Alive & Not Guilty

I don’t think I’ve truly ever worn this lapel before, so pray for me if my non-projecting voice is carried through this lapel out there, and hopefully, you can hear. But hopefully, whatever double portion that Pastor Sanil’s mic infers on me, hopefully, I get that too this evening as I preach. Alright, what an opportunity that we’ve had this whole summer to go through the book of Colossians. Colossians equals Christ. Can you say that with me? Colossians equals Christ. 

So, if you ever go through, if you’re ever skimming through your New Testament and you come across Colossians, you’ll remember that the C in Colossians equals Christ. Christ, it’s all about Christ. That’s why the title of the series is Complete in Christ. It’s literally from end to end of Colossians, all about Christ. So, hopefully, if you come out with nothing else from this entire series, at least you’ll know that the book of Colossians is about Christ. But hopefully, you’ve come out with a lot more than just that.

I have the opportunity of covering 2:13-14, but I wanted to go over quickly just what we’ve covered so far. From the beginning of June, we’ve been talking about the Supremacy of the Son in Creation, Supremacy in the Church and Resurrection, Supremacy in Incarnation and Redemption, Reconciliation and Hope in the Gospel, Suffering for His Glory, Maturity in Christ, the fact that we’re fixed on Christ and rooted in Christ and His word. And last week, we heard from Anjo about the fullness that we have in Christ. And so, this is just the second-to-last message in this series; next week, Noel will end us off in what will be cictory, having victory in Christ. So you can see kind of this climax as we end off in what is the Christology, or the high Christology that we’ve learned, as it relates to Christ. 

So, we’re going to read Colossians 2:13-14. I think I have it up there. Let’s let’s look on and read: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.” Amen.

Quick poll: anyone think back to the year or the age that you were when you got saved. Anyone get saved after the age of 30? I’m starting real low here. After the age of 20? Okay, after the age of 18? 17? 16? 15? 14? 13? Anyone? So no one was saved after the age of 13. Age 13, that was just a few years ago. Okay, okay, somewhere between your mid-teens. Okay after the age of 12? 11? A couple of people, a few people. Uh, 10? I was saved at age 10. Nine? Okay, so you’re telling me that most of you got saved before the age of nine. Okay, eight, wow, we have a few eights. Seven? Six? Jacob, you’re saved. You are. Hey, if you’re saved, you’re saved, age five, that’s just three years older than Levi.

Okay, okay, so, for the point of this exercise, and I had a feeling we were going to get very low in our numbers, is, for the most part we, the majority of us were saved in our single digits. When we were very, very, very young. And praise God for that. Praise God that I think most of us, for the most of our lives, or maybe our entire life, we grew up in a Christian household and were exposed to the truth of the Gospel from a really young age. And I’m not denying that anyone was saved when they were saved, but we were all saved at a very, very young age. And that’s not the case for, say, even First Baptist Rowlett.

You’re going to take a poll like this, and you’re going to find that people were saved in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, even… and so, I feel like, in the history of the church, we are kind of an anomaly. The fact that we were born into this sweeping movement of Pentecostalism in the early 1900s and that our parents, and grandparents, perhaps even just a few years ago, our parents were called by God, called into this family of faith. In that, we were able to, from a very young age, hear about the truth of the gospel and accepted that gospel.

I fear though, and you might get a sense of where I’m getting at. I fear that having been saved at such a young age, we weren’t really exposed to the world that much. Like, none of y’all at age nine were in your deepest, lowest moment of your life after a failed marriage and after, you know, blowing all of your money on some investment that didn’t work out, and sitting in your agony and sitting in your despair, you found the Lord at age nine—probably not. He probably went to VBS or maybe you had a family prayer at home, or maybe you had an uncle tell you about the gospel, and you became saved.

But there’s something, if you go through the New Testament, you find those stories of the joy and the response that people have when they’re saved or when they find the Lord. If you think back to the eunuch that was saved on his way. He was reading the book of Isaiah, and Philip caught him and explained the book of Isaiah, and he heard the gospel and immediately he wanted to get baptized. And then Philip is taken away by the Lord somewhere, but that’s the response that the eunuch had to hearing the gospel. Mind you, there was no written gospel at the time; it was just Word of Mouth, just from hearing about Isaiah being explained.

How about the demoniac in the garrisons? The guy who’s healed from all the demons. His first response after being delivered by Jesus was, “Jesus, I want to follow you.” Or how about the Philippian Jailer, right? He hears the gospel; he hears Paul and Silas singing, and he hears the gospel, and the rest of his family is saved right from the get-go.

And so, you see these very dramatic responses to hearing the gospel, and entire lives being changed. Think about the Apostle Paul, right? He hears the gospel through some crazy events, and he ends up being the greatest missionary ever known to man.

And so, perhaps, if there’s a downside—I’m not saying there is—but if there’s a downside to being saved so young, at such a young age and being exposed to the gospel message from literally age zero, is that we might get a little numb to it. And when we get a little numb to it, the gospel presentation that we just read, Colossians 2:13-14, might, I’m not saying it has, but it has the potential of just being another presentation of the gospel, and it doesn’t elicit that elation, in that exuberance, and that joy—joy of Salvation anymore.

So first, let’s talk about what it means to be dead because if we don’t know what it means to be dead, we don’t know what we’re safe from. And if we don’t know what we’re safe from, why should we have joy? Why would being alive in Christ mean anything to us if we don’t know what we were dead from in the beginning, in the first place?

So to understand the deadness of the state that we were in, first, we go back to the beginning. So if you have your bibles, if you could turn back to Genesis chapter 3. So we know this narrative; everything, you know, we’re very familiar, maybe too familiar with this narrative.

But again, Genesis 3:6-7, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for them.”

The fruit is taken, and immediately they notice their nakedness. There’s an immediate introduction of shame at the introduction of sin. Shame, in this place where there’s no shame, no sin, no guilt whatsoever, living in complete freedom and complete liberation with God in the garden, there is this immediate introduction of guilt.

In Genesis 3:8, “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”

After the shame comes this intense guilt; they have to hide from the Lord, they have to hide from God whom they had been in perfect communion with all of this time upon taking the fruit and sinning for the first time.After the shame comes the guilt and the estrangement that comes from the guilt and the shame, being estranged from God who you’d walked with in the cool of the garden every single day.

In Genesis 3:12-13, “The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ And the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’”

So, from guilt and shame comes this depravity. Adam is immediately, for whatever reason, sin nature, is forced to blame it on the woman, and the woman is forced to blame it on the serpent. The relational goodness and the relational stability that had existed in the garden before sin was gone in an instant.

Lastly, jumping to Genesis 3:19, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

God forever proclaims for the human race that there will be death as a judgment for sin. So we see this timeline, this flow of events; sin enters the world, there’s guilt, there’s shame, there’s estrangement from God who they had perfect communion with, there’s depravity—a relational depravity that develops between man to man, man to woman, God to man. And as we read in Colossians 2:13, death enters the world, physical death enters the world. If you just plant here for a second, and we have the foresight of knowing the rest of Scripture, right? We know that Jesus comes; he saves everyone, those who believe in him. He saves everyone. Jesus comes again as a Victor, and praise the Lord, Amen, right, for that?

But if you have to, you have to sit here and mourn for a little bit, right? You had a perfect relationship, perfect vertical and horizontal relationship that happens from the beginning in the garden, and it all goes away.mAnd you think about your own life, when you’ve been hurt yourself, or when someone in your family’s gotten sick, or right now, this moment, someone’ contemplating suicide, there’s suffering of chronic loneliness in a nursing home somewhere, thers’s the disasters that happened in Moracco and Libya. Everything started because of what happened in the Garden – death on death on death on death on despair on loneliness on depression on anxiety – everything emanates from the Garden. 

If we understand the depravity that we were in, the depravity that has existed from the beginning, from the Garden, the utter sadness, the anxiety, the loneliness, the despair, and the hopelessness that comes from this one instance, if we don’t understand that, then seeing Colossians 2:13 and where it mentions death—it just doesn’t hit home for us until we see the timeline of events and how it personally affects us. If we don’t understand the depravity that we were once in, we cannot possibly understand the life now that we have in Christ.

Going back to Colossians, we see in 2:13, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature…” So, you were dead because you were in sin and because you were in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature—two things: sin plus uncircumcision equals death. Uncircumcision has been explained extensively in Colossians because it’s come up again and again. Even last week, we heard about what it means to have an uncircumcision of the heart—being alienated from God, being alienated from having an identity with God.

Sin, in that sin nature that’s been passed on to us from Adam, from parent to parent to parent, all the way down to us—that sin that’s within us and our propensity to sin—all of those things equal death. It’s not just physical death; it’s death in every possible plane, dimension, segmented society, every aspect of our lives, from beginning to end, every aspect of it is death—death on death on death.

I just highlighted the extent of our deadness that I got from one of my books in school. We were dead to every extent, in every possible way. We were dead volitionally; our will was dead. If someone can read 2 Peter 2:19 for me real quick. Thank you. We’re mastered by sin. We are slaves of depravity. Our own will, we are so proud that we have the freedom of will, but we actually don’t. Our will is mastered by sin. We have the will to sin; we don’t have the freedom not to sin.

So, our own volition is affected by sin. Our emotions are affected by sin, and we’re enslaved by all sorts of passions and pleasures. Our affections are disordered and unruly, living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. Emotionally, we are dead. Relationally, as I just talked about in the garden, we are dead.

Can someone read Colossians 1:21? “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.” So, our sin nature and our deadness extend even to our relationship with God. We were enemies of God in our minds because of our evil behavior. Lastly, intellectually, we think we’re smart, but intellectually, we’re just as dead as a corpse. We know nothing of the spiritual world.

Harvard and MIT, and UNT where I came from, it’s filled with intellectuals—UNT mostly with musical intellectuals—but intellectually, they might say that they’re the highest order of intellectualism, but they’re dead. They are as dead as anything can be in spiritual things, and they don’t understand it. They believe that they’re the highest order of humanity at these places, but they’re darkened in their understanding.

We were dead in every possible way. Have I impressed on you how dead we are? We’re dead when we’re born, and we’re dead if we don’t accept Christ until the very end, no matter how smart we are, no matter what we accomplish, no matter how many friends or followers we have. No matter how intellectually and emotionally advanced we are, we are dead.

When we share the gospel with someone and we’re immediately met with rejection, it’s not necessarily because of what we said or our lack of eloquence. It’s because they’re coming from a point of deadness. They’re spiritually dead. Any truth that we have to tell them, any spiritual enlightenment that we’re drawing from the gospel that we’re telling them, they don’t have the ability to even comprehend that because they are dead in every possible way. It’s not you; it’s them. They’re dead, and until the Holy Spirit quickens their heart to understand the gospel, they will continue to be dead. And what you tell them won’t make any sense to them – their minds are darkened.

We see a lot of seemingly put-together people on social media. We see people who can cook, sing, travel, draw really well, people who seemingly have everything put together, but sometimes it all unravels. There’s a show called “That ’70s Show” from the ’90s or 2000s. There’s this guy who was kind of the star at it. It was a very popular show, and he was recently accused of rape and found guilty. His life fell apart. More importantly, he was a part of the Church of Scientology, and in being a part of the Church of Scientology, you’re kind of saying that you don’t really need God; that all you need is self, and if self is realized, then you can live your best self. There are a lot of celebrities who are part of the Church of Scientology, created in the 60s. But over the years, we found that there is so much scandal, so much utter corruption in the Church of Scientology that people are running away from all over the place. So, just because someone has it together seemingly without the gospel, without Christianity, without church, without the Bible, without the gospel, seemingly, just because they might have it put together, that doesn’t mean they’re not dead. That means they know how to put a good front on, they know how to make a good following putting certain pictures and videos together, but there is an immense amount of deadness, and for that, we should grieve, we should be sad, and that should propel us to share even more the gospel. That is the deadness that we’re coming from.

So, moving on, the rest of the chapter, verses 13, “God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us, that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.” To get us out of our deadness, what had to happen? We had to be made alive. How are we made alive? One, he had to forgive us all of our sins. There had to be a cancellation of the written code, with its regulations, that was against us. Piper probably puts it better than most: Essentially, the written code is a list of all of our sins and the law that said that those sins warrant death; the wages of sin is death. The law mandates that if you break God’s law, you must die.

So, if you were to pull out a big roll of butcher paper and you wrote out every single sin that you had and you coupled it with the law, that code is what’s standing against you. But God, in his holiness and his justice, couldn’t just tear apart the paper and say, “All right, you’re good, we’re all okay here” because that would violate his own holiness, his own sense of justice, which is perfect. It would violate it because he can’t just say, “All right, we’re all good,” as if it’s just a piece of paper that you just tear apart. There had to be a propitiation for the sin; there had to be atonement for the sin, otherwise he wouldn’t be just, and he wouldn’t be holy. Its all one package here – If he’s not just and holy, he cannot truly be love; if he’s not truly love, he cannot be good. So, there had to be something or someone that appeased that wrath that we deserved. Like Piper says, Jesus’ hand was on the cross, there was a nail that went through it. In between the nail and the hand was this written code, this long list, longer from here to, you know, probably spanning 30 miles’ worth of sins and indiscretions and transgressions—everything that we’ve ever committed, everything is on this written code, and it’s nailed to the cross in the most cutting, sharpest way that Paul can say it’s nailed to the cross. Every legal requirement that was required to cancel your sin, to cancel the wrath, to take it away from you, everything had been met. We see this imagery of it being nailed to the cross, and because it’s nailed to the cross, you are forgiven, and because you’re forgiven, you’re raised to new life with Christ. Praise God for that, that we are alive with Christ because of the forgiveness that we have because our sin was nailed to the cross.

I wish I can go to verse 15, but I can’t. I’m restricted to end at verse 14 because we have one more week to go to cover verse 15. I wanted to, because again, I’m preaching to the choir here; this is the gospel presentation has been made several times to you, I wanted to give you more of an illustration, more facets to what it means to be alive in Christ, and to be alive in Christ means that your sin had to be forgiven, and for the sin to be forgiven, God had to do the forgiving.

Last year, at a family conference which I helped coordinate, we had a guest speaker named Sam Storms. Sam Storms is a very cool guy, very cool in that he’s very Pentecostal in his teaching and his practice, and very smart as well. He’s a theologian as well, which the two sometimes don’t go hand in hand; you usually have a lot of one but not a lot of the other. But Sam Storms is a good blend of both and someone that I think a lot of us can look up to. He wrote a book called “A Dozen Things God Did With Your Sin (And Three Things He’ll Never Do)”. This is written by Sam Storms, and he spoke at the conference last year. It’s a great privilege to get to meet him. But this is a book that he wrote that I encourage all of you to read. It’s a pretty easy read. But I wanted to go through those 12 things with you very quickly and kind of give you the SparkNotes version of this book.

So, imagine we’re looking at a clock, and everything I just said is the clock, the face of the clock. These 12 things are the cog wheels and the inner working mechanism behind the clock. This had to happen for you to be saved, for your sin to be forgiven, for you to be alive in Christ. These things had to happen:

1. He had to lay your sin upon his son. Isaiah 53:6 says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” I know we’ve heard these verses, but I’m just tying them all together in this one package that allows for the forgiveness that it takes for us to be alive in Christ. Jesus voluntarily offered himself to be our substitute, to die in our place on the cross, to suffer the judgment that we deserved. He laid our sin upon his son.
2. He forgave your sin. Psalm 32:1-5 says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven… I acknowledge my sin to you. I will confess my transgressions to the Lord; and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” It seems elementary, but God had to forgive our sins.
3. He cleansed our sin, he washed it. We sing songs about our sins being washed because that’s how dirty it is – that’s how icky and scumfilled and really hard to get away it is. “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,” references in Isaiah and Psalms. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
4. He covered your sin. Psalm 85:2 says, “He covered all of their sin.” Almost as if he covered Adam and Eve with the skin of the lamb. A lamb had to die, he covered the nakedness, the shame, and the guilt. He covered it in the garden and he covers it now. He covers our sin. That had to be a requirement in order for our sin to be forgiven. Its simple – He just covers it, out of sight, out of mind, he puts a big sheet over it so that you can never see it again.
5. He cast your sin behind his back. Hezekiah put it this way, “Behold, it was for my welfare that I bore bitterness; but in your love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction; for you have cast all my sins behind your back.” God doesn’t have a physical back, but it’s an illustration here. It says God has taken all of our sin and throws it behind Him, never to see it again, never to be influenced by it again, never again for it to take consideration when He deals with us or hears our prayers. It isn’t considered by Him, why is it considered by us?
6. He removed it as far as the East is from the West. Every time I read this, there’s something in my heart that goes whoosh. It’s not just from one end of the Earth to the other, it’s from one end of the universe to the other. Every time I read this there’s something in my heart that goes whoosh because it is so profound and in my mind I always thought wow Los Angeles to New York that’s such a long distance east to west keep going it’s not Los Angeles to New York it’s not Los Angeles to New Zealand not going this way not the other way it’s further it’s not from end to end of the globe it’s from end to end of the universe. If you go 500 miles per hour, which we routinely don’t go that fast, but if you did and you tried to go from Earth to the furthest place ever found by a telescope, the Hubble, if you go that distance going 500 miles an hour non-stop 24 hours a day, it would take you 20 quadrillion years to get to the furthest end of the universe that humans have been able to find on a telescope. So imagine the actual end of the universe, it just points to the infinite level to which God has removed your sin and mine away from him, away from us, the remembrance of that sin, the memory of that sin. That’s how far East is from the West, it’s not it’s not earth Geographic East and West, it’s literally east to west expanse of the universe, known universe that we even know about.
7. He passes over our sin and there’s this beautiful verse in Micah I never knew existed, who maybe some of you have read this more than once. Let me read it here, I think I have, yeah, in the next slide I have it, “Who is a God Like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over a transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot; you will cast all of our sins into the depths of the sea.” Three things here that I’ve bolded, he passes over the transgression, he passes over the doorstep because it had the blood of the Lamb on it, right? He passes over our transgression.
8. He treads our iniquities underfooted, it connotes an authority or dominance, he treads, he stomps on it. 
9. And he casts it into the depths of the sea, farther than anything can possibly go to come to to catch it. You understand the no pun intended but the depths of what is trying to what is trying to be conveyed here in Scripture. It’s the problem isn’t that God is going to somehow without you knowing it go the expanse of the ocean or the expanse of the universe and find that once in it you will I will will think back to a sin that we committed a long time ago and we’ll keep that from enjoying full fellowship with God, fellowship with fellow believers because of the sin that keeps haunting us but that’s how far our sin is removed from us. This submarine tries to go to the Titanic and is very unsuccessful unfortunately and that’s just hundreds of meters deep. Our sin is even deeper and nothing can get back to it, it’s trampled, it’s in the sea, it’s cast down there, you cannot get to it, God certainly won’t.
10. He blots out our sin in the book of Isaiah, we’ve read those verses many times.
11. He turns his face away from our sin, “hide your face for my sins and blot out all my iniquities” Psalm 51:9.
12. And lastly, he has forgotten our sin, as if he didn’t get the point already, he has forgotten our sin, he quite simply refuses to remember it, “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins; for I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more” Hebrews 8:12.

You know what’s just to add another level of awesomeness here: God is omniscient, he knows everything, he can’t forget anything and yet he allows in his omniscience to forget your sin. He seemingly violates his own knowledge of everything, infinite knowledge, and he chooses to forget your sin. That’s the extent to which we’ve been made alive, in God’s goodness, his faithfulness, his ability, his willingness to forget our own sin. All of these things make us alive but it begs the question in the familiarity which sometimes breeds contempt and that happens potentially possibly when we’ve been in church our whole lives, when we’re constantly bombarded by the truth and the goodness of of God in his gospel, when that happens do we continue having the joy of salvation in our in our lives anymore?

My time is over but as a way to get a little more time I’m gonna start a time of prayer but before we pray I want everyone to you can close your eyes, you can keep them open, we’re going to go through Psalm 51, very very familiar psalm, and we’re going to focus, we’re going to read the whole thing, you can read it with me, you can choose not to but we’re going to go through the whole thing and we’re going to focus on verses 12. I can put that up, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin; for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me; yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb, you taught me wisdom in that secret place. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face for my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God; renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, God, you who are God my savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken Spirit; a broken and contrite heart, you God, will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem; then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar.”

If you go back to verse 12, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing Spirit to sustain me.” Let’s spend just a moment here, eyes closed, thinking and reflecting on what we’ve just heard but also specifically on this verse. We’re all lifers, as we’ve kind of established, a lot of us have been in the faith our entire lives, we’ve been exposed to, we’ve been in and encapsulated by the goodness and the mercies of God our entire lives, we’ve experienced the joys and the satisfaction and the fullness that comes and knowing Christ and making him known but in having this exposure our whole lives, and for God willing many decades to come, I fear that we will fall into this joylessness and into this period, possibly even seasons of not feeling it anymore, just being blah about our faith, being blah about everything Bible, anything salvation, anything gospel. And it’s in times like these that we need to cry out like the psalmist does after a terrible affair, after going on a murderous rampage to hide the affair, after being confronted by Nathan the prophet. It took being confronted by a prophet for him to come before the Lord in contrition, in grief, and sadness, and he prays this prayer. And this is a prayer that I think all of us should be praying: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.”

Guys, you could be a six, you could be 16, you know at the peaking the hill at 40 or on your way down, but this is a prayer that all of us need to be praying from time to time, maybe even today, because some of us are going through just really, really tough times. Not because there’s anything wrong, but because the joy of life is drowning out the joy of salvation. And that’s a crazy thought, right? Everything around you may be going perfectly right, joy on joy on joy. You’re getting into things, you’re getting your jobs, you’re getting your, you know, you’re getting really far in life, you’re getting good grades, and praise God for that. You may not be, but if you are, then praise God for that, and your life is just surrounded by joy on joy on joy, but the joys of that are drowning out the joy of Salvation. And because of that, we’re becoming numb to the goodness of God, to life-saving gospel. And in Colossians 2:13-14, the life now that we have in Christ, are we becoming numb to that? Are we becoming numb to the victory that we have in Christ? And that manifests in these couple ways: we don’t share the gospel anymore, our prayer life is suffering, our relationships with fellow believers is suffering, our walk with the Lord is no longer as robust and as joy-filled as it once was, maybe it never was. Are we asking the Holy Spirit for a willing spirit to sustain us in this walk by God’s grace? It started at age 6, 10, 11, 12, 13. Are we asking God on a daily basis to restore the joy of salvation? Are we asking God to give us the wonder again about being covered in the blood of Christ?

Let that be our prayer this evening as we reflect on the blood of Christ. Lord, we thank you for this precious time that you gave us simply to go over scripture. It’s nothing groundbreaking here, other than tying various passages together, your holy written word, and seeing how it reflects and how it relates to where we are in our lives. All people who have been exposed to the gospel time and time again, who are living perhaps victorious Christian lives in some cases, and others that are really suffering right now, other walks that are suffering. God, we pray, and we echo the cry of the psalmist to restore in us the joy of Salvation, oh God. Fill us with that Wonder, not just from camp to camp or Sunday to Sunday, but every waking moment that we have. That everything that we experience, in our drive to work, in our walk to school, in our interactions with everyone around us, that everything is with the lens of the Holy Spirit, covered in the blood of the Lamb, knowing who we are, that we were once dead, and now we are raised to New Life In Christ. God, fill us with your spirit again, fill us with an overflowing of that Spirit again. God, each and every day, Lord, we pray that you would remind us of what we once were, that we were revolutionary, intellectually, behaviorally, relationally dead in every possible way, in what we’ve been saved from, oh God. And lastly, let the young start that we had, this early start that we had in the Christian walk, let that be to our advantage and not to our disadvantage, O Lord. let instead of it being our 40s and 50s, God let our 20s and 30s be spent in our prayer rooms, enjoying the fullness of Christ, enjoying the excellencies of Christ, in the darkness of our rooms, in the quietness of our homes, O Lord. Let it start in our young age, O Lord, so that in the future, in the coming years, the Lord, that the potential, Lord, that we have to expand your kingdom, O Lord, to be a light to the world, O Lord, will be truly limitless. The Lord God, we pray, O Lord, that in seasons of dullness, of mediocrity in our Christian walk, O Lord, that there would be a restoration, that there would be a fullness of joy once again, that our understanding of our Salvation, O Lord, would never be superficial, ever, ever in her life, O God. Fill us with your Spirit, O Lord. It’s many years to go, if your will allows, O Lord. God, let it not falter, let it not stumble, Lord, not right now. God, give us strength to keep going, O Lord. Help us to understand what we have in you. Ask all these things in your mighty person.