No Other Foundation
Colossians 1:1-8 · Miles Driedger · Aug 9, 2026
Colossians, No. 02
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/89261750313592

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. Thank you, Jim. We had that first song, Be Thou My Vision, we had that song at our wedding, and a great song in regard to that kind of an occasion. You know, I don't know that I'd really, certainly at that time, I didn't understand the depth of the words in verse two, but we see there our identification with Christ quite clearly. It was 431 in your hymnal if you're like, well, what did it say there? It says, be thou my wisdom and thou my true word. I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord. Thou my great father, I thy true son. Thou in me dwelling and I with thee one. It's really an amazing verse and very central to what we teach here at Holly Hills, isn't it? That identification with Christ, that union with him is at the core, really, of our message here.

We, as Jim said, we set the stage last week for Paul's epistle to the Colossians, and we gave this the title, Jesus is Enough. We'll talk about that a little bit more this morning as we get going. But before we do that, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just ask you this morning that you would direct our study, that you would use your word powerfully in each one of our hearts. Lord, you know where we're at. You know the things that you are doing in us. And Lord, we need your word. We need to understand it. and we need you to teach us what it means. So I pray that you would use me simply as your vessel this morning to bring your word of clarity and power. In Jesus' name, amen.

So just by way of really brief review, Colossians is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the church at Colossae. And we see in the letter that Paul had probably never met these believers in person. We talked about why that probably is. But he indicates that in the letter. He talks about those who have not personally seen my faith.

And you know, we don't know much about Colossae, either the city or the church there. Secular historians aren't overly interested in Colossae. It's never been excavated. Maybe someday it will be, that would be pretty neat. But there's not a lot about Colossae in the biblical record either. As I said, the only place that Colossae is mentioned is right here in verse two of chapter one. And so from a human perspective, Colossae is not that important.

But what's interesting is that God saw fit to inspire a letter written to these believers. that would be recorded as his word to us today. And so it is very important, which probably tells us something about the way man sees things versus the way God sees things, right? What we see as unimportant, he often sees as very important, and what we sometimes see as important, God doesn't necessarily see as important. But we want to recall that the Colossians heard the gospel through Epaphras.

And we're going to see that today in the text. And it could have been that this happened during Paul's two-year stay in Ephesus when he says that the gospel reached everyone in Asia. And we know that the Colossians were a healthy church, a growing body, growing spiritually, we could say.

Paul makes a few comments along those lines, right in verses three and four of today's text. He says, we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Jesus Christ and the love which you have for all the saints. So there was an outflow of that life that they had in Christ Jesus. And so they were growing. And then we're going to see in chapter two, Paul says, So again, there was this, they had a stable faith. We're going to talk about that as well this morning a little bit.

But as much as the Colossian believers were growing and they had a stable faith and they had good discipline, we also know that there were some false teachings that were coming into the Colossian church, right? There were wrong ideas about how we are to live and operate as Christians.

If you just flip over to chapter two, verses 20 through 23, Paul writes, if you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, Why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees? So we see this indication that the Colossians were actually submitting themselves to this false teaching. Decrees such as, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, which all refer to things destined to perish with use, in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men. These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

So that's the kind of teaching that was coming into the Colossian church, and Paul took this very seriously. And that's probably a significant part of the reason for writing this letter, right? He sees the danger of the kind of teaching that was coming into the body.

And we're still dealing with the same problem 2,000 years later. The church at large is full of wrong ideas about how to live the Christian life. And the reason for that is because the sin nature hasn't changed. Okay, everything in our flesh, which we still have as believers, right? Everything in our fleshly nature pushes back against God's design. And as we said last week, you know, there's no question that God wants you and I to live a godly life, right? And now something we talked about this morning in the first Peter class, right? Actually, if you want to flip over quickly to first Peter chapter two, these were our verses this morning that Roger taught.

He says, Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles so that in the very thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds as they observe them glorify God in the day of visitation. So the Christian life is to be this life of excellent behavior, good deeds, and so forth.

And you'll hear that message commonly everywhere, right? But as Roger pointed out this morning, how's that gonna happen? How are we gonna get that kind of life, right? And is it gonna be by means of human effort? Or is it going to be through dependence on Him to live that kind of life through us?

So we said last week that our theme for this letter is that Jesus is enough. and I want that to be a mental handle for you. This is something, I don't know, I don't know if JD intentionally does this or not, but when he teaches, he gives you these mental handles, these phrases, these things that you can hang on to, and as you then go, you don't have to remember the whole theology textbook, you can remember this simple statement, something that will stick with you, and it's full of meaning, all this meaning that's behind it, but I want that to be a mental handle for you. I want you to be reminded of that in your day-to-day walk, that Jesus Christ alone is the source of a godly Christian walk. Jesus is enough. It's not my best effort plus his help.

Okay, in chapter one, verses 10 and 11, which is not our text this morning, but we kind of keep coming back to this in introduction, we see that the Christian life is lived on the ground of the fact that we have been strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. And notice that word all power, right? The source of our power in the Christian life is entirely in Jesus, all power. And our responsibility is to receive that power from Him in every situation that we face. And of course, we do that by faith. We receive His power for His life by faith.

And we've got to believe that His power is constantly available to us and that it's enough for any and every circumstance that we might face. Now, last week I was talking about that and I said something to the effect that, you know, that we have this strength from Christ when our world is falling apart.

And maybe you could relate to that and maybe you couldn't, but what I didn't know until later in the afternoon is that a very good friend of ours who JD introduced us to 18 years ago, Jeremy and Robin Thomas, JD introduced us to Jeremy's teaching. I probably, oh, I was thinking about this, I wanted to, you know, talk to Jeremy a little bit. We just went through the 75 questions, and last week I got the official nod and so forth. But I was thinking, I wouldn't have been able to answer maybe three quarters of those questions if it had not been for Jeremy's teaching over years and years that I just listened to him. He didn't know who I was, but JD had introduced me to Jeremy's teaching and I listened to him for years and learned an awful lot about the word of God. And so I owe Jeremy a huge debt of gratitude. But what JD told me about Jeremy last Sunday afternoon is that the Thomas's house burned completely last Sunday in the fires in Spokane. And of course, I just shared this message about how we have all power for any circumstance, even when our world is falling apart.

And I had to stop and think about that, right? Because it's easy to say that kind of thing when your life is relatively tranquil. But when something like that happens, do we still believe it? Can we still trust it to be true when the pain and the loss are suffocating? Because it's one thing to say that the life of the Lord Jesus is all I need in any circumstance. It's a whole different thing to come to know that in experience.

And that's really what the Lord is teaching us through trials. He wants us to learn just how powerful his life is. And he wants us to learn that our human resources can't cut it. So trials are the Lord's training ground. And he's taking right now the Thomas family through a very hard time in order to teach them in a deep way that he is enough. Even when he strips away every earthly thing. And he does that for all of us. In his own way, in our own time, he teaches us this lesson.

And you know, we can pray for one another that, just like Jesus prayed for Peter, that your faith would not fail, that your faith would not fail. And faith, faith is simply trusting him, resting in his ability to live his life through us. And when we trust him, he will always come through. He will never let us down. He'll never fail to produce his righteous life through us. And if we're depending on Jesus and his mighty power, then nothing can defeat us. Nothing can overwhelm us. We are more than overcomers in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's the moment that we begin to forget that, and we begin to handle things in our strength, that we are defeated.

And that's fundamentally what Paul is contrasting in this letter. He's contrasting man's wisdom, which says the Christian life is something you need to work at in your own strength, with God's wisdom, which says Christ is your life. Your responsibility is to believe him about it.

Now, we come to verses one through eight. Because before Paul can address all of that, he has to remind the Colossians of the foundation that has been laid. And that's why the message is titled, No Other Foundation. Because the foundation for all of this is the gospel of the grace of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that's what Paul focuses on in verses 1-8.

I just want to read through verses 1-5 again because I want you to see what Paul is emphasizing. I've got it underlined so you should see it. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and Timothy, our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father.

We give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven of which you previously heard in the Word of Truth, the Gospel. You see how Paul emphasizes the fact that these are justified, born-again saints, brothers and sisters in Christ. We share the same Father, we share the same Lord Jesus Christ. You have hope laid up in heaven, all because of your response to the Gospel. So why is this important? What does that have to do with living the Christian life? And it's really very simple. We can say it like this, no Christ, no Christian life.

There are millions of people living in this world who are involved in religion under the name of Christianity. And they think that they are Christians because of all the religious observances that they take part in. A lot of people think that going to church or being a member of a church is what makes you a Christian. And then there are those who, you know, they're more devout. And they know that it's not just going to church that makes you a Christian, but they think that by living a moral life, living a godly life or the Christian life, that that's what makes you a Christian. You know, and you can ask people whether they think that they're a Christian, and many will say, oh yeah. But if you ask them, well, how do you know that you're gonna go to heaven when you die?

Oh, well, because I'm living a good life. I seek to obey God. I do my best to keep the Ten Commandments and on and on I go. They're trying to live the Christian life in order to be a Christian and they've got it totally backwards. If the Christian life were something that I could produce, then I wouldn't need Jesus in order to live it. But if it's truly something that Christ must live through me, then I have to be joined to Christ before I can even begin to live it.

Look at chapter 2, verse 13. This is, again, this is identification truth, right? When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive, but that's not where he stops. He made you alive together with him. And then just look to the next chapter, chapter three, verse four, where Paul writes about when Christ, who is our life, right?

So again, no Christ, no Christian life. That's why Paul emphasizes the gospel right up front. Faith in the gospel is what joins us to Jesus Christ in the first place. Without faith in the gospel, you don't have Christ. And without Christ, you have no Christian life.

Without Jesus, you don't have his power for living the Christian life. Apart from a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Christian life is an impossibility. You can't even begin. You can mimic it, right? But you cannot live the life of Christ in your strength. And that's why Paul takes us back to the gospel as the foundation of the entire Christian life. We've got to know our position in Christ before we can walk in it. You catch that? We've got to know our position in Christ before we can walk in it.

And, you know, I can't overemphasize the importance of gospel clarity today. We can be so sloppy about what the gospel is, but if we're going to share the gospel, we need to be clear on what the gospel is and what it is not. Because we can often say to people, well, the gospel is, you know, and say, oh yeah, I agree, but we don't clarify, you know, what it's not, and often people have all kinds of other add-ons.

We're going to talk about that. Is Jesus plus my good works? Is that going to save you? But if we pay attention to what Paul says in these verses, we can draw out some really important truths that are gonna help us clarify the gospel this morning. We're gonna look at six different truths.

So the first thing that we wanna notice in this text is that the gospel message is conveyed through words. Now that might seem pretty elementary to you, but it's very important. We see it in the text. Look at verse five, Paul says, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel." And word here is our familiar word, logos. Logos can, you know, can mean word. It can also carry the sense of message, a message, right? I mean, when you bring word from a distant land, or we use that the same, just use the word when we're bringing a message, right? And this is the message of truth or the message which is true, okay?

And then keep reading in verses six and seven. Paul says, which has come to you. Just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God and truth just as you learned it from Epaphras. So all of these, all this language and all these words make it clear that the gospel is something conveyed through words, through language. It's a message. And it came to the Colossians through Epaphras. And of course the word gospel itself is the word euangelion, which simply means what? Good news, good news or the good message. And the gospel is actually a very simple message.

Sometimes someone asks you to explain the gospel and you can really start to squirm. like that's something I should be able to explain as a Christian, right? I've experienced this more than once, you know, but when we're put on the spot, to put it into words, it can seem very difficult to do that.

How do I explain the gospel, right? And some of that has to do with the confusion that's out there about the term gospel. You know, I had a pastor one time who said, well, the gospel is essentially the whole Bible. Sure, okay, but please explain to me how that even makes sense, right? I mean, yes, the Bible contains the gospel, the Bible contains the good news, but do I have to have read it from cover to cover to understand the good news, to understand the gospel? And so because of all the confusing and often contradictory gospel presentations that we hear, we have it in our heads that the gospel is very complicated. And that's not true.

The gospel is a very simple message. A couple of years ago in a Bible study, we just focused on the gospel and evangelism. And this is one of the things I really tried to drive home in that study. because I need to know this. I need to remember this.

The gospel is not complicated. The gospel is simple. It's a message contained in words, and it's not hard. And so I want you to be able to remember this simple message of the gospel so that you, when you're put on the spot to say what the gospel is, you don't have to feel that awkward tension. We should be able to state the gospel in one sentence.

And you may modify the word slightly to this. You can put it into your own maybe vocabulary, but this is a very simple gospel message, just this, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins and rose from the dead. so that anyone who believes in him will receive eternal life." Now, that's pretty simple. You can remember that. Now, you may be looking at it and thinking, well, yeah, but we've got to explain those things. There's so much in there that we've got to explain. And that's true, right? Who is God? Who is man? What is sin? Why death? What is eternal life? And how do I even respond to that message? What does it mean to believe?

We could go on and on. But we have to understand that explaining those things doesn't change the gospel message. It adds clarity and understanding to what that is all about. But keeping the simple core gospel message in view protects from confusion and error. So the gospel message is simple. It's a message contained in words and we can remember that and hang on to that. So that's our first point. The second thing we want to look at is that the gospel is a message of grace. Look again at verse six.

Paul talking about the gospel says, which has come to you just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing. even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God in truth." So Paul says that to understand the gospel is to understand the grace of God. You know, there's probably nothing more distorted about the gospel than this point, because people don't like grace.

Grace is really not that difficult a concept. It simply refers to something that is given as a gift with no strings attached. In this case, with the gospel, God has offered eternal life, salvation from the penalty of sin, he's offered it as a gift. And there's absolutely nothing that anyone can do to deserve it, to earn it, or to pay God back for it.

But people don't like that. People wanna be told that there's something that they can do. We like to earn what we get. We like to deserve God's gift. We wanna merit it. And that is not grace. And we have all kinds of ways of destroying grace in the way that we present the gospel. Every time we add some requirement to the gospel, we've destroyed grace. And we have this little book.

I think it's the only book he ever wrote. The man's name was Lance Latham. Some people know him as Doc Latham. That was his nickname. He was a pastor in Chicago in the last century. He was the co-founder of Awana, which is probably his greatest claim to fame. He wrote a book called The Two Gospels. And in the book, he highlighted several different ways that the gospel is often presented that deny grace.

And this is his list. I don't have it on screen, so you can just listen. And as you listen, you'll think, yeah, I've heard that often. And so these are some of these claims that he heard. And he was working through this as he was trying to figure out the gospel and his own coming to salvation. But these are some of the messages that he was hearing.

Give your heart to Jesus. Surrender all. Pray the penitent's prayer, the sinner's prayer, right? Turn the direction of your life over to God. Put your all on the altar. Make Jesus Lord of your life. Confess all your sins. Take Jesus into your heart. Make the great commitment. Follow Jesus.

And you've heard all these, you've heard these, and a hundred different variations of these messages, right? And you may be tempted to hear that and to think, well, we're just getting nitpicky now, because don't all those things really just, aren't they just different ways of saying the same thing? And this is why we have so much confusion about the gospel, because if you take those things and say that those are the same thing as the message that we just had on the screen, then you have really confused things. Because all of these statements bring in an element of what I can do for God or give to God or in some cases ask God to do something rather than receive what he's already done for me by grace.

But the gospel message has nothing to do with what I can do for God. It has only to do with what he has already done for me. And a little farther down in Lance Latham's book, he says this, the gospel is the good news. It is not a new set of obligations or duties to be performed, new strivings, more agonizings, but rather an announcement of what has been done for us. We do not present the claims of the gospel.

We present a wonderful free offer by God himself to the sinner who believes. That is an awesome statement. If you want a copy of that, I can get it to you. We need to be really careful about that. The gospel is all about what God has done for us, and it has to be received on that basis, and that basis alone. So the gospel is a message of grace, and that is one of the most distorted things about the gospel today. The third point The third thing that we can see in what Paul says here is that the gospel is a message of hope. Look at verses four and five again. So this is contained in the gospel message, hope. Hope in the New Testament always refers to something that is expected or certain.

I shouldn't say always, but almost always, and in this case it certainly does. It's not an I hope so, because an I hope so kind of hope leads to uncertainty and anxiety. Have you ever gone into an exam thinking, I really hope I pass? Are you at peace about that? No. There's anxiety. There's uncertainty. I don't know if I'm going to pass, but I sure hope I do. That's, I hope so. And that's not the kind of hope that's being talked about here. The hope here is a hope that actually motivated love, not anxiety.

And this is a guarantee, we could say, of everything that God has laid up for us in heaven. Notice that this is not the hope of heaven as we sometimes think of it, just the hope or the assurance even of going to heaven one day, but this is the assurance of everything that heaven means for you. Everything laid up for you in heaven. Verse 12, if we jump down a little ways, verse 12 says, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

That's our hope, the inheritance. of the saints in light. And we won't take the time to expand on that this morning, but there is no question about it. The gospel promises this, and we can be sure of it. We don't have to wonder if we're going to receive it. And so the gospel is a message of hope. And when we say that, we mean that it is a message of assurance.

Notice that the Colossians' hope or assurance wasn't based on their walk. This is a really important point. It's actually the other way around. Look there in verse 4 and 5. because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. It was assurance that came first, and the love for the brethren or the Christ life flowed out of that. The Christian life flowed out of that assurance.

And people who add works to the gospel will always lack assurance of salvation. My brother, when we were up in Canada, showed me a clip of R.C. Spruill talking about hell, and in that, little clip, it was very evident that Sproul lacked assurance of salvation because he felt that he said, if I end up in hell, Spruill, right now, I don't know, frankly, if he ever put his faith in the gospel because the gospel that Spruill preached was not the grace of God alone. He preached all of the things that you must do to know that you have assurance.

And he didn't have it in this three-minute clip. I certainly hope, and this is a hope without assurance, I certainly hope that he did at some point in his life put his faith in the simple gospel message that Jesus did it all on the cross for him. But he didn't have that assurance. Why? because he attached, he got things backwards.

He attached the way we live our life to whether or not we have salvation. And in fact, those who teach this way teach that it's arrogant to have assurance of salvation, right? But think about that. The only way that being sure of your eternal salvation could be arrogance is if salvation depended on me. in some way, right? So in saying even that it's arrogant to be sure of your salvation, you're admitting that human merit must somehow be involved, okay?

But if you've put your faith in what God has done and what God has promised, then you're not arrogant to have assurance, to have confidence in your salvation. You're just resting at what God has said. And that's why we can have hope. Okay, we're confident that what God has promised, he will fulfill, not because we're worthy of it, but simply because he promised it and because he's provided everything necessary.

So we should have hope, which is complete and total assurance of what God has done and what he's provided and given to us through the gospel. Our fourth point is that the gospel must be shared. If people are ever going to come to salvation in Jesus Christ, the message of the gospel must somehow come to their ears. We already looked at the fact that the gospel message is conveyed through words. It's a message contained in words. But the message does no good if it never reaches the ears or the eyes, we could say, of the lost.

And we talked last week and a little this morning about how Epaphras had brought the message of the gospel to Colossae, and we're not exactly sure of the circumstances about how that happened. Like we said, it could have been in Acts 19 when Paul was teaching at Ephesus, that would seem likely, but it doesn't matter. However it happened, we know that Epaphras came to them with the message of the gospel. Right there in verse 7, it says, just as you learned it from Epaphras.

And that is an important takeaway from these verses. Because I have to honestly confess that I find it hard to share the gospel. I have all kinds of excuses and anxieties about sharing the gospel, but it's critical that we share the good news, that we actually share that message.

Jesus sent out the apostles with the gospel. Paul and Barnabas were sent out with the gospel. Paul sent out other believers with the gospel. Why? Because the message doesn't go out on its own. Romans 10 verses 14 through 15, now in context, dealing with the nation of Israel, but the principle is the same. It says, how then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent?

Just as it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things. You know, I think we have a lot more opportunities to share the gospel than we often think. And that's something that we can be praying about. How would the Lord have us share the gospel in this area, in our neighborhood, in our city? So that's a critical truth that we can glean from this passage. Just like the Colossians needed someone to bring the gospel message to them, people today need to hear the gospel.

And it can go out in all sorts of ways these days, can't it? We've got a lot of different ways to share the good news today, but it still needs to go out. It has to be shared. And point number five, the gospel must not only be shared, but the gospel must be understood. In verse six, Paul says that the gospel has been bearing fruit among the Colossians since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God in truth. And that's a mind word. It's literally the word to know, to know the grace of God in truth.

You know, and there's a common error that to really be saved, a person has to go through some emotional experience. If there are no tears, well, then maybe they didn't really get saved. If they didn't really feel badly about their sin or weep about what Jesus did for them, then maybe they didn't really believe the gospel. Now, there's nothing wrong with emotions, right? But we can never measure the genuineness of a person's salvation based on their emotional response.

The gospel message, as we said, is contained in words. And if you're nerdy, you could call it a propositional truth claim. It's simply a propositional truth claim, a truth claim contained in words, a proposition of truth, okay? It's just a statement of truth. Just a simple message about what God has done to provide salvation.

And that message has to be understood. So it's not a question of how a person feels about the gospel. The question is, do they actually understand it? The gospel must be understood. But of course, that's not enough to be saved, right? And that brings us to our final observation about the gospel. The gospel must be received by faith. But see why this is important, because the gospel, in order to be received by faith, has to be understood.

Okay? Understanding the gospel is not what saves us, but it's necessary in order to believe it. You're not just putting your faith in faith itself, right? You're putting your faith in the message, in the truth. We have to understand what's being stated and then we have to believe that it's true. That's the critical response on the part of man. There are plenty of people who have understood the gospel without believing it.

Hebrews 4.2, we've got this one on the screen. For indeed, we have had good news preached to us just as they also, but the words they heard did not profit them. Why? Because it was not united by faith in those who heard. So they heard it. And it's implied that they even understood what was being said, but they didn't believe it. Those who heard the gospel didn't believe it. And so, it's necessary to believe the gospel, simply to take God at His word about it.

Some people have called faith the open hand of the heart, and I think that's pretty good. Because faith is simply receiving from God what he has offered in the gospel. And we have to be really clear on this point, that not only is faith the required response to the gospel, it is the only response to the gospel. It's the only response that God will honor. And this goes back to that list of gospel appeals that Lance Latham gave us. with all of those appeals is that they invited some other response besides faith alone in Christ's finished work. Something that I can do for God, or asking God to do something for me that he hasn't already done. And we said that that denies grace. The only gospel response that's consistent with grace is to receive what God has already done, and to receive that by faith.

So those are the six points, and we could probably draw out more, but those are the six points that I wanted to draw out of this text about the gospel. One, the gospel is a message conveyed through words. Two, the gospel is a message of grace. The gospel is a message of hope or assurance. The gospel must be shared. The gospel must be understood, and the gospel must be received by faith.

And Paul's point, this is what we want to return to now. Why are we talking about the gospel? Because Paul talks about the gospel. What is his point? Why does he remind the Colossians about this? He reminds them about the message that was brought to them. He reminds them about the message that they understood and received by faith.

And his reason for doing that is that this is the only foundation for the Christian life. 1 Corinthians 3.11 says, for no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Attempting to enter into the Christian life on any other basis than faith in Jesus Christ and his finished work on the cross will not save a person. And only those who have responded by faith to the gospel will ever receive that gift of salvation. And it is only through faith in the gospel that a person enters into a living union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's the point. That's why Paul brings all of this up here at the beginning. Because if Christ is going to live his life through you and I, then we have to know that we have this living union with him. That leads to some really important points that I want to leave us with this morning.

First of all, have you put your faith in the gospel? The plain, simple gospel, no strings attached, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins personally, and that apart from anything that you could ever do to earn that or to repay that, Hey, you have salvation, that his work was enough. Have you received that? Have you put your faith in the gospel?

Or are you looking to your own works, your own effort, your own merit to prove whether you're truly saved? Because if you're looking to that, it calls into question whether you have really ever rested in the promise of the gospel. So that's a really important question that every single person needs to have settled in their mind. And it has to be settled before you can begin to grow in your Christian walk.

Because the next question is this, do you know that you have been united to Jesus as your very life? Are you depending on him to live his life through you? And then we could ask, what does that even mean? How does that work? Well, that's where Paul is gonna go in this letter, and that's where we're gonna go as we continue to study. But we have to have these issues settled up front.

Do you know, on the basis of the word of God, that you have salvation as a guarantee through Christ and his work on the cross? And then we can begin to move into Do you understand that on that basis you've been joined to Christ, that he is your life? And then, and only then can you begin to depend on him for the life that he will live through you.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gospel. We thank you for your gift of grace that is available to anyone who will believe. We thank you that on the cross, Jesus paid the sin penalty for every man, woman, and child who has ever lived and who will ever live.

Lord, we thank you that the message is not a message of faith plus works. It's a message of grace, pure and simple. And Lord, I pray that we would not confuse that. I pray that we wouldn't preach a message that denies and destroys grace. And I pray that we would be absolutely clear in our own hearts on the fact that through faith in the gospel, we have received the gift of salvation, eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And then on that basis, on that foundation of assurance, we can move forward into the Christian life, the life that only you can live through us because we begin to understand that the moment we put our faith in Jesus Christ, we entered into this living union with you, that Jesus Christ is our life. And Lord, I pray that we would each learn to depend on that, to trust in that. And Lord, I also pray this morning that we would see the urgency of the gospel, that we would see the need for the gospel message to go out in our day to the millions and hundreds of millions, billions of people, Lord, who have never received your free gift of salvation. Don't allow us to be apathetic about that. In Jesus' name, Amen.