All for Christ - Col 3:17

Col 3:17 KJV - 17 And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, [do] all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.

Full Transcript

But please, once you've found your place in Colossians 3, verses 12-17, I will invite you to go ahead and please stand for the reading of God's word. Colossians 3, verse 12-17, hear the word of the living God. Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one another and forgiving one another.

If any man have a quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts to the which also you are called in one body. And be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. Amen. Please remain standing for prayer as we seek his face once more. Oh, our great Lord and God, in the name of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, grant, I pray, that your Spirit would illuminate our mind to the understanding of this word, that you would grant us wisdom as to its meaning, and power as to its application. Help us to know it, to understand it, and to live in it. In Christ's name, amen. You may be seated. Remember where we left off last as we came through and looked at verses 15, 16, and 17.

We saw that the rule of peace is to be the umpire, is to be the referee, is to be the judgment call that is overlooking every thought, action, word, and deed of the entirety of our lives. that there is to be this moment by moment deciding or judging within ourselves what is ultimately goal worthy or praise worthy in every action and activity and situation that we find ourselves in and that we take up.

And that the goal ultimately is the peace of Christ. the peace of Christ reigning over the troubled waters within, such that he commands peace be still and we have an inner peace, and such that by our obedience and by our experiencing that peace, we being peacemakers work to bring about peace in our circumstances and in our conversations and in our life lived amongst the saints and the world around us with others. We are as a people mutually called to unity as one body, all bearing about that goal and that aim, and cooperating with one another, and shouldering up one another, bearing one another's burdens, fulfilling the law of Christ, that we may jointly and corporately aim to be ruled and governed by the rule of peace in Christ. And that the proper resulting attitude that rule of peace in our hearts, as we saw at the end of verse 15, is that we would be a thankful people. A people not given to grumbling and murmuring, complaining, backbiting, and slander, but a people given to that more gracious and spirit-led positive outlook which brings us to a conscious state of thanksgiving again and again. And it begins to color our world, not as those who are always looking for the negative aspect of what's missing in our framework and then dwelling on it to the point that it jettisons us into conduct and attitudes and speech that is not glorifying to God, but it's actually murmuring against His sovereignty, but rather we're to be a people whose world is colored by thanksgiving, because in light of what Christ has done, in light of the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, in light of His reigning supremacy over all things, we find the reality of the positive of the fact that we are still drawing breath, that He is still shedding abroad His kindness upon us, that Christ has been the means by which God would show us mercy, not just now, but forevermore.

And that when we even look at the saints, the fruit that we do see in them is a result of God's kindness to them and to us, that they can bear that fruit. So we give thanks to God for them, even going all the way back to the beginning of the letter. If you remember in Paul's thanksgiving at the onset of the book of Colossians, he was giving thanks to the Father for the fruit he saw in the saints. There is to be a world that is bejeweled with the constant refracting radiance of a hundred thousand mercies and blessings that we as the Saints can see, regardless if the unbeliever can't.

And it should change the way we live and we think and we see things. All of this brings us to this grand statement at the end of this section, verse 17. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. It was recently, just a couple weeks ago, we heard, some of us reminded, some of us heard probably for the first time, the name C.T. Studd, the missionary who gave up his famous cricket career and sort of like Eric Little, pursued the Lord in this marvelous way and ended up laboring in China underneath Hudson Taylor in the China Inland Missions.

And that statement, only one life, he wrote, which will soon be passed. Only what's done for Christ will last. There's actually eight stanzas, or verses, if you will, to that poem. I'll just take verse number two of it here, and just think. Only one life, yes, only one. Soon will its fleeting hours be done. Then, in that day, my Lord to meet, and stand before his judgment seat. Only one life will soon be passed. Only what's done for Christ will last.

When you look at the sum total of your life, the way you live and think, and you look at the choices you make and why you make the choices you make, the decisions, the words, the speech, your attitude, Is it done with this grand reality and view that everything is quickly passing away all around you? And it's not passing slowly. Scripture says it's passing quickly.

But the life of a man, the glory of a man, it's like the flower of a field. It may be beautiful, but it is short-lived. And it's not long before, about the time you've even found that beautiful flower in full bloom, you circle back around a day or two later to show your friend, and the wilting has already begun. Such it is, it seems, when we are, by God's kindness, brought into, some of us, whatever it is we may consider to be the prime of our life. Some of us live to quite a ripe age before we get anywhere near what we think that looks like. But no sooner have we entered into it that we are made very cognizant that this won't last long. This won't last long. Only one life will soon be passed, and only what's done for Christ will last.

Is your life a life that you can say whatever you're doing right now, whether in word or deed, that everything you're doing, you're doing in the name of the Lord Jesus? Is that why you're doing it? Is that by whom you're doing it? Is that in whose strength you're doing it? Is it true?

You need to know verse 17 is, as one man put, an interpretive summary of all that we just read, verses 12 through 16, at the beginning of this sermon. All those verses, everything dealing with putting on this new man, putting on these Christ-like bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, putting off all these old things, putting on the new, letting this peace rule in our hearts. You could say verse 17 is a grand summing up of all that these verses were building out.

We could say for Paul's formula, if you will then, for Christian unity following this cascading section into the verse we now arrive at, you could say the formula for Christian unity starts with the peace of Christ arbitrating over all our actions and thoughts. then it continues with the word of Christ dwelling in each one of us. The word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the word of God dwelling in us powerfully. And then his formula concludes with the name of Christ supplying the reason and the motive for every element of life. that Christ himself, doing things in his name, is our great motivation. Doing everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Now when you look at this verse, if this is a grand summing up, if this is a great summary statement that we've come into, keep in mind, look at what it's actually saying. You could almost ask yourself, what is the Christian life? Because a grandness is coming into view here, something that does seem to grab hold of the far-reaching sphere of everything that touches the Christian life.

There's a principle here that colors everything. What is it actually saying? What I want you to notice is that Paul is offering not so much a set of rules. Paul is not granting us this set of wooden laws. But rather, Paul is setting forth an attitude, or what we may call a spirit. A spirit in which Christians are to think and speak and act in everything.

I can't begin to tell you the importance of that. When you talk about the life that we lived and all the things that we do, when we talk about why we do what we do, We must be careful lest we devolve down into mere do's and don'ts. This has been a big thrust for the whole letter of Colossians, and that makes this verse 17 doubly applicable for the summing up of this section as well as the heart of a large aspect of this letter. True worship has always been about the spirit of the thing.

You know who grabbed hold of that reality and knew it and wrote about it in the Old Testament and had to be brought very low in his own sin sickness, very low in the humiliation of his rebellion and transgressions against God, very low in the stupor of the blinding power of sin before he could lay hold of it and recognize it and sing a psalm about it? none other than King David himself. Psalm 51 is known as the great psalm of repentance of King David. I grabbed just a few verses out of it. Look at Psalm 51 verse 10. Look what David, by the Spirit, is made to sing.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Verse 12, restore unto me the joy of my salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Verse 15 through 17, O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise, for thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it. Thou delightest not in burnt offering, sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Dear Saints, true worship.

We just touched last time regarding the hymns and the Psalms hymns and spiritual songs where the melody is being made firstly and chiefly where? In the heart. As we were reminded in John chapter four, verse 23 through 24, it says, Christ speaking, but the hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship him.

God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The whole immaterial, invisible reality of why you do what you do, the secret atmosphere of your mind state is in view before the Father at all times. And you can't worship Him even with your most perfect doctrine and your perfect practice, your perfect dotting every I and crossing every T. If the atmosphere and the air of your heart is not heavenly and thankful and rejoicing in the knowledge of the grand truth of who Jesus Christ is, you can go through, like a Roman Catholic, 100,000 motions to the day you die. and die an alien unfamiliar with the intimacy of knowing and communing with Christ. And all you will hear on that day with all your fair show of religion is, depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never knew you.

True worship. Of course, that spirit, if that's the air, if that's the atmosphere of your mind state and your heart, of course, it's gonna breed obedience to actual commands. Of course, it's going to bring about, if you have an overall attitude of submission to Christ, then his laws are not grievous. That attitude of submission to Christ will produce obedience to Christ's commands, but obedience to Christ's commands doesn't begin with mere and outward rule keeping, it doesn't.

And sometimes the atmosphere of our heart devolves into that low base, ritualistic sacramentalism, and God hates it. There's a way to offer sacrifices we see in the Old Testament where the Lord abhors it, where He can't even stand the feast days anymore. He can't stand it. He's looking for true worshipers to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Now note this, this attitude, this atmosphere, this outlook, this spirit is given to us as something that's not to be attended to merely for two hours on Sunday morning. It is meant to invade and saturate your life.

Whatsoever you do, whatsoever you do, do all Scripture says the net of God is cast wide. You have been caught within it and there's nothing about your life that is not captured and brought in to the glorious reality of the miracle of the new birth and his plans for you in eternity. Everything that you are, everything that you think, everything that you feel, everything that you know, it's all being brought into glorious subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ that you may be free from that old man. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and rinse and repeat till you die, and then eternity, and then forever.

Paul, when he thinks and when he writes and when he speaks by the Spirit, he views our whole life as a thank offering. is a thanksgiving offering laid upon the altar in response to the amazing grace that is ours in Christ. This is what he's urging us to in Romans chapter 12, verse one, to present not a few minutes of your time, please, if you could look over this way and just give dutiful attention to a few religious things. No, he says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. This is your reasonable service. This is your spiritual worship. Paul clearly acknowledged the importance of the in-gathering of the saints, of the Lord's Day, public worship, but he never believed that worship stopped when the Lord's Day ended.

Christ gets all your days and all your hours and all your minutes. He gets all your thoughts. He gets all your goals. He gets all your dreams. He gets all your ambitions. He gets all your worth and all you could ever think about. He gets it all. The King gets it all. If He left you with it, it would burn with you in hell forever. But He saved you, and He ransomed you, and He's taken you unto Himself, so He gets it all. You were bought with a price. You're not your own.

But to the saint, this is really good news. We were in the midst of a tragic scene of self-murder when the Lamb rescued us from ourselves. And therefore we have no hesitation as it relates to the spirit within us, the principle of life within us, the Holy Spirit's indwelling in that real, true, deep part of us. We long, we desire to do everything all in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Who else would we do it for? We filled up the sum of our iniquity in our life before he came. We've served sin long enough, haven't we? We've served ourselves and our appetites and our lusts long enough, haven't we? Why would we lay another oblation and offering before that wicked idol of self one more time? Let's give it all to Christ. Let's give it all to Him. He's worthy. And we'll sing it for eternity. Worthy is the Lamb to receive all honor, all glory, all praise. How much of it? All of it. All of it. This is the song of the saints.

It's important that we understand the significance of doing it in His name. You know, this has really been something of a theme. Paul has been just worshipfully building up to this and authoritatively establishing it in doctrine by the Spirit as it's being breathed out.

Consider just the chapter before in Colossians 2, verse 6, Paul said, and this is a great sum of the Christian life in the statement as well, Colossians 2, 6, as ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him. What's the proper response to receiving Christ? Walking out every last step of the rest of your life until you see Him face to face in Him, and then you walk in Him manifestly from there. For even the angelic host to see, and the brethren to see when we shine with the radiance of His glory, conformed into His image. What's the Christian life? It's walking in Christ, it's following the name of God withersoever He goes. Paul's saying that the natural consequence of receiving Christ is walking in Him. So you can't walk in Him if you haven't received Him by faith. There's no power.

Colossians 1, verses 9 through 12. Going back, we spoke of Paul's prayer at the beginning. Well, we'll look closely at it. What was it that he was praying from the beginning of this epistle that the Spirit is now sealing, as it were, at this point? In Colossians 1, verses 9 through 12. If you haven't gone back and read that prayer 14 times by now, I'd encourage you to do it. Paul is praying by the Spirit for the Church of Colossae, and by extension, he's praying for you and he's praying for me.

He says, "...for this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you and to desire that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that ye might walk worthy of the Lord, unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness, giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light."

Beautiful. Remember, we cannot lose sight of the theme in Colossians that it's in the power of knowing Him. It's in the power of knowing Him. Knowing Him. Knowing Him and the power of His resurrection, Paul says in Philippians 3. That we have the power to walk in and walk out the Christian life. He's the source of it all. He's the wellspring. The triumphs of His grace overwhelm our sins, not our best efforts independent of Him. And so we see, and I want you to have a sense of that power in what's being said.

This is not the first time in Scripture we are told to think about doing something in the name of the Lord, or trusting in the name of the Lord, or having within view the importance and the significance of that which is in the name of the Lord. I mean, doesn't Scripture say in Psalm 20, verse seven, gloriously so, and this is something we, we return to very often when we're tempted to lean and retreat back into the arm of the flesh and to trust in what we can do. This is a verse that is combat ready to fight back against our carnal temptations to trust in the flesh.

For it says, some trust in chariots and some in horses. But we will remember the name of the Lord our God. There are those Egypt is going to trust in its horses. Babylon is going to trust in its chariots. You're going to have a Syria that's going to look to the numbers of its army surrounding the walls of Jerusalem. You're going to have the Philistines that look to what they think they can do in the flesh to Israel. over and over again.

The nations all round about are constantly trusting in what they can make, what they can practically build, what they can do. The horses they can multiply, the tanks they can multiply, the chariots they can multiply. But what is unique of the people of God? Let them do what they will, let them trust in what they want to trust in, let them boast and brag about whatever it is they want to brag about that they think is going to get them over the hurdle.

As for us, As for me and my house, we're gonna trust, we're gonna remember the name of the Lord our God. We're gonna serve Him. This has been the cry of God's people for as long as they've known Him. And here in that statement, we will remember the name of the Lord our God. Oh, this isn't just poetry. It's a holy threat to the enemy.

Bring your horses. Pharaoh, go ahead. Get your best and brightest. Go get your most formidable army you can find. We've got a pillar of fire. Go ahead. All right, come on. Let's go, Assyrians, Sennacherib. You're threatening us? You're gonna write a letter with all these demands? Okay, I'm gonna go take it to the temple and hand it to Jehovah. He has an angel who'll be meeting you outside the camp shortly. Oh, Nebuchadnezzar, you're going to threaten us with destruction and fire. That's fine. Our Lord's gonna meet us in the furnace.

Go ahead. Though the heathen rage, the Lord speaks and the earth melts. Go ahead. Bring all your maximum firepower. We're gonna trust in the name of the Lord our God. We've got the better end of this deal. We have the mighty maker of heaven and earth.

So you can bring all the twigs and sticks you like. will have the God who raised up the cedars of Lebanon and turn them into furniture at his decrees." Micah chapter 4 verse 5, for all people, this is Micah by the grace of the Spirit looking to that grand day, that reality when Faith is so absorbed and taken up that grand city of which we speak. It says, for all people will walk everyone in the name of his God, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. So whether it's Psalm 20 verse 7, Micah chapter 4 verse 5, or so many other scriptures in the Old Testament, there is a grand statement of power when we say we're going to trust in the name of the Lord our God.

That's where our trust is going to be. That's where we're going to get our motivation to do what we do. That's what we're going to remember. That's where we're going to put our mind on. That is where we're going to interest and exhaust ourselves in while you're busy putting together your machinery.

So to import that statement, in the name of, into the New Testament, and then put on it the title, the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, is to summon the realities of God as creator, God as the Holy One of Israel, God as the destroyer of enemy armies, God who is the captain of angelic armies, God who's sovereign over all, and to show that mighty identity in the person and in the face of the Lord Jesus, who has been made head over all things to the church.

Paul summons this language in 1 Corinthians 5. If you remember, the necessity of church discipline is taking place. You have a egregious sin taking place within the church. And Paul has called them to repent, not to merely tolerate it and celebrate the fact that they're tolerating it, but to put it out. And Paul says this. and you are puffed up and have not rather mourned that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I verily, Paul says, as absent in the body but present in the spirit, have judged already as though I were present concerning him that hath done this deed.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. when you are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a one unto Satan, for the destruction of his flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." Paul invokes the name of the Lord at this place and brings to bear the authority and the power. that name. That that which is done and accomplished in the church truly, that which is effectually accomplished, even in church discipline is accomplished, not even in the power of our flesh there, but in the name of the Lord Jesus. That it is Christ that makes even this discipline effectual, and makes Paul's judgment effectual, and makes the the destruction of this man's effectual, and praise God, and we even get to see it in 2nd Corinthians, the redemption of this man's soul, effectual.

It's in the name. And here we are told, in the light of that name, in the authority of that name, in the power of that name, in the greatness and the grandness of that name, in the all-sufficient boasting of that name, you and I, dear saints, need to do everything in this life by that name. We need to live in and through and by that name. Not in your name, not in my name, not in the name of our companies, not in the name of our businesses, not in the name of our fill in the blank, our greatest ambitions, our greatest desires in this world, not in the name of our favorite political party, but in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Do all. Dear Saint, you need to think, you need to speak, you need to act in the name of Christ.

And bear, always bear in mind, and the only way you're gonna do that is by always bearing in mind, his character, his will for you, his commands, and a concern for his reputation in the world. Do you hear that? What more tragic statement can be made about anyone who calls on the name of the Lord except that it could horrifically, scarily, possibly be said that the name of the Lord is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you? When the whole reason, as far as you're concerned, if you're a regenerate, that you're still alive and you're born again is to bring glory to that name. That the cry of your heart is, not just in world missions, but in your attitude about home and domestic duties.

May the Lamb of God receive the rewards of His suffering, that that Lamb that was slain should receive the joyful benefit of your glad submission to Him in everything that you do. One commentator summarizes here, Everything ought to be done to the glory of God in Christ, and this should be the scope of all our actions.

The supremacy of Christ that we read about and that we looked at in Colossians chapter one in the Christ hymn, verses 15 through 20, all the glory of that that we saw in his supremacy over creation, the new creation, the church, the world that is, the world that is to come. When we look at the supremacy of Jesus Christ, here is where the rubber meets the road. Here is where you have a practical ability and opportunity to actually apply it to your life. The supremacy of Christ to be applied in the way you think. Think in the name of Christ. The supremacy of Christ applied in the way that you talk when you speak in the name of Christ. The supremacy of Christ applied in your actions and in your conduct, that you act in the name of Christ.

Listen, you know what kinds of thoughts come to your mind when you're alone? You know what kinds of thoughts come to your mind, not just when you're hearing a sermon, but when you're on the road and you're driving? You know what kinds of things you fill your ears with when you get home, when you sit down on the sofa and you need time to decompress. You know where you turn to and where your favorite influences are. You know those things that shape your, what I might call your hidden character that other people don't always get to see, but God sees.

And what the Lord is calling you to do here is a wonderful privilege. It's a great joy. He's summoning you into the holy priesthood of the believers. He's calling you to put on the white robes of the priesthood and to minister in the holy place of His presence at all times, everywhere you go.

Nothing you do is trivial anymore. Nothing you do and say and think is small stuff anymore. You've been elevated to the high rank of the Son of God. The sons of God. You've been elevated to the high rank of kings and priests unto the Most High God. The days of you thinking in terms of just small and big are gone.

It's all His. Everything you do now is in the service of the King. You wear the uniform. of his conquering lordship. And you're an ambassador and an emissary to a world that's quickly passing away, and you have a very little bit of time to be busy about your duties before the king marches upon this world and you see him face to face. It's a high privilege. It's a great joy. It's the right. It's the right of the saints.

I mean, do you realize that? I mean, whenever the, remember when the demoniac that was possessed, the Lord Jesus came and rebuked and came and they cried out for mercy and even acknowledged who he was, thou son of David, and spoke even to his deity there, the son of God. And what did Christ do? He silenced him. But to you and me, he says, go. And we get to proclaim this to the ends of the world, to the nations.

There is a glory and a dignity to take the trumpet of the resurrection, the trumpet of the gospel, and to shout out loud and long and herald the coming king. And the Lord did not grant that to the demoniac. He did not grant it to the kingdom of darkness. It's not their right. It's not their privilege.

Give the war horn to my bride. Give the war horn to my people. Give it to my priesthood, my holy city. Let them be lifted up. Let the nations observe. Let Christ, his very spirit be in them. Go and proclaim it to the nations. This is the right of the redeemed. This is the glory of the saints. Make him known, beloved. Everything you do is heavenly if you'll receive it on faith.

The only way you're going to be able to do this actively, practically, the only way you're going to be able to take what we're saying here, what the Word is saying here, and practically put your foot into the footprint of the slain lamb in whose way you follow, is if you are actively, purposefully, consciously looking unto Him actually. Not just phraseologically. Sometimes we get so used to hearing things in the pulpit, we take simple truths and we turn it into monikers, and then we forget that the power is really in what's being said. We're not saying, look unto him, and what does that mean?

Well, it just means sort of be a good Christian, remember that we worship Christ, and that's it, and you move on. There is a real reality into which your eyes need to be tied upon Christ in the text of His Word. There is a reality in which your eyes need to be tied upon Christ in recognizing your immediate real situational need of Him in your practical everyday elements of life. You need Christ to wash the dishes as a Christian.

Otherwise you'll wash them with a bad attitude and those dishes will be more clean than your heart. And what service is that when the hands that come and intend to do the cleaning are more dirty than the thing they go to touch? I heard a commentator say that's what, that was the lie that Uzzah believed when he reached out to steady the ark. When it fell, he made the mistake of thinking his hand was cleaner than the dirt.

We need the grace of God to lead our families. We need the grace of God to raise our children with the right attitude and the right heart and the right spirit. We need the grace of God to even know how to think about each other as fellow saints and Christians in the same church. You can't do that if you're not looking at the slaughtered lamb of God dying for that saint. Unless you know deeply what his prayers were, and the things we just read this morning in John chapter 15, the high priestly prayer, the unity of the church.

Can you really honestly say that those words are near enough to your heart that even if you can't necessarily quote them verbatim, you can move through that prayer and know the heart and spirit of what Christ was wanting of His Father to be seen in you and the men and women around you?

Is that actually shaping your thinking right now at all? Can you reference scripture that way? Is it familiar enough to you that it actually changes the way you live and you think? If not, how can you say, prove to me you're looking to Christ? If I come and I ask you about your marriage, can you go to the scriptures and say, here's how I built my marriage?

And the way that you discipline your children and the way you decide what kind of discipline works and what kind of discipline doesn't work. Can you run to the scripture and pull out verses to justify why you do what you do? The way you work at your job, the hours you put in, the things that you're saving up for, the expenditures that you're planning. Can you run to God's word on stewardship and explain to anybody why you're doing what you're doing?

If you're not careful, you will name the name of Christ verbally with your mouth and you'll build your life on secular humanism. You'll do it. You'll do it. Don't think you won't. It's like second nature, you won't even think about it. Why? Because no good thing dwells in this flesh. And your heart will deceive you. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things. Who can know it? Yes, you can justify to yourself why you do what you do, but you can't justify it to God's Word if you really know it. That Word needs to dwell in you richly. That Word needs to dwell in you with power. You need to have understanding.

There's no shortcut around that. There's no shortcut. Where's the practical reality that you know enough about Christ, His character? Can you think of the times He engaged with contrary personalities in the Word? And I'm not just talking about your one favorite instance. It's like, yeah, I remember He flipped a table. What else did He do? He flipped a table. You go through your life flipping every table, and you're gonna find out real quick you don't know the first thing about Christ's character.

There was a perfect, wide, intelligent, wise, divine wisdom to the multiplied interactions and complex situation the Lord Jesus Christ was divinely placed in, the way he responded, in what he said, and again, take note, to what he did not say. in every circumstance.

Have you really studied out those and found a pattern that you can replicate in how you talk and how you carry yourself before the world? When you go to the scriptures and you see the New Testament epistles that speak massively about bitterness and speak massively about malice and speak about lust and speak about fornication and uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, covetousness, idolatry, When it speaks about anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication. When it speaks, as we've said here, about bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, forbearing, charity, peace. I mean, if all we did was take the entire New Testament, and every time a character element or a way of thinking shows up, if we just read it back to back to back to back to back to back, how much can you honestly say those realities are what you are practically putting into practice in your life and aiming to do it more and more? And that's where you can say, I'm aiming to meditate and to bear in mind the character of Christ, the character of the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit in my life.

Or are those things very far away because when it comes time to do work, you push that out of your mind and focus on the mere practical aspects of what you're doing. And though you have Christianity in the 80% of your life, you work, you labor, you pick up a hammer like an atheist.

You need to bear in mind his will for you. Bear in mind what he said. He says, if you love me, obey my commandments. He says, why do you call me Lord? And yet you do not do what I tell you. You need to bear in mind the grand privilege of bearing that holy name before an ungodly and unholy world. You will bear it forever. Carry it with dignity.

Look, stand upon the top of Mount Horeb, look at the people who are departing from its presence, look out upon the wasteland And there out there in the midst of it, you'll see a nation clothed in white and a priesthood bearing up the Ark of the Presence upon their shoulders.

And you'll look on with wonder and with curiosity as God has picked a people for himself. He's gonna dwell with them, go with them, go before him, put his name upon them. And all the other nations are gonna look on with wonder. All the other nations are gonna look on with fear. They will, they will when the King comes. Now I'm telling you, when you look out there, what do you see? Do you see yourself out there with that golden stave upon your shoulder?

Because that's what you've been called to in the New Testament Christian life, to bear up the testimony of the Lord Jesus to the nations. Think in the name, speak in the name, act in the name. You must bear in mind his character, bear in mind his will for you, bear in mind his reputation before the world. This is what was in view when the hymn writer wrote, take my life and let it be consecrated. Lord to thee, take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise. For as verse 17 ends, Whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. It says, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him. Giving thanks. giving thanks, what does that presuppose in our atmosphere and in our spirit?

It's presupposing that we have the very reigning presence of Christ with us, that our knowledge of him, the fact we can know him, our knowledge of his ways, the fact that his spirit is still teaching us more than what we know, the fact that we do have this inner rule of peace that is working within us, and these other benefits that he brings to us, the spirit illuminating the text to our mind, growing in understanding, growing in our hunger for him, the unity that we may enjoy even as the people of God. We recognize that none of this has come to us by our own merit nor power. We recognize it has been granted, it has been given. What do you have that you have not received and you've received it and why do you boast?

All of this has been given to us completely by God's grace and therefore in light of it all, we are a thanksgiving type of people. thankful to God the Father. Even, now watch this, this is where I could say that interpretive summary of verses 12 down through 16, you're really going to see the divine wisdom in the setup here. Because what it's saying, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him, you need to be made aware if you haven't picked up on it already, that even the thanksgiving we are actively giving to God the Father is given through Christ. We thank the Father by Him.

Do you realize you can't even thank God without Him? You can't thank God rightly without Him. You can't be brought to thanksgiving without Him. Your thanks are not acceptable without Him. that not only is Christ supreme over nations and worlds and galaxies and regeneration and the Spirit and the world to come, He's supreme over my ability to give thanks. He's supreme over my thanksgiving.

I thank God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what we've been moving toward in this section all along. You can't thank God rightly without laying hold of the name of Christ. The prayer here is that you will be found giving thanks to the Father in and in and because of Jesus Christ.

As Paul prayed at that opening prayer we looked at, giving thanks unto the Father which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in life. Jesus Christ made it appropriate for us to be called sons and daughters of the Most High God. Jesus Christ cleansed us of our iniquity, forgave us so that it would be appropriate to give us the power to be changed rather than killed for the wages of sin is death. Christ purchased our new life and a legal right to even have it And so let us, let us sing, take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.

May our worship, in summary, beloved, not come to a stop when the Lord's Day ends, but may the Lord's Day be a great help and a boon to the praise and worship we give throughout the week. The greatest acts of worship, look at Abraham. The first time worship occurs in the scripture was not in a gathering service specifically, but rather it was when Abraham was taking his son up into the mountain to offer him. That's the first time the word worship appears in scripture. So as you enjoy 10,000 good things your father's given you in this life, may you live a life of worship.

May you live a life of laying it all down on the altar for his name. And may you have the thanksgiving that comes from Christ's peace ruling in your hearts. May all that you do be to the glory of God in Christ. May that be the scope of all your actions.

Husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, families, churches, marriages, roles of men, roles of women. and all that you do, are you doing them in the name of Christ or are you doing it in the name of modern secularism? Whose cause are you advancing when you're alone by yourself and when you're with others?

We're gonna take this principle and we are going to go one verse next, Lord willing, next week, directly into wives and husbands and children and fathers. This is as practical as it gets. And you can't be godly wives, you can't be godly husbands, you can't be godly children, you can't be godly parents, unless you understand verse 17 and you take it in to the rest of the text of all that comes next, that Jesus Christ is supreme in all these arenas and areas of your life. And the only reason you're allowed to be a husband and to be a wife and to be a child and to be a father, to be a parent, and not dead in hell.

As a Christian, it's because He has resaved you and redeemed you for higher purposes, and He's called you into these stations as priests unto the Most High God. And I pray that you will remember that, and I will remember that. And we will know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. And we will be empowered by His love for us, knowing we love only because He loved us first.

And we will turn our gaze, even in the midst of the real day-to-day practical labors we have to do. And there is, I mean, even C.T. Studd himself said, missionary work is not glamorous, it's drudgery. It's drudgery day in and day out. It's not all just mission reports.

It's pain, it's loss, it's hunger, it's difficulty, it's uphill, it's laboring in solitude with no fanfare and no high fives, it's a lot of pain. He said a lot of these students come out of seminary, they hit the field, and you have to just get them to unlearn everything the first couple years because they're so full of themselves. They need pain to be sanctified.

Listen, the Christian life does have a lot of drudgery and a lot of practical difficulty in it, but this gospel is such, it's meant to empower you particularly in those places. So I'll close with verse seven of his poem. Oh, let my love in fervor burn, and from the world now let me turn, living for Thee and Thee alone, bringing Thee pleasure on Thy throne. Only one life, it will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last. Let us pray. Oh, our God in heaven, we praise you. We thank you for the incredible, unspeakable gift that is your son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for his life.

We thank you for his faithfulness. We thank you for his character. We thank you for his commands. We thank you for his mighty example. Lord God, we thank you for his promises and his faithfulness. Lord, we thank you for his life and we thank you for his death. We thank you for his stripes.

We thank you for his afflictions, for it's by these we are made whole. We thank you, Lord, for his sufferings, because he suffered in our place. We thank you, Lord, for his crucifixion, for he died for us. We thank you, Lord, for his death, because by it we are set free. We thank you, Lord, for his mighty resurrection over the grave, for in his triumph we triumph. We thank you, Lord, for his glorious ascension, for he's now been given all authority in heaven and earth, and in him we have power. Lord, we thank you that he ever lives to make intercession for his saints, Lord, for we now have a faithful advocate and high priest. Lord, we thank you for Christ. Give us more of him. Help us to see him. Help us to meditate on him, to dwell on him, to think of him, and Lord, to obey him. And may this be all our Christianity.

In Christ Jesus' name we do pray, amen. Well, dear saints, as it says in Jude 16, or excuse me, Jude 24, now unto him that is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. To the only wise God our Savior be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.