Alive in Christ: Who is Jesus to You?

Order of Service:

Welcome
Song of Praise  “Mighty To Save”
Call to Worship Psalm 54:1-7
Song of Praise  “The Church’s One Foundation”
Confession of Faith Psalm 23
Song of Praise ) “Lord I Need You”
Prayer of Adoration
Greet One Another
Testimony of God’s Grace
Prayer of Intercession
Giving of God’s Tithe and Our Offerings
Song of Preparation  “Heal Us Emmanuel”
Scripture Reading     Colossians 2:6-15
Sermon Craig Swartz   “Alive in Christ: Who is Jesus to you?”
Prayer of Commitment
Song of Response  “How Marvelous”

Benediction

SERMON NOTES

” ALIVE IN CHRIST: WHO IS JESUS TO YOU?”

Thomas Merton:

“We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.”

1st main point

WE HAVE BEEN  IN HIM

Colossians 2:11-12

Deuteronomy 30:6

Augustine:

“Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us. All these good things, and all our security, are rightly found only and completely in him.”

2 Corinthians 5:17-18

2nd main point

WE HAVE BEEN  BY HIM

Colossians 2:13

Rock of Ages:

“Not the labor of my hands could fulfill Thy laws’ demands. Could my zeal no respite know; could my tears forever flow.

All for sin could not atone; Thou must save and Thou alone.

Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling.

Naked come to Thee for dress; helpless look to Thee for grace.

Foul I to the fountain fly; wash me, Savior, or I die.”

Micah 7:18-19

J. B. Phillips:

“He has forgiven you all your sins:  Christ has utterly wiped out the damning evidence of broken laws and commandments which always hung over your heads, and has completely annulled it by nailing it over his own head on the cross.”

Martin Luther said:

“It is true, every word of it, but write across it all:  ‘The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.”

3rd main point

WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH HIM

Romans 8:1

Psalm 130:3

Colossians 2:15

Jim Elliot:

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”