STAYING THE COURSE: BROKEN GAUGES

We start our study this week on Colossians: One Jesus, One People.  You will find the video’s on our website at sjpcjax.org and you can get a book at the church, either outside the church office or in the narthex of the sanctuary.  This week in our sermon series based on this study, Staying the Course, the sermon is Broken Gauges.  It is hard for us to stay on course in our lives, even with our access to scripture apps and sermon videos.  With all of our access to everything, it looks like it would be easier than ever to hear the Word of God in our hearts and lives.  If anything, it is becoming increasingly difficult because each day our lives are filled with so much noise, and uncertainty.   Instead of feeling as if we are headed in the right direction, we feel as if we have hit dead end after dead end, always trying to find our way out of the frustration and despair.  The people in the Colossian church struggled in the same way that we do today.  They had the noise of all the voices saying Jesus Christ was not the only way to God or that the Roman and Greek gods were better.  The problem with humanity is that all of our directional gauges are broken and they will not take us to the place God wants us to be!  Sin always leads us the wrong direction. This week our scripture is Colossians 2:6-15.  The Apostle Paul tells them that Jesus will lead them and help them to find an abundant life.  It not only a possibility but it a certainty if we are willing to believe.  In these verses he reassures the Colossians and every believer that they do not need to worry because God will lead us to him and hold us close!  Our gauges may be broken but God in Jesus Christ has given us a great beacon of hope and joy!  These words help us to redirect our hearts towards our Lord and Savior!  It is our prayer that you will sense the eternal, living God holding and encouraging you as you read Colossians 2:6-15:

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, ⁷ rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. ⁸ See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. ⁹ For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, ¹⁰ and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. ¹¹ In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, ¹² having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³ 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, ¹⁴ 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. ¹⁵ And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.  (NIV)