Do All in the Name of the Lord

Introduction

Folks with hearing age understand what that is. We have to have help, and sometimes that gets a little loud, and so we my hearing aids do that too sometime. And so we appreciate anybody who’s here tonight who’s come. And if you have to have hearing aids or eyeglasses or a walking stick, or if you’re silver headed, you know, I tell about my grandpa who obeyed the gospel when he was 69 years old, and uh he kept after the church to let me preach a meeting down there where he was after several years they did, and he’d gotten up then a pretty old person, and so uh he was going to church when he could, but he got to where he couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear, and so he came in the building, and I was staying at the back door when he came in, and uh I stuck my hand out and said, How are you doing tonight?

And he said, Fine. He said, Is my grandson here? And I said, Well, is he a handsome looking fellow? He said, He sure is. I said, Well, you’re talking to him. And he looked like he’d eaten chicken and rubber grease on his glasses. So he came in and he sat down and he sat on the seat, and I preached for about 20 minutes, and he got this big old railroad pocket watch out that he carried for years. He gave it to me when it came through my dad to me when my grandfather died, but he took that out and pecked it on the seat after 20 minutes and held it up like that to let me know that was time to go. And I noticed when he was singing, he never sang the same song we were singing.

He he couldn’t hear. And uh, I noticed he went around and and kind of avoided people, and and and the brethren told me, said now when your grandpa pulls off of the building, make sure you’re in the building. Because he starts his car up and he can’t hear it, so he puts the accelerator all the way to the floor and then jerks it down in the drive and stones everybody in the parking lot. And so, but my grandfather told me, he said, You know, I don’t know why I come to church. He said, I don’t know the songs they sing. I don’t know the people that are there anymore, all my friends are gone. He said, I can’t sometimes understand the preacher. So he said, I don’t know if I’m doing any good or not.

I said, Grandpa, you’re doing me a lot of good. When somebody old just keeps on going, they leave a step and a footprint for people to walk in for years and years. And so we’re glad for everybody that’s here tonight, especially for all the silver-headed saints who are able to come and be with us. Let’s turn in the Colossian later and continue our study there. We’re going to look tonight at just a smaller segment. And I’m just going to try to do what the way I learn best. It may not, sometimes it bothers people the way I preach, because I never was real good with books. And so I like to see things in pictures and word pictures. I think Jesus painted a lot of word pictures for people.

And so I kind of caught on to that idea. I may abuse it, I don’t know, but I’m going to look at these words and try to paint some word pictures, so maybe you will remember by the story, remember the word. And remember the lesson to be learned in some of these verses. We’re going to go from verse 12 in the second chapter of the third chapter from verse 12, and just go down to verse 17. So we’re not going to cover a great deal of distance. But notice now we’ve been told already that if we’re going to be Christians and be God’s people, we’ve got to seek those things which are above. And we said, that means to focus your mind on what is above you.

If you look at what’s down here, you will become depressed and discouraged every day. But if you keep looking up and thinking about what’s above, the throne room of Christ, where he’s seated on a throne in the presence of God, and keep your mind seeking, become consumed with that and think about that and focus on that, and then set your mind, and we said that word said, it’s just like somebody setting a watch on something where it just keeps ticking away for that one thing. Set your mind on things above. And so if we can seek what’s up there where Christ is and set our mind on that, and then, good people, take off all these old garments and old things, old attitudes, sinful things, get rid of all the sinful things.

First of all, if we’re going to be God’s people, we’ve got to put an end to what’s sinful and what’s wrong. We’ve got to stop that. But now notice just to empty yourself out of all the evil you’ve done and bad attitudes, that’s not enough. You know the man that Jesus talked about who was possessed with a demon, and he the demon went out of him, and he cleaned himself up and swept himself out and left himself empty, and seven demons came back, and he was worse than he ever was. So that means you’ve got to keep putting new things into your life, new things into your mind, becoming consumed with new things, you see. Now listen to what the writer says we’ve got to do about we’ve put off the old things now by the renewing of our mind in chapter 10 and verse uh chapter uh 3 and verse 10, by the way of our mind uh into the knowledge and image of him who created him.

1. Put On, as the Elect of God, Holy and Beloved

And then he says in verse 12, put on therefore, here’s a conclusion drawn now, put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, and long suffering. Now notice here’s some terms that we probably are familiar with, may not know the details about a lot of them. But notice, first of all, he says, what we’re to do is therefore as the elect of God. Now, what does that mean? This word elect means chosen. And and it there have been generations and generations and thousands now, uh thousand years have passed where people believe that what has happened is that what what that God has done is God went around and God picked certain people and said, I want you all, and I want this person, I want that person, and God picked these certain people, but he said, I don’t want that guy combs his hair like Einstein.

I don’t want him, I don’t want this guy, and there’s somebody else I don’t want. And so they get the idea that God ran and chose people before the world began, and that’s who he would say. But the I think the ideal to see here, and you see this in the Fijians, the first chapter, and verses 3 through 5, you see it in the eighth chapter of the book of Romans, and you find out what God did was really God laid out some parameters about what the people would be, and the people who would fit in those parameters, that’s who he would choose to say. And I I like to tell this story about a young boy. I I I’d get around and hold a few meetings, and sometimes young guys will come to me when they start wanting to get married, and they’ll say, Listen, I’m I’m at the age of marriage, and I’m such an age, and I’m looking for somebody who’s looking to get married.

And he said, You get around some, and so he said, I want you to go looking for me, a girl. He said, I don’t care if she can be 22 to 35, and and uh he said, I don’t care what color her hair is, and he had some, I won’t tell you about weights or anything like that, but he had all these things that he had laid out. He said, I want her to be a devoted, dedicated dedicated Christian, and if you can just get her phone number, just tell her that you know somebody that wants to meet somebody just to be friends, and so I can call her. But now, see what he did, he laid all the parameters out. I just went out looking for the people who fit the parameters.

Well, that’s exactly what God did. God said, Listen, if you’ll be holy and blameless, and you will live the way I want to live, and you will live like Christ and be filled up and become consumed with Jesus, so much so that Christ is all. I mean, Christ is everything to you, and Christ is in all. That’s it. He’s in everything you do and everything you think about, the way you treat people, what you do, how you work, how you talk, everything you do. And so he says, now, if we’re going to be God’s elect, since that’s what we’re going to be, the elect of God, he says what we should do, uh be elect of God. Be holy for no, that’s just simply the idea of being consecrated, dedicated, or something that is set apart.

Something is taken that of uh uh my wife and I uh went to Boston years ago, and uh we went up there and we we spent, and this is gonna sound crazy to you, but we found a uh a tea pitcher that was made in 1865 in London and two little teacups, and we thought we would buy that in every anniversary. We would get that teapot and teacups out and drink some hot tea on our anniversary, and that would be something special for us. Now it’s hid back there in the kitchen, in the in the uh in the dish cabinet in there. Nobody knows it’s in there. Nobody knows us, it is very valuable to us, but it’s very special. Now, when I’m out in the garage working on the car, my wife doesn’t bring a little little teacup out there in the garage.

This is a very special, uh, very fragile, uh uh uh expensive piece, and so she’ll bring my my tea or coke or whatever to God’s out in an old rubber tupperware club, because I’m gonna knock it off the car and bounce it around. And so here’s something very special, very valuable, something consecrated, something dedicated, something special for service. We should be people who are set apart from the world and dedicated and consecrated to living to please God. That should be what’s on our mind all the time. God said, These are the people who will be my elect. People will be holy. And then he says that we need to have uh holy and beloved uh bows of mercy. And so the word beloved means who you set your love on.

And when he says that we’re to have uh beloved bows of mercy, this is just the idea of what’s inside. It’s the idea of the inner parts of a person, the core of a person. Have you ever gotten real upset about something? And something disturbs you. You know how your stomach, after a while, will get to bothering you? It’s your innards that bother you, you see. And here’s where the out of the core of a person, what should come out of our core, tender mercy should come out of us. I I I’ve said over and over how amazing it is to me to see how people do. When uh and I’ve had people tell me this at congregations, where somebody would make a mistake and and nobody had any compassion and had no mercy for them.

And so they said, you know, it’s amazing how that people, when you when you make a mistake, uh people your friends, but when you make a mistake or sin or do something, people have no mercy for you. I want you to know God has shown mercy to us. And what God wants for us to have inside of us is to have this compassion, this mercy that’s in our core, so that when somebody does something wrong, we can reach out and try to help them and try to lift them up and try to encourage them, not try to shoot them or kill them. Sometimes we have people that are weak and do sinful things, and we take a gun and we shoot and kill them. We should have bows of mercy.

2. Kindness, Humbleness of Mind, Meekness, Long Suffering

There should be tender compassion inside of us because God has had compassion for us. And then the writer tells us not only we need to have that kind of a heart, but he says this word kindness. And this word kindness, if you notice, has it the beginning of it, the word kin, and it’s just the idea of somebody would be gentle, somebody would show some family traits to people. I I like to tell about this word, my my, I may have already told this, I’m not certain what I’ll tell I’ll tell so much. But uh, my two boys went out one day, we’re playing baseball around the block, and so they came home and they were both crying and they were chewed up, and and uh Matt, the youngest one, uh, he was chewed up pretty bad.

And I said, Matt, what happened? He said, Dad, he said, a boy hit the ball and went over this fence, and I didn’t notice this big old bulldog in the doghouse, and I jumped over the fence to get the ball, and this bulldog came out and got a hold of me and got to chewing on me. And I said, Well, what’d you do? He said, I couldn’t do anything. I had to just stand there. And then I said, Well, Scott, how’d you get you to that? Scott said, Well, Dad, I jumped over the fence and grabbed hold of the bulldog’s collar and jerked him off of that, and then he got a hold of me, and I held him back until Matt got loose, and then I run and got over the fence, and I said, Well, Scott, why’d you go in there and do that?

He said, Dad, I had to do that. I said, son, why? He said, Dad, we’re kin, dad. We’re kin. You see, kindness, gentleness, uh, family traits ought to come out. We are God’s kinfolk. We’re kin to each other. It ought to come out, it ought to be a natural thing for us to show compassion and kindness and kindness and gentleness to each other. That’s what we should be. If we were that kind of a people, I wonder what other people would think about us. They might think these people must be the people of God. They must love each other because Jesus said, that’s the badge that makes people know you’re my people because you love each other. And then he says, humbleness of mind. That just simply means to have a uh a low opinion or uh not to think too highly of yourself, and just put yourself a little lower on the ladder and not think so highly of yourself.

I when I was a boy in the country, my cousin in Louisville would come to the country, and uh he always was telling me what he knew how to do everything. He was an expert on this and that. He was a big big city guy, and so uh one time he came down there, he said, Dad, I want to ride your horse. And I said, Well, you have royal. He said, Listen, I can ride like Roy Rogers and Gene Alter. You just you saddle him up, I’ll ride him out of here. And so I said, Well, now this horse is a little different. I said, if you let go of him, if you fall off of him and let go of him, he’ll run to the next county, we’ll be all night trying to get him.

So I said, Whatever happened, don’t you let go of him. He said, Okay. A lot of people saddled up on there, and I got hold of the girth. And this old horse is like most horses when you pull the girth up on him, he’d swell up. He’d he’d take all this area and see, so he couldn’t get the girth tight. Well, I pulled that girth up, and I just thought, well, this is my cousin, and he’s kind of high minded, so maybe I’ll just so I just let her go there. The horse let the air. Sh. Well, the saddle wasn’t real tight, so I got to go with the stirrup, see. And my cousin jumped up on there. He said, I said, Are you ready? So I’ll let her go.

So I let her go, and he kicked it in the side. He said, Get out of here. He took off across the field, and the sagebrush is in October, it was about that high. And he started sliding over on the side. That old saddle started moving. He just kept on riding. And he got down and he looked like a mole machine going down through there, tearing the sage brush down. And finally he let go of the horse and fell. He’d come back crying. He ran to the farmhouse and told my grandmother on me. And my grandmother said, What in the world were you thinking? Why did you do that? And I said, Well, Grandma, I said, That old boy is high-minded, and you always told me to stay low.

And I, and you know, I tell people I went in the military later and did some training, you had to crawl under live ar and they always said, if you want to stay alive, stay low. Well, I’m gonna tell you that’s the way to stay alive. And so anyway, I said, I I I said, You always told me to stay low, and I said, I was helping him stay low. And she said, Did I tell you that the Lord said, humble yourself? It’s not God didn’t assign you to humble somebody else. He said, It’s your job to get off your own high horse and let everybody get off their own horse. You can’t knock an old wall and help him. My cousin was just as proud as he was when he got under the head was before.

You see, you’ve got to get off your own high horse and humble yourself. And don’t think too so much, you won’t get your feelings hurt. We’re going to mishandle each other. We’re going to make mistakes with each other. Don’t think so much about yourself to think this is all about me. I’m the one here that’s important, and you better handle me right. You’re going to be mishandled here. We’re people making mistakes, trying to get along. So you see, in this body of God’s people, here’s what Christianity is all about. It’s people that are not high-minded. And then this term of the word meek or meekness of the word gentleness. And then again, that’s a term, and then most of us who grew up in the country, we we talked about animals out of way.

You’d have if you had a horse. And somebody said to him, one ride a horse, they said, Do you have a meek horse? Well, yeah. That means I’ve got a horse. Now it doesn’t mean the horse is weak. Nobody wants to ride a weak horse. He’ll fall down underneath of you. You want a horse that’s strong, but you want a horse that has all of its powers under control. And I tell my wife and I, we lived in Louisville, Kentucky when first got married, and we there was a bridle path in Louisville, Kentucky. It ran along Southern Parkway, and we could go over there and rent horses and ride up to the airquois park and then ride back. And so my wife, she hadn’t ever ridden horses before, so we know they ain’t got no horse.

And she got on this horse, and her horse would get off in people’s yard, group and eat their tulips and get around in the and so people can get that horse out. I said, honey. I said, just pull. I said, it won’t hurt his teeth. I said he’s used to it. I said, just easily pull. He’ll go wherever you want. I said, you take off and run fast. If you pull back, he’ll stop. And I said, just gently. And so I’d get over and I’d push and beat on him and get him back on the path. And she said, Oh, I’m going to hurt him and so. And so and she got her horse, she didn’t understand. The horse was gentle. It was meek. It was under control.

Bring yourself under control. Can you see that? Be a person that is meek. Not weak, but meek. When somebody bothers you, don’t blow up. Control yourself. Keep control of yourself. Keep rain on yourself. And then this word long suffering, and a lot of times Bible terms, if you’ll take them and cut them in half, take this word, cut the front part, put it the back, you found the definition. It means to suffer long. You know what that means? People are going to do things that just keep on bothering you. And I tell you, we’ve got a lot of one-mile Christians in our bunch, but very seldom do we ever find somebody that’s a two-miler. When somebody keeps bothering you, and you just keep putting up with it and keep trying to encourage them, here’s a person that is long suffering.

They can suffer a long time. They’re patient with other people, you see.

3. Forbear and Forgive One Another

And this is the ideal of enduring with somebody. And again, take the front part and put the end, and you find the definition. It means to bear for. Sometimes there are people that have things they can’t they’re they’re overloaded. And the weight’s killing them, and they need some help. And I love it where I am. I tell about a widow lady there in Madison who uh uh she was uh her husband had been gone for several years, and her roof got battered on her house, and uh I knew I talked to her, she only had 200, and so I told the men, I said, let’s get over at uh at uh uh well it’s been a long time ago. Uh light us, Gilbert Light’s house on Saturday morning early, and we’ll see what we need to do on the roof, and we’ll put a roof on her house for.

And they said, okay, so we I got over there. And we got over about 7 o’clock on Saturday morning and started taking some of the roofing off. She was there. The sheeting was bad underneath. And so I said, Fellas, we’re gonna have to have some money. She’s only got $200. And so I said, Everybody go home to your bank and see what you can do and come back in a little while, and then we’ll go get the sheeting and get the roofing, and we’ll put the roof on. And while we went to do that, and we came back, we ended up getting $1,800 in a few minutes. We went and got the material. And we got back to the church. A bunch of women and children had come.

And the women went in the house and started cooking food and doing things. The children got out in the yard. We were shoving the roof off. The children were picking the roof up and putting in the trailer. And so while that was going on, I noticed I didn’t see Lida anywhere. I said, Where in the world’s Lila? And somebody said, She’s in the living room, sitting in the rocking chair crying. I said, What in the world? Let me go talk to that woman. And I went and I said, Lida, what in the world is wrong with you? She said, She said, I’ve I’ve never been anywhere in a church. She said, I’ve never been loved so much by so many people. She said, How am I ever going to repay you?

I said, You’ve already paid us by being our sister. And she said, I just can’t get over this. She said, I’m going to try to get all my neighbors. They’re coming over and say, Where do you go to church? We want to know where you go. People like that. Got to be somebody to know. But you see, there’s a picture of what we ought to be as God’s people together. If we ought to get together, help each other, take care of each other. And when somebody needs something, usually nobody even knows about it. We ought to know well enough to know when somebody needs something. Somebody said, Well, I didn’t know that. Well, do you know the person? Do you ever go talk to them or go business or been in their house?

No wonder you don’t know. You don’t even know the person. We’ve got to see good people, but these are qualities that we ought to have as God’s people to forbear for one another. And then, he says, and forgive one another. And here’s the idea if anybody had quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And so here here’s the first of all the picture of forgiving, pardoning somebody. When somebody does something that when somebody sins against you, uh, do you have the ability to forgive somebody? Uh I I tell this story about we lived in a house when we moved to Madison. Uh, the the man that preached there before me, he was of a different persuasion than I was about some things.

And when I got there and started preaching, I realized that they were uh involved in things that I didn’t I couldn’t find in the Bible. And so I started uh preaching once a month on some of these issues. I told people, I said, I want you all to think about this, because I think we might be a little different. Some of us are different in the ranks here, and I am too. And so let’s just take the Bible and see what it says. And so for a year we did that with this this lady who her husband preached there. Uh she, of course, got upset at me pretty quick. And so we moved into her daughter, had a stroke, and so uh had a had a uh she uh was in a wheelchair, and so she moved in with a daughter, she had an empty house, so she rented her house to us, and while we moved in there, we weren’t in there long until a young couple had some trouble, and so they moved in there with us for us to help them because they couldn’t financially survive.

And and uh this and Gladys found out that we had them in there with us, and she said, Gary, she said, I’m gonna have to have uh double rent. I’ll have you got two families living in a house. I said, Well, Gladys, you know that I I you know what I’m getting paid. I can’t I can barely pay the $180 I’m paying you now. I’m barely getting that done. And she said, Well, uh, you’re gonna have to get out of the house by the end of the week. This was two days before Christmas. And so we packed our stuff up, and I talked to one of the members, had no house nobody lived in for 60 years. There was no plumbing, no electricity in it. And they said, You can go out there, and the man only said, If you’ll work on my farm and tend my farm for me, I’ll let you live in there for free.

You can do whatever you want to it, fix it up any way you want. And so we went out there, we moved our my family in there, we put a wood stove in there. I had to run electric court out to the city, electricity out there, and run out of the house to get electricity, and I even run a garden hose and got my wife a stand-up sink where she could wash dishes in the kitchen. And uh and we we started tearing all the old dry maw off, started working on the inside of it. And uh, after being in there for about six or eight, maybe nine months, uh, Gladys, I noticed she would come back to the back of the building when I’d be back there shaking everybody’s hand, I tried to get everybody to go out.

She’d come back to the back of the building and she’d get over toward the toward the bulletin board and she’d read uh stuff on the bulletin board and go right by me. See, and then she’d dart out the door. Well, I chased out the door after. And I said, Gladys, are you doing okay? I hadn’t talked to you. I want to see if you’re all right doing it. She said, Yeah, I’m doing okay. And so she went on. Well, that went on for about nine months. And then one night I went out of the building. I would, I should have told you, I would go there when summer came. I’d take my lawnmower and more grass. I wouldn’t even knock on the door, I’d just go back home.

And so I did that through the summer, and then uh that about the end of the summer, I came out of the building one night, and she was out there, everybody was gone, her car was out. She standing by her car, and she just kind of shivered like that and went up to her and tears running down her face. I said, Gladys, what in the world is wrong? And she said, Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you? I said, Do you want me to forgive you? She said, Yes. I said, It’s already done. But I said, I’m gonna tell you something. I want to scratch your eyes out. I said, What you did was terrible. But I said, it’s okay. You’re my sister, I love you.

And she hugged me, and I tell you what, I heard one of the other old ladies, older ladies was saying something bad about me one time, and somebody said they overheard glass saying, If you don’t quit talking bad about Gary, I’ll scratch your eyes out. But you see, we’ve got to forgive each other. That’s what we gotta do. You’re not going to be happy carrying a grudge. It’s going to kill you. If you do that, you’re letting somebody live rent-free in your own mind. It’s possessing you. It’s not helping you to hold a grudge. When somebody needs to be forgiven, forgive them, you see. And then notice what he says next. He says, if any uh have quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

And so here’s a picture of how should we go about forgiving each other. Now, if we go back to Romans 5 and verse 8, I’m not going to go there because there’s plenty on this page to talk about. But we can go back to that verse and see that really what the Bible tells us about forgiveness is when we were with our strength, when we were Christ’s enemy, Christ died for us while we were his enemy. That’s what he did when we didn’t. We didn’t do any. We didn’t ask him to forgive us when he died for us. He did that before we ever asked him for give for forgiveness. Before we ever were concerned, we sinned against him. We did wrong. He did that before we ever did anything right.

And so somebody says, Well, when somebody comes to me and says they’re sorry, then I’ll forgive them, but buddy, I’m going to carry my, I’m going to, I’m going to keep the ice handle up so I can get hold of something out so I can go to chopping on them again. I’m not going to forgive them till they come say they’re sorry. No. Have the disposition of mind to befriend people and to treat people right, even though they don’t treat you right. And it’s like I said about Gladys, sometimes the best thing to do when you’ve got a problem with somebody’s go mow their grass for a while. It’ll surprise you how good it’ll be for you. Go do something good for somebody else. And it’ll help you get over the things you’re struggling with.

4. Put On Charity, Let the Peace of God Rule

But then notice he says after that, in verse 14, and above all things, put on charity, which is the bond of the glue of perfection. I, you know, I’ve told this about when super glue first came out. My older son Scott, uh, my middle son Scott, uh, he chipped one of his teeth off. And uh I thought we didn’t have any ability to go to the dentist, we didn’t have money to do things like that. And so somebody told me they had some super glue that had come out, and maybe that could glue that tooth on. So I thought, well, I want to go get some of that stuff. So I went and got a tube of it. I didn’t read it. I I never I never have read instructions.

I’m one of them kind of people. And so I got that stuff, and I I let the glue, I really put it onto it, you know.

I said, come here, Scott. And he come over and I go down to that stand still, and I held that up there and I counted a 10. And when I let go, I thought, okay, but he walked away. And I still had his tooth. And I and then I tried to get loose of it, and I thought, well, I’ve done it now. I get my steaks, set back to the table, you know. I got that tooth. I had to cut my finger loose. And I then did some research on it and found out, you know what superglue does? When you put super glue on two surfaces, the molecules on those surfaces, it eats into them, and it’s like the surfaces that are flat, they start getting like hair like surfaces, and when they come together, those hair-like surfaces stick together, and you push it out, and the air goes out, and when you do that, it becomes stronger than the other parts of the material.

And I’m gonna tell you what we need to learn about what we’re doing is we should have superglue attitudes. If we will be so concerned and so well known of each other that we will become so glued together when something happens and we fall apart, we won’t break. Everything else will break, but we’re not gonna break. We are stuck together. We’re gonna stick together. We’re the kind of people that have this bond of perfection. And we’re not gonna break apart and fall apart. It’s crazy for church. Every time some issue, people just run off and blow in the wind. Why? Why didn’t we have the bond of perfection holding us together? And so then he says to us, after painting that picture of what we should do, uh, in verse 6, I’m sorry, in verse 15, he says, And let the peace of God uh rule in your hearts, to which also you’re called in one body, and be ye thankful.

You know, as the people of God, the peace of God’s rule in us. And you know what we should be in Matthew 5? The children of God are called peacemakers. And as much as life within you be at peace with all men, you know what we should be people who pursue peace and work about getting along with each other. Uh there was an old sister that uh had some trouble with her heart, and she went into the hospital and uh and they checked her out and decided they were going to take care of her, and so one of the old elders went to see her, and he was hard hearing, and so he went in and said, Well, sister, how are you doing? She said, I’m fine, they’re gonna fix me.

And he said, Well, what’s wrong with you? She said, they’re gonna put a pacemaker in me. He said, Oh, they figured out what was wrong with you. God bless them, they got you figured, you know. And so he went to church, thinking he understood what she said, and he got up and said, Sister so-and-so’s in the hospital, and they found out what’s wrong with her, and they they diagnosed her exactly right, they’re gonna put a peacemaker inside of her. But I tell you, some people need to have a peacemaker put in them. I mean, he they’re like one of these fellows in uh uh Charlie Brown, a guy walks on with a dark cloud, following him everywhere he goes. They do every time there’s a uh trouble, they’re right in there with it.

Uh, don’t you see, we should be people who are trying to get along? We we can make enough trouble without trying to cause it. You ever thought about how much trouble we have without trying to cause trouble? Let’s let’s be peacemakers. Let’s let’s get along with, let’s work and talk and behave in such a way to get along with each other. This is what a Christian is. This is what God’s people ought to be doing. And notice he says, after saying that we are to uh let the peace of God to rule our empire in your hearts, to which also you’re called into one body. Now notice God is called, God didn’t make two or three different bodies. He didn’t make a Jewish church and a Gentile church and uh a Syntian church and uh some other kind of church.

And you think about it in the first century, you see all the problems with all the people from different backgrounds, from different areas. People had trouble getting along. But you know what they did? The Lord didn’t make two churches. He taught them how to get along. And I tell you what will help us y’all. The power that’s in the blood of Christ will cause us to want to get along with each other if we love the Lord. He’s purchased us and caused us to become a part of this body, and we ought to be thankful that he only made, I’m glad to know. When I first started reading the Bible and going around, I went to different churches, I went to seven member churches, and I noticed every one of them was teaching something different, and I was just about to think there’s not there’s nothing to any of it.

I think there’s no such thing as there being any kind of true certain kind of. I was listening to the Bible over and over, and I could see people doing things that you couldn’t find. I’d ask them, where’s that in the Bible? I said, Well, it’s not in the Bible. I thought, well, why are you doing that? I didn’t know anything about Bible authority. But I thought, well, if it’s in the Bible, I’m gonna do what the Bible says. And so what we need to see here, here’s a picture of people who, when they understand what we’re doing together, we should thank God that there’s just one body. And we need to find what that is, and be a part of it and strengthen it and help it and be a pillar and uh and a ground under the truth, as the church is supposed to be.

5. Let the Word of Christ Dwell in You Richly

And then he says to us in verse 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace and your hearts to the Lord. And notice here’s one of the commands that we see that teach us how God wants us to sing. Now, if God wants us to play an instrument, God could have been, he said, I want you to sing and strung the saw the saw tree and play the trumpet. He did it in the Old Testament. It wasn’t he probably God. God made it very clear that’s what he wanted. But now when we come to this new testament, we said the Old Testament is dedicated with animals’ blood.

Instrumental music was dedicated with animals’ blood. But in the New Testament, the new testament, every word in the New Testament, the Old Testament, every word was dripping with animal’s blood. In the New Testament, in Hebrews 9, Jesus’ blood dedicated this New Testament. It’s consecrated by the blood of Jesus. Every word, every word in this book is a red-letter word. It’s the words of Christ. And so when we read these verses like that, it’s our attitude toward Christ. It affects whether we believe it or not. We want to change it or not. And so he’s saying, notice what he tells us here in this verse. First of all, let the word of Christ be on you richly. That’s an appeal for us to study your Bible, know your Bible, and let it do that in all wisdom, have the insight to see what it means.

And then he says, teaching and monishing one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. And this is just the idea of when you this word psalm is the word solo in the Old Testament. It’s the word uh solemn, the old testament. Well, when when David would pull a bowl string, uh David sold a bowstring. He pulled, but you see, solo means to pluck or to pull. And so, unless they said he plucked a bowl string, you wouldn’t know what he plucked. And Nehemiah, he plucked out people’s beards when he came back and saw what they were doing. He got a hold of their beard and plucked their beards out. And so here’s a picture in the New Testament. Now, notice in the New Testament we’re told to sing and we’re to make melody soul, we’re to strum our heart.

And I’ve already mentioned every act of worship in the New Testament involves the heart. When you pray, Romans 10 and verse 1. Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer, preachers that they might be saved. Matthew 15 and verse 9. Those people who teach for doctrine the commandments of men, they arm with their lips, and but their heart is far from me, for in vain do they worship me teaching for doctrine. So you see, teaching, you must examine your heart. If you look at your heart and look at what God said, your heart is far from God. If you add anything or leave anything off, you might say, Well, I don’t like what they’re I don’t care what you like or don’t like. This is what we can read.

6. Do All in the Name of the Lord Jesus

Now, if we’re reading it wrong, you help us see that. We won’t do what God said. But here’s the here’s the what the Bible tells us about how God wants us to sing. We’re to solve, we’re to the that we may have this grace in our heart to the Lord, you see. And then finally in verse 17, he says, and whatsoever ye do, do it uh in word or deed. That’s in everything you do. What else do you do besides word and deed? Did anybody do anything else other than that? Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father by him. And so I want to say to you that what that shows is everything we do, I’ve already mentioned to do in the name of, it means by all that Jesus is about, all that Jesus said, everything I do, everything I think, I better first of all look up to this high standard and see what it says and climb up to what it says.

I don’t want to bring it down and put what I think up above it. I’ve got to whether whatever I say, whatever I do, every bit of it has to be sure. First of all, I put my finger on a book, on a chapter, and on a verse. And I tell you, that will you will find out if you do that in life that it will be a difficult task for you. Holding on to the truth and staying with it is a is a is a big challenge. Some people let go, they don’t give up. They don’t like it sometimes. It it it it speaks against them. They don’t like that. And I I I read this this is a true story, believe it or not.

You probably don’t hear that and find the fellow’s name that did it, but uh it’s an insurance report of a man who uh was uh remodeling an upstair uh apartment on his uh house, and so he went up there, he had a deck out there, and he put a big barrel up there on that deck, and he took a rope and took a pulley and put a beam up there and ran the rope down to the bottom and tied on that barrel and went down the ground and he tied that rope on a tree down below. He went upstairs, he started telling all the drywall and things out, and he started loading that barrel up. He got the barrel filled up, he shoved it off the deck that was hanging by the rope.

He went downstairs, and he thought I’ll just he had a slip knot tied in the rope. He said, I’ll get a hold of this rope and I’ll jerk this knot loose and I’ll hang on to it, and I’ll just lower that barrel down. Well, he didn’t calculate that he weighed 170 pounds, and the barrel weighed about 250 pounds. So when he pulled a slip knot, see, it jerked him up. When he went up into the air, and the barrel started coming down, we hit the barrel on the way up and hit his shoulder and broke his shoulder. He went up the top of the uh where the where the rope was in the pulley and jammed his hand in that pulley, the barrel went to the ground at the bottom and busted out of the barrel.

Now the barrel weighs 17 pounds. The barrel starts coming back up, and he comes up and the barrel hits his leg and went up, broke his leg, he went down to the bottom, hit the ground. He was sitting there holding this rope, the barrel over, and he thought, why in the world did I hold on to that rope? And so he let go of it. And the barrel hit him on the head. Well, here’s the point. Why hold on to something when it beat you half to death doing it? Why hang on to the truth? When it seems so arduous and so hard, so challenging, and so many people have no concern for it at all. Why hold on to it? My friend, because it’s worth holding on to.

Conclusion

It’s going to hurt you. It’ll whittle on you. It’s like looking in the mirror. You won’t want to see yourself sometimes. But if you make up your mind, I am going to hold on. I’m going to do what the Lord said. Even if it kills me. And sometimes you think that’s without what’ll happen. But if you’re here tonight and you need to obey the gospel, can you see why you ought to come with a confession on your lips that Jesus the Christ? Why you ought to come with a desire and have a repentant heart to change your will and say, I’m going to do what God said. I don’t know what God said, but I’m going to do it. And then to be baptized so your sins can be washed away.

You can do that tonight while we stand and sing. Why don’t you come?

Jesus.