I love gathering with fellow believers and worshipping God as a body.
I just love it.
I also love learning more about the Word... even though at times it brings rebuke.
Today, we had a guest speaker at my grandparents church, since the pastor and his wife are out of town. His name is Robert Noufer and he used to be in the air force. His main passage was Col. 2:5-14:
5 For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order, and the stedfastness of your faith in Christ.
6 As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him:
7 Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.
8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
9 For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.
10 And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power:
11 In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ:
12 Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.
13 And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;
14 Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;
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If you know me, you know that verse 14 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. I love the image of our sins... All of them... being nailed to His cross. So powerful.
Anyways, the preacher began with a story. In the military, the preacher once had to jump out of an airplane. He was strapped to an expert jumper, since he himself did not know the first thing about jumping out of planes.
He applied that picture to us an Christ. If we try to jump alone, we will fail. We need to depend on Christ everyday as we jump out of our airplanes in life. Being an English nerd, this analogy was so powerful to me. Just like the pastor and the jumper, we are literally covered by Christ and His grace to land safely. His love and forgiveness is the only thing that separates us from eternal punishment. He has made us alive... since we were nothing but dead in our sins.
I started to think about how I, more often than not, try to jump alone. I get my "Sunday pep talk" and then begin the next week trying to "fly solo." How silly is that? I think I can do it on my own...
No parachute.
No qualifications.
No idea how to land.
And then I fail. I fall flat on the ground and can't understand why. The short answer is because I failed to trust my Expert Jumper.
The first three verses of the next chapter explain how to fix this issue:
2 Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
3 For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
If our focus is on Christ, everything else will fall into place. Out affection shouldn't be fixed on this wicked, temporal world... which will soon pass away, but on things above. That's what really matters. All my "plans" of life are useless if they are not centered around Christ. Everything else is nothing compared to the union I have with my Savior.
