, eight years later, after this moment, he came to this realization. He wrote this down. He said, it is certain that men must utterly despair in his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ. He said, listen, I went and I did something that was unthinkable, and it was amazing, and it was this so-called spiritual decision. And yet it didn't do anything for me. Because I was doing it in my own flesh. I was doing it to make myself look good. I was doing it so that I could tell others, hey, listen, I went and climbed the stairs on my knees. And it took me so many hours to do this. Look at how great I am. He said, it wasn't to the point where I realized that it was nothing that I could do, but it was only through what Christ has done, which allows me to be the spiritual person that I need to be, to be this Christian that I need to be, to be Christ-like as Christ lived his life. Man-made religion is incompatible with a grace-filled life that Christ offers for us. As Terry comes and plays for us, I want us to ask ourselves in this closing moment, in our closing time, ask yourself these couple of questions. The first is this. Why is it that rule-keeping and following man-made ideology is attractive to us? I had to ask myself this question eight, nine years ago as I began to go through this journey. Why is it attractive? And this is the conclusion I came to myself. It was easier. It was easy for me to check the boxes. It was easy for me to say I've got the right version. I'm listening to the right music. I'm going to church X amount of times. It was easy. Because grace-filled life, yes, it's easy, but it's the path of least resistance. When we begin, sorry, legalism is the path of least resistance. Grace-filled life is the path where there's resistance in our flesh, resistance in what we want to do. You see, Christ doesn't want us to have religion. There's enough religion in this world, church. He wants us to have an intimate relationship with Him. That intimate relationship is what draws us closer to Him. My last question is simply this. Is that your desire this morning? To have an intimate relationship with Him? To say, God, I don't care what the man-made religion says. I don't care what the bondage or the shackles have on my life. I just want a relationship with you. If that's not the question, if that's not the answer to our question, then it may be that we just simply need a heart change this morning. We need to come and we need to say, God, I need you to do an operation on my heart. I need you to change the desires of my heart. Renew my heart today, Lord. Maybe that's what it is for you. Maybe it's you're sitting here and you're like that opening illustration where you've been set free and you no longer have to serve in prison. And yet you're saying, but judge, can I go back? Can I go back to prison? Can I go back and live there? When Christ says, no, I've set you free for a reason. And that's what Paul is saying here today. I don't know what your need is, but the altar's open. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this day. Lord, we love you. We pray, God, that your will would be done in our lives and our hearts today. In your name we pray. Amen. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face when I found my beginning that has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. Thank you.

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