Teaching & Songs for the Body of Christ - Colossians 3:16

Well, good morning. I know this is not the face that you were expecting to see up here this morning, or at least for most of you. If it makes anybody feel better, here's a picture of a moose. That's a little tie-in with my dad, who likes to use moosen for Mysterion. So there you go. So we've got a gap between Luke, in the book of Acts.

And so I asked my dad if he would talk with the elders and get permission for me to talk about music in the church. Okay, the songs of the body of Christ, as it says there on the heading. The problem is that I am not an elder, right? So the elders got to make sure that That's okay, because what would happen if I got up here and I said ridiculous things, right? But why I'm here is to talk about Colossians 3, verse 16, and I'm going to tell you why through a personal story, why we're going to go into the text of the Scripture, okay?

So, the first thing is that Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my family singing. So that's my grandma and grandpa and my dad, and I couldn't find one with my mom also in the picture, so there's my mom superimposed. And some of my earliest childhood memories were of my dad pushing me on a swing and singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Swing, Loat, Sweet Chariot and other songs. So, Swing Low Sweet Cherry was good because it was a swing song, right? So that's what was going on there. So I blame my parents for instilling at an early age for me to have a love of music.

We would go to church on Sunday mornings and there was a hymnal and I couldn't read it. I think the number one reason I actually wanted to read was so that I could sing with the congregation. And some of you may have noticed that on Sundays when I lead that actually the kids come up here. And part of that is rooted in the fact that for me, having that participation in the body was really important.

It made me hungry at a very early age. And so I'm forcing that on your children. So after that, at about 12 years old, I asked my dad, Dad, teach me how to play the guitar. And he taught me two chords and then I got a chord book and I went up in my room and I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced. I went to youth group and I told the youth group leader, Mike, I'm ready to help lead worship. Let me play the guitar tonight. He said, well, are you sure you know how to do that? I'm like, I got this because I was young and I knew everything.

And so it was possibly one of the worst musical times ever to happen on the face of the earth. It was pretty terrible. That being said, I started to get practice and I started to learn and I went to conferences and I learned about good music theory and how to lead worship so that everybody would be in the Spirit all the time. And since I'm mentioning that, you probably already know it was a bunch of bunk. But God had a plan to instill that in a very practical way.

One of my friends who was a worship leader at a youth group, he was just volunteering at his church, was in college and had to take an engineering class. And in the engineering class, they only offered it on Wednesday nights, which was youth group time. So he talked to the youth group leader, one of the pastors of the church, and he said, hey, could Randy sub for me? And so they said yes. And PJ was the pastor of the youth group. PJ did not subscribe to all the things that I knew.

And in fact, he took a list of songs he wanted me to do for the quarter, or the semester, He put them in an Excel spreadsheet and he randomized them and said, these are the songs you're going to do this week, and you're going to do these songs in this order the next week. So all of the planning and the order and all the things I'd learned at the conferences, and all of the experience I had was out the window.

And you know what the Holy Spirit did? It was the meanest thing the Holy Spirit has ever done. He showed me that when you come with a humble heart, and you're ready to worship the Lord, it doesn't matter the order the songs are in. And so all the things that I knew were wrong.

But I got married. I was going to be a worship leader. I was sure I was going to be a worship leader. I bought a $1,000 guitar. This was going to be my career. And I got married, and we moved to Texas, and I went to seminary. And I was sure that when I got to seminary, I would teach them how to worship, because they were a bunch of frozen chosen.

And God took music away from me for five years. And it wasn't until I moved here and the body of Holly Hill said, hey, would you do a special song? Would you help with worship? But during that five years where God said, no music for you right now, he taught me something really, really important. He taught me how to study the Bible.

So this morning, we're going to take a look at Colossians 3.16, because we're going to see what the Bible says about worship.

And I hope that when you're done with this, you walk away understanding body life and worship and fellowship together in a meaningful way. One last thing I need to tell you before we move on is that I've planted this terrible picture of a hamburger in here. This is the church service sandwich, and I want to point out that usually when you get here there's fellowship, and then there's some songs, and then there's the sermon, and there's a song or songs, and then fellowship again, right? And the church service sandwich is really awesome because every element of that sandwich, sorry I'm hungry now, every element of that sandwich the Holy Spirit can use in your life to minister to those around us in the body.

So as we take a look at this passage here, I want to also highlight the fact that I have this opportunity that I've had with Roger and Bob to teach First Corinthians. And before we dig into Colossians 3, I want to point out that in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, Paul says something that's really important, but it gets lost in the argument about spiritual gifts. So I'm going to highlight that because that's going to be one of the things that we're going to count as a parallel passage as we go through Colossians 3 16 and in that in first Corinthians 14 starting in verse 5 in verse 12 in verse 26 and verse 31 and you've got those in the intro of your note there there's there's letters because the verses aren't broken up easily to reference in those in those verses Paul talks about edification But he says if you come with a song, if you come with a teaching, if you come with a gift, it better be edifying. So we're going to talk about edification, because as a body, we kind of have a responsibility for that to one another. So, edification.

Alright, so now that we've done that, let's take a look at Colossians 3.16. And I'm going to be flipping around in my Bible with you guys. hopefully we'll all get there at the same time, although those of you with computers will go faster probably, right?

So Colossians 3.16, he says, Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. So he starts off with, Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you.

Now, that right there is this strange nugget that the Holy Spirit has implanted in my head so that when I'm on the light rail or going to the light rail every morning on the way downtown, I always see Jehovah's Witnesses and Muslims. They love the light rail that the Jehovah's Witnesses do because they can stand there legally and try to hand out tracts.

And the Muslims are just in transit. But I think about how hard it is for them because The Word of Christ is not dwelling in them richly. They've found religion, but it's not the Word of Christ. It's the teachings they've been told to memorize. Memorize this. Muslims think Jesus was a great prophet, but he wasn't Muhammad. But we're believers. We're here today. We can talk about this together with confidence. So Paul writes to the believers there that they should let the Word of Christ dwell in them.

The word there is logos. Now, logos can mean single word, but it also can represent the idea of the teachings or the concepts of Christ. In this case, Paul is probably not telling the Colossians, hey, you should focus on the word Jesus, right? Let the word Jesus dwell in you richly. No, no, he's talking about the doctrine of who Jesus is. If you want to know that my parents paid for some seminary, I can use the word Christology to describe the study of who Christ is and the theology around Christ. So Paul says, let the teachings about Christ be dwelling in you richly. And so, as believers, where do we get that? Where are the teachings about Christ?

Now, in my normal Sunday School class, you're supposed to answer me on that one, but we can't because we're in the main service. You're not allowed to in this room. I don't know why that is. You know, we learn about who Christ is. He's central to the gospel. He's central to our identification. And so at Holly Hills, those things are normal, right? We talk about them and we don't think about it. And you know why that's good? Because it's supposed to be that way.

We're focusing and we're dwelling richly on... And you know what I've noticed in my conversation with my brothers and sisters in Christ here, is that you don't just do it on Sundays. You're also actually spending some time studying God's Word, and you're dwelling on it richly. Now, there's this problem, and that is that sometimes in our lives we notice that we're not dwelling on the Word of Christ richly. We're going through a time where we're being carnal, but the good news is that because of what Christ has done on the cross, we can respond by abiding. and we can immediately go back to dwelling richly.

We can open our Bibles. You might put it on your smartphone if you have one of those, and you can take it with you. But there's another way to take it with you, and we're going to talk about that more later, but we can memorize the scriptures through song, and I think that's a pretty awesome thing. I happen to be biased. So we have this abiding As believers, we're vessels for His work. We're abiding.

Ephesians 2.10 tells us that He's got good works planned for us to do. And so, if we're abiding, if we're dwelling richly in the Word of Christ, those good works are bound to happen.

And His Holy Spirit fills us, as Ephesians 5.18 tells us. Alright, so He says that we should be dwelling richly. And then he says, with wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another.

Now, I don't know about you, but one of the things that I personally just enjoyed the snot out of during the election season was how much wisdom was available on Facebook. There was a lot of it, and so I was off Facebook because I pretty much couldn't stomach it. But the thing about wisdom here is this is biblical wisdom. This is God's truth understood and applied to our lives. So he says, with wisdom, with God's truth applied to your life, you understand it, let it bear directly on your life. and then teach it.

Now, how many of you are aware that public speaking is one of the most feared things that people hate doing? The comedian Jerry Seinfeld said that most people in a survey would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. I've done this long enough now that I'm slightly less nervous than I used to be, but I still didn't sleep well last night just because, oh no, what if I screw up? But with wisdom teaching, now we have teaching opportunities.

If you are afraid of teaching to adults, there's a Sunday school class down there. And you know what those kids love? They love you. They love that you come and give them a hug. They love that you talk to them and give them time and tell them about the love of Jesus and show it to them.

So with wisdom, teaching. If you have to teach little kids, teach little kids. But the thing is that he doesn't pick anybody out to not teach. He doesn't say you have no responsibility to tell anybody any truth that you've ever learned. The teaching is one another. So with wisdom, with this biblical truth, teach one another.

And the church in Colossae had a hard problem because they also did not have the New Testament. How many of the books of the Bible did they have? Well, that's a trick question because we don't know. But they didn't have the New Testament. They certainly didn't have, at least at the time of this writing, the book of Colossians until it got to their doorstep, right?

And so Paul is writing to them about wisdom and teaching because the Holy Spirit must move in their hearts and lives and minds to give the church the opportunity to express the liberty of the New Testament. The Jews tended towards legalism, right? And so their teaching tended towards, let's obey the law, if they weren't aware of biblical doctrine, if they didn't heed what Paul had told them about the law. And the Gentiles tended towards all kinds of other corruption and debate and wisdom, right? Because that's what the Greeks and the Romans liked to do. So what they needed was wise biblical teaching, deeply in their hearts.

Then the next thing he says is that they should admonish one another. Now, admonishing, my dad went over last week in detail, so I'm not going to, because you can listen to last week's lesson if you weren't here. And also, I think he did a really tremendous job because he spent a whole service on it. But I will say this, the end result of that admonishing, that correction, should be a restored, love-focused relationship.

And so, after the word of Christ is dwelling richly in these believers, they're teaching it. They're teaching to one another. And they're admonishing one another. And wise teaching leads to edification. All right. So now, to the part of the passage that I wanted to teach, but I couldn't teach it until I taught the other things, because guess what? I don't get to pick and choose how the Holy Spirit inspired the Scripture. So to one another, they're teaching and they're admonishing one another.

He then says, with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, the singing and making music in your heart, Singing with thankfulness in your heart. Sorry, that's Ephesians 5 18 says or 19 says almost the same thing So what's a psalm? How many of you can turn to the book of Psalms in the split second if I say turn to the book of Psalms? You know, it's just well worn in your Bible and you know where Psalms is Everybody's got computers now. So there's no well-worn pages on those right and But we think of the 150 songs from the Hebrew National Songbook, the book of Psalms as we know it, but the Jewish readers would have thought of Psalms as songs about God.

Okay, so today we might call those worship songs. But Paul's writing to believers then that had a different vocabulary, and so I'm going to just help you connect those dots. If you hear me use the word worship the rest of the time in this lesson, understand I'm talking about the Psalms in this context. So worship is the act of ascribing worth to God. The Greek word proskuneo, often translated worship, carries with it the idea of reverence before God in being or in blowing kisses or bowing. Okay, that's the idea behind the idea of this word for worship. And Psalm 570 says, but as for me, by your abundant loving kindness, I will enter your house, your holy temple, or at your holy temple, I will bow in reverence for you.

Our first focus is not on the outward bowing, or the blowing of kisses. Our first focus is on what? the inward attitude of reverence. Growing up in junior high and high school, I was part of a charismatic church. We would do a lot of real physical bowing because we really wanted God to know we were serious. My knees are bad because of mountain biking, not bowing. But if I could have figured out how to brag about that, I might have. That was the kind of thing where I wanted to be ultra-spiritual.

So we have this idea that we're talking about God. These are songs about God. And so I wanted to take a moment and talk about another seminary word, theology proper, the study of who God is. Because if we're going to have songs that talk about God, we ought to know who He is. And so I've got a list here for you, and this is edited down. There are much longer lists.

But God is eternal. That's not shocking, right? Because you've probably sung it a few times, and you've probably heard it a few times. But if you stop and think about it, God is the uncaused cause. That's worth singing about. God is good. Right before my family left the church, there was this really trendy thing going on where people would say, God is good, all the time. And then, all the time, God is good. And it was this mirror thing. It was really fantastic. You had to be there. God is good. But here's the thing.

Good gets its definition in God. When God created things, He called them good, right? God could say something was good and know precisely that it was. And so God and His attribute, when we're talking about worshipping God and calling Him good, that means something different than we treat it today. Because we treat good as like middle of the road in modern English vernacular, don't we? We say, oh, that's good. Oh, it's not great? I know that if my wife asks, how do you look, and I say good, it's the wrong answer. Okay?

But for God, it's the right answer. God is good. God is gracious. Now, here at Holly Hills, that's not shocking because we talk about grace all the time. It's one of the core tenets of who God is that we bring up with so much regularity that I think sometimes we forget how awesome it is because we hear how awesome it is every week, right? God is holy. He's sacred. He's set apart. God is immutable. He doesn't change. His mind doesn't change. His character doesn't change. He's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God is just. Boy, do we need a just God. When we look at the world around us and we see the corruption and the sin, we go, all right, God, you're just. You're going to deal with all the injustice. You know how.

Another word that gets its definition in God, well, all of these do technically, right? But another one is love. I really, really, really want my children to understand love in God's definition, and not the Disney princess version of love where it's like, happily ever after, I just had a hormonal influx. So when we're worshipping God and we say that God is love, that's a big deal.

God is merciful. He's omnipotent. He's omnipresent. He's omniscient. He's righteous. He's self-existent. He's sovereign and he's transcendent. And transcendent is one of those words that even I had to look up when I was preparing this. It means that God is unlike any other being.

We can't say, oh, God is the evolutionary progress. After you're a man, you're a God. That's kind of Hinduism, right? No, that's not Hinduism. I'm sorry, that's a mistake. But it's the idea that you'd have this transience or this mobility between beings.

God is singularly and individually one, and there's no one like Him. That's worth worshipping. That's worth having a psalm about. Do these attributes not prompt our hearts to worship Him as the one and only true God? Our call is not to appease God because we're just told to worship. Our call is to respond to Him in intimate love because He first loved us.

Examples of worship songs. We've sung a lot of songs in this church over the years. My last count was that we had over 300 songs that we have in our PowerPoint slide repository. 300 songs is a lot. Not all of them are worship songs. But examples would be, when I look into your holiness, we will glorify and all heaven declares. Now because I am allowed to do this because I have the clicker, I'm going to ask you guys to stand up and sing with me, all heaven declares. But as you're singing this with me, I would like to ask that you would think about the words. What's the worship involved with that?

And if somebody's got a mixer, you probably want to turn this microphone off because it's going to get distorted. All right. Oh, it's all in one slide. How awesome is that? And you can be seated. Don't worry, there's more. This will be church exercise. The elders will never let me teach again.

Okay, so we have Psalms, which are songs of worship. And they're songs about God. And then he says hymns. And hymns are songs of praise. Today we find that we're using the word hymn to mean like a traditional song. It's an older song. It could even be really, really old. But that's not actually what the word hymn means. And so I would like to say that's a misappropriation. I don't mean that to be mean. But a hymn is not just a song that shows up in a hymnal. A hymn is a song of praise. It's a song that reflects on what the Lord has done for us.

Okay? So, as a believer, it's nearly impossible to think of no things that God has done for you. Right? He only died for you and was buried for you and resurrected for you and ascended and seated with you in all of those things. Not a big deal, right?

Maybe worth praising Him for. Praise is the expression of thankfulness towards God in response to His love and the outflowing of that love. The Greek word translated praise, epinos, means to laud above others. The Lord is praised as a response to our abiding mindset.

If you're not abiding, you're probably not praising. I can tell you that much because that's the human condition. You can't be thankful if you're being carnal, right? At least not towards the Lord. So we can be abiding and singing His praise, Thanksgiving and praise are not just for those times when everything is going how we planned, though. That's an important thing.

So I want, if you've got your Bibles with me, please turn to Acts chapter 16. I'm going to read out loud verses 23 through 34. This is one of my favorite praise verses. Stories and my dad's going to go over this next year I think or the year after depending on how fast he makes it through acts So you'll get to hear it again, but I'll like it both times so Acts 16 verse starting in verse 23 when they had struck them Them being Paul and Silas with many blows they threw them into prison commanding the jailer to guard them securely. I And he, having received such a command, threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. But about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God and the prisoners were listening to them.

And suddenly there came a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison house were shaken and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened. When the jailer awoke, I think an earthquake that's strong enough to open up all the jail cells is probably enough to wake up a jailer. When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped.

But Paul cried out with a loud voice saying, Do not harm yourself, for we are all here. And he called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas. And after he brought them out, he said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And in the rest of the chapter here, we see the response of the jailer and his family is that they received salvation. And they received salvation because God moved in their hearts. improved the veracity of the gospel message.

Nobody comes in and sings songs after being beaten and whipped all day. But Paul did. Silas did. And they prayed. I'm pretty sure they prayed quite diligently. But what we see here is that they were praying and they were praising, even though the environment they were in was definitely not a good one.

If you're in the stocks, That's gross. You're not just uncomfortable, but you're stuck there. So being in the stalks, they're probably bleeding from being beaten. They're really uncomfortable. There is no, hey, can I get a different position to be seated in?

But they're praying and they're praising and they're thanking the Lord for what he's doing. Thank you that we're in prison. And it was so different that the prisoners were listening. It says the jailer became a believer in his household. I suspect the other prisoners may have also joined in on that.

So praise in all situations, that's an important thing. Now another thing in Ephesians chapter 1, And I love Ephesians chapter one. It's it's one of those those chapters that if you're in a Greek class, they'll tell you. And if you're not in a Greek class, they'll tell you that it's got Paul's longest sentence in the Greek. And in Ephesians chapter one, in verse six, we read to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved. which was, I'm sorry, let me read 5 first.

He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself according to the kind intention of his will to the praise of the glory of his grace which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved. Why are we praising God? Why is God being praised? That's a benevolent, generous love that he's bestowed upon us.

And then again in verse 12, to the end that we who were the first to open in Christ would be to the praise of his glory. They're establishing the church. The gospel is being responded to, to the praise of his glory. And then also in verse 14, who is given as a pledge, the Holy Spirit who is given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of his glory.

When we get to heaven, The Holy Spirit will be our seal. He'll know we're His, right? That's what's going on here. I should be careful how I say that. At the rapture, one way or the other. The Holy Spirit will be a sign that we're of God's possession, and it will be to the praise of His glory.

So praise, something that we get to do, but it seems like the heavenly scene is also very focused on the praise of God's glory. Now, when we talk about praise, there's multiple songs that we could sing. One of them would be Ten Thousand Reasons, or Blessed Assurance, or Allelu, Allelu, or To God Be the Glory. Okay, those are all good examples of praise songs. But if you'll stand, we'll sing Blessed Assurance.

The heir of salvation, the purchase of God Born of His fear, washed in His blood This is my story, this is my song The perfect submission, the perfect defiance Reaching for the past, but now it's on my side This is my story. This is my song. I am my Savior. Perfect submission. Perfect submission. All is at rest. I am my Savior. This is my story. This is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long. This is my story. This is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long. Please be seated.

And so after psalms and hymns, he gets to what I'm going to affectionately refer to as the bucket of everything else, which is maybe not as theologically classy, but the reality is that there's a whole lot of other songs that fit into a broad array of other things. These are spiritual songs that don't quite fit anywhere else, but are doctrinally accurate and worth singing together. These are songs that will definitely be edifying, and it's worth noting that here at Holly Hills, the elders review all the songs before we sing them, because they want to make sure that it is edifying, that when you leave, you don't leave going, oh, that was a really great song, but I don't remember anywhere in the Bible where it says Jesus was on unicorns, right?

It's not a good thing. That's not the theology that we want to implant in our minds. So as far as edification is concerned, edification is the act of building one another up. It is the use of doctrine to change one another's perspective about things so that they align with biblical truth. That sounds a whole lot similar to that wisdom idea earlier. So the thing that I love about edification and all of these things where the doctrine comes in is that if you have a song that you might have learned that has biblical truth in it, you might be able to remember it better.

You guys know how Velcro works? Or what do they call that hook and loop fasteners in the generic name, right? You guys know how that works? It's a bunch of little tiny hooks, and then a mess of little loops, and the plastic grabs on there. And guess what?

Songs are just like that. songs will act like velcro in your brain, which is why when you listen to those secular pop songs that are really repetitive, you're like, oh, the first time you hear it, you're like, oh, I learned that in about two seconds.

And the 50th time you hear it, you think, I wish I was deaf. But when it comes to spiritual truth, having that and stuck in your head is valuable. Spiritual songs may contain lots of good truth that we can memorize and we can take. It's not about God, it's not to God, but it's doctrinally accurate. And it's things that we need to share with one another. Might be encouraging to one another. Might be educational. It gives a new meaning to the term sound doctrine, right? And the thing is, how many of you are ready to be the next famous singer? Nobody? Nobody? A few people got one hand.

Okay. So as it turns out, you don't have to just sing these verses, these words. It's possible that you could do like I did and take a poetry class and realize, hey, there's a lot of poetry here. There's a lot of poetry in the hymnal. There's a lot of poetry in the praise and worship songbooks. There's a lot of poetry there.

So if you're not a great singer, you can still walk up to your friend and say, here's a Bible verse. Here's the thing I memorized. Here's a song that I find encouraging. Or you could rap it. That's something I expect to see a lot of here at Holly Hills, right? Now I'm really not going to be asked to teach again. So the next section I've got here is memorization. To have the word of Christ dwell richly in your thoughts, song carries great value. We can use song to memorize scripture such as Romans 8, 38 and 39. These verses are about being convinced that nothing could separate us from the love of God. But these verse include Paul's famous lists. Paul loves lists. I think as a writer, I like to think that I was inspired by Paul because I can make a list with more commas than is probably allowed. Paul is amazing at it. So If you'll stand, we'll sing our last song that I'm going to lead here, and we'll sing Romans 8, 38, and 39, for I am convinced this is a great song for memorization.

That was not a good sound. Okay. for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor friends, nor holidays, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us. Please be seated.

So how many of you have that memorized because we've sung it enough times? I haven't memorized because I had to memorize it so I could sing it. But it's an easy way to memorize that list. Much easier than just trying to brute force your way through it because the melody is that Velcro it holds on.

Alright, one last story, and this is a personal story. As a child, I'd sometimes have nightmares. That's probably not shocking if you've had children. You probably go, yes, that's a thing that happens for kids. You probably remember them. You were once a kid. Well, my mom would come in and she would start to sing whatever is right, whatever is just, and I would know all the rest of the words.

It's Philippians 4.8, and she would sing it. This happens to be an arrangement or a composition by Pam Mark Hall. And because she wanted me to, you know, actually fall asleep, she'd switch over to humming sometimes.

And the words would keep going. And to this day, when I hear that melody, when I hear those words, I immediately think of the doctrine of resting in Christ and putting my mind on things above and putting my mind on things that are right and true and just and worth spending my time on. So, memorization. Not too bad of a thing to have as a result of a song. And memorizing scripture, even better. Examples of edification and doctrine in scripture memorization songs might be Amazing Grace. That's one everybody knows, right? Amazing Grace. Everybody knows Amazing Grace. Even the people who don't love Jesus know Amazing Grace.

But it's a testimony song of who God is and what he's done in your life. It's not just a praise or just a worship song. Beloved, let us love one another. Great scripture memorization song. Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord. Great scripture memorization song. Where you are glorious, which is a song that focuses on abiding and then responding to that abiding.

So the last little section on that part is that some songs aren't just one of those three, they're a blend of those three. Your Glorious is an example of a blend where it's about needing to abide and then also praising or glorifying the Lord, worshiping the Lord, not praising, in response to his provision in those things. So the last thing Paul writes is, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

The outcome here is unity and focus of doctrine. It's singular and plural. The thanks is you be thankful singularly and then sing together from your hearts with thanks. So we have this idea that as a consequence of the word dwelling in us ritually, as a consequence of teaching one another, and in some cases, building up and correcting one another. And as a consequence of praising and worshiping and singing these songs together, that we can come together as a body unified. That's an awesome place to be. Where we can look around us and we go, wow, these are my brothers and sisters in Christ.

And we're all singing together. One of my favorite things when we sing some of our songs, when I'm leading worship, is you guys sing out, and it is loud up here. You're singing, and you know what? You're singing together. You're singing in thanks. Everybody who's been up here to lead music at one point or another has heard that, and you're just blown away. You're like, wow, the Holy Spirit is moving in the lives of these people, and I'm excited that I get to be an instrument in it.

So in conclusion, we see that these things come together. We see that this dwelling richly in the teaching and the worship, those things all fit together and it stops being about what's in it for me. And it's instead, we're in this together, the one and others. My dad had asked me, he said, Randy, if there's one thing you want the body of Holly Hills to walk away from in your lesson, what would it be? And I wrote this last sentence.

When we recognize that all parts of the gathering are for edification, intimacy with God and intimacy with one another, and for our growth, we cease thinking about fellowship time, music time, and teaching time, and instead actively abide together as one body.

The music isn't just music, it's teaching. The fellowship isn't just like, well, that's the thing I have to do because you see people in social situations. There's a social situation. I walked in the church. It's the Holy Spirit moving in your lives and the teaching and with one another. And that's an awesome place for us to be as a body. Let's close in prayer and then Brad and Judy, if you'd come up. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would continue to Indwell our hearts and minds as we as we study your word and we look for your completion of these things in our lives that you would actively be Moving in us for praise and worship and psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and teaching and correction and dwelling richly in the word of Christ We thank you and we praise you in Jesus name Amen