Good morning. How are we?
If you don't know me, my name's Prit.
I'm usually in Hemel Hempstead in our Versa Hemel site.
So if you haven't met me, please come and say hello.
I'd love that. And if you've been with us for a
while, you'll know we're in this series called Rooted.
Yeah. Is that news to anyone?
And we're looking through the book of Colossians.
And one thing if you've been around that you'll have noticed
is that all of us who have preached, we've really, really
lent into this like plant analogy.
So I've been on BBC Bite Size and I've been having to read the
Bible and learnt my biology and about how plants work because
it's not my Forte. Some people love gardening.
Any gardeners in the room? Anyone love plants?
Yeah. My wife hasn't got her hand up
so she's just give her, she's definitely one of those she
loves not a gardener, but she loves house plants.
She's got all of them. She's got every house plant
there is. She's got names for them all.
She's got an app. She loves it.
And one of her favorite places to go is a garden centre.
Any garden centre fans in the room?
Yeah. And now me, as someone who's
just. I'm trying to be a good husband,
you know, occasionally I'll try and treat my wife.
So we'll go on a little date to a garden centre and I might say
this, and this is a very dangerous phrase, lads.
All right. It's a very dangerous phrase.
But I might say T pick something that you'd like, whatever you'd
like, within reason, whatever you'd like, and I'll get it for
you, you know, So we walk around, we see all these like
beautiful flowers, all these like just gorgeous house plants
or like, like she loves her hanging basket.
And I'm like, whatever you want, pick anything.
And do you know what she picks more often than not?
Soil, soil, like literally a bag of dirt.
That's what she picks. I don't know, right?
But but she was explaining to me why she does this right, because
she understands something that that before I before I went on
BBC bite size, I didn't understand.
And it's this did you know that if a plant is rooted in
unhealthy soil, what happens is you have to help me hit tea.
The the soil becomes what is it hydrophobic, which we all know
what that word means, but but if you don't hydrophobic, it's when
it's, it basically repels water. So it means that the the, the
plant, the very thing that it's rooted in is now stopping it
from receiving water that it needs for life.
And So what tea does with her plants and what we're going to
see in this passage, what Paul unpacks, is this process of
being uprooted from unhealthy soil.
And then I'm using the language re rooted into new healthy soil.
And and and I want to put to you there's three stages to this
that Paul's going to unpack. So stage 1 is that, and I want
you to imagine, right, like anyone got a house plant at home
in a little pot. Yeah, I want you to imagine,
right, that God, the good gardener or the good, I don't
know what the term is for indoor plants, but the goods indoor
gardener, imagine he that you're this plant and he's, he's
pulling you up from this unhealthy soil.
So that's stage 1. He's re rooting you in new soil.
And then stage 2 is all the unhealthy bits of you that have
come from that have developed from this unhealthy state you
were in. He's just pruning and he's
cutting off. That's stage 2 pruning.
And then stage 3, you're in new healthy soil, you're pruned,
you're renewed, and you're ready to thrive.
Shall we dive in to scripture? Who's got a Bible, like a
physical Bible with them? Any physical Bibles in the room?
Great, you guys are winning. You guys are winning.
OK, alright, so we're in Colossians 3 from verse one it
says since then you have been raised with Christ.
Set your hearts on things above where Christ is seated at the
right hand of God. Set your minds on things above,
not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is
now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life
appears, then also you will appear with him in glory.
Amen. All right, there's something you
need to know before we can go any further with this.
There's something that you need to know.
And if you've not heard this before, then what I'm about to
tell you can change your entire life.
Did you know that you have been made in the image of a creator
God who loves you and designed you to exist in his presence?
Yeah. But all of us, me included,
especially me, we've been corrupted and polluted by this
thing called sin, which which is which is just like ways in which
we've we've we've made-up. We've made a decision where
we've gone. You know what I don't think I
need? I don't think I need you, God.
I think I know better than you. So I'm going to live.
I'm going to live without you. And So what we do when we live
like that is we choose to live without the God who gives us
life. And so that leads to death.
But I want to tell you this morning that God loves you so,
so much that he came to earth to be with us in the form of his
Son, Jesus. And he wasn't polluted by sin,
but what he did was He took your sin and he put it on himself.
And then he went to the cross and he died for you.
And then he rose again, proving that he is more powerful than
death, that he is a life giving God.
And now today, right now in this room, he is here and he is
offering you that free gift of life.
Isn't that good news? That's good news.
You know, we were living in a way that would lead to death,
but God gives us a way back to life.
And let me tell you that way isn't just a way, it's a way.
It's the truth. It's the life.
And it's not an it, it's a who. It's Jesus.
And you know, the Bible says we can only encounter if we want to
get back to that place where we exist in the presence of God.
The only way is through Jesus. And it gets even better than
that. If you've never met Jesus, well,
today you can and you should know that he loves you more than
anyone. If you think of the person in
your life that you think loves you the most, do you know
there's another? And he loves you even more than
that. And it's Jesus and he's
desperate to meet you. And so we'd love this morning to
give you the opportunity to make a decision to meet him.
Very exciting, right? Very exciting.
And listen, many of us in this room, we've made that decision
already. And, and Paul's writing to
people who had made that decision.
And what he's talking about now is, well, you've made the
decision. You've decided that you want to
live with this God who gives you life.
But now what? Like, what do you do?
How do you live? How should you walk?
And so he kind of sums it up in that one line.
It says, set your minds on things above, not on earthly
things or, or to use, let's say, the Rooted series translation.
All right, it's, it's saying don't root your life in earthly
things. Instead, root your life in
things of God's Kingdom, things that are above.
In other words, like don't, don't, don't chase the things
that the world chases because it's not going to satisfy you.
It's not going to lead to life. There's a famous author, David
Foster Wallace put it like this. He said if you worship money and
things like if they are where you tap real meaning in life,
then you'll never have enough. Never feel you have enough.
It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty
and sexual allure and you'll always feel ugly.
And when time and age start showing, you will die a million
deaths before they finally fly on you.
He goes on to say worship power. You know, you'll feel like
you'll feel weak and afraid. Worship intellects.
You'll feel stupid and a fraud. What he's saying is, you know
the world celebrates and and champions these things.
It tells you to go after all these things.
But actually those things are the things that consume you and
hold you prisoner. They claim to give life, but
they lead to emptiness and death.
God has so much more than you, more for you.
So they live for him, live for the Kingdom.
And, and I hear you ask, what does it, what does that mean?
What do you mean live for the Kingdom?
Well, let me say it like this, right?
So Paul, Paul says we were raised with Christ and, and as
part of this thing we do, which is learning to be a follower of
Jesus. And John Marcomi uses the word
apprentice. And, and, and, and those of you
who've ever been an apprentice will know, well what you do is
you watch how the person you're learning from lived and then you
try and live like them. So if we were to watch how Jesus
lived, and let's look specifically at how Jesus lived
like after he'd been resurrected, right?
So Paul says you've been raised with Christ.
Well, let's look at how Christ lived after he was raised.
Well, what's the first thing he did?
He left the tomb. He ran out of that grave as we
sang earlier, you know now what? And I loved what Ezzy was
saying. Like, like many of us, we have
places of death in our lives. And for some of us, it's a
choice to walk out or it's a journey to walk out.
For some of us, it's, it's what what we need is for God to lead
us out. And we need to have the faith
that he can do that. I don't want to tell you that he
can this morning, whatever those places are.
And secondly, Jesus spent his time being weird and ministering
to his disciples, right? I want you to look around the
room, right? Just keep, just look around.
Just have a little little to your left and your right behind
you, right? These are his disciples church.
We are we are then all right. And so if Jesus spent time being
with and ministering to his disciples friends, we need to do
the same with each other, you know, and let me just plug space
this Tuesday evening in this very room.
Do you know your way here? Which all of you do because
you're here. Come on Tuesday night.
And it's a great opportunity for us to just have literally have
space to just be with and minister with each other.
OK. And thirdly, Jesus lived in
supernatural power with the ability to do impossible things.
Did you know that you live with supernatural power and the
ability to do the impossible through in partnership with the
Holy Spirit? So let me ask you this, Are you
doing the stuff as John Wimber would say?
You're doing the stuff, you know, everyone gets to play like
close your eyes for a minute. All right, Imagine being in this
place and and everyone here is just alive and abuzz with
stories of healing and a miraculous like signs and
wonders are bursting out of us, bursting into our communities,
bursting through this church that everyone in Saint Albans
and all of Hertfordshire know. If you need a miracle, you come
to Verso Vineyard. I'm preaching to myself here
too, right? But but, but what if those
things weren't stuff we did on the side?
What if our whole lives were centred around that?
So let's let the Father pull up our roots from the earthly soil
and now put them in the new Kingdom healthy soil.
All right, so .1 the first stage was what we are re that was like
10% confidence, but we'll get there.
That's good. Re rooted.
Stage 2 is pruned. OK, so we're uprooted from the
world re rooted in the Kingdom, but there are still behaviours
if you like, like leaves and branch.
Does the plant have branches? What's it called?
Stem. I don't know whatever.
See, I don't, I'm not, I'm looking at my wife here.
But you've got branches and leaves that are still kind of
like sick and and withering because they they, they, they
come from this. Oh, so So what do we do?
Well, this is what Paul says. Put to death.
He likes the extreme, doesn't he?
He just goes for it. Put to death.
Therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature, sexual
immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is
idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of
God is coming. You used to walk in these ways
in the life you once lived, but now you must also rid yourselves
of all such things as these anger, rage, malice, slander and
filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other since
you've taken off your old self with it's practices.
Put to death. Eradicate.
You know the Greek word is necroon which which which
literally means to deaden. I love that to deprive of life,
to cut it off. It's extreme in, in other words,
like, like there's some stuff in your old life that you can't
take with you. When you see your new life, you
can't do it. You've got to cut it off.
And, and that first list, you'll notice it's all kind of like
issues of the heart. You know, some of those things
that they, they might they might stay hidden, but they can tear
us up inside and they can keep us isolated thinking that we're
a fraud. Like we walk into a place like
this and we think, man, if only they knew what what I've done
here. If only they, they knew my
secret sin, like they wouldn't love me anymore.
They cast me out. I want to tell you that's a lie,
by the way. And and if you're in that place
this morning, like, like, bless you and there's freedom for you
this morning. And I'm going to do it.
I'm going to talk about sexual immorality, if that's all right.
Is that all right? Yeah, and, and, and, and I'm
going to skip the like the preamble on the with stats on
how big a problem this like we all know this is a, this is a
problem, right? Like it's a serious thing, but
it's also, it's unfortunately, it's really commonplace in our
in our world and, and even in the church, whether it's
pornography, premarital sex, sex outside of marriage.
But what I want to do this morning is look at what Jesus
says about this so that you might hear what he's saying to
you today. So we're going to start in John
chapter 8. You maybe, you know the scene,
it's where the religious leaders have brought forward this woman
who's caught in the acts of adultery and they bring her in
front of Jesus and they say, shouldn't we stone her?
Oh, shouldn't we stone her? That's what the law says.
We should stone her. OK, well, and we need to picture
the scene like, this woman is in an unbearable situation, All
right? Like, like her sin, her shame
exposed to the crowd. Like, imagine the visceral rage
of the crowd directed at this poor girl, you know, Imagine the
shouts of shame on you. You've let us down.
No one giving her a chance to speak.
No one giving her a chance to share her side of the story or
even repent, say sorry, no opportunity.
And she was probably still naked.
She was probably alone. She's accused, as far as she
knew, she was about to die. So what does Jesus do?
How does he respond? Well, we read he does this
right? He gets down on the ground and
he starts writing. And I just imagine, I want you
to picture again, imagine the crowd.
All of a sudden they're like, what's he doing?
What's he, what's he writing? And and so what's he done in
that moment? Well, I want to put to you that
what he's done is all those eyes that were accusing and piercing
this woman all of a sudden now are on Jesus.
And so thus we see his mercy. He says to this woman, I see
you. I see all these eyes looking and
accusing you. Let me take them from you, put
them on me. So first thing, mercy, and then
secondly, he says something so profound to all of these
accusers that they actually all start one by one, they start
walking off convicted of their own, convicted of their sin,
right? And so all, all of a sudden what
happens is now the scene has changed and it's just this poor
woman and Jesus. And so thus he's, he's given
this woman mercy and now he's created a moment of intimacy
where it's just her and Jesus. And then he asks this question.
He says, woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?
No one, Sir, She said, then neither do I condemn you.
Go now and leave your life of sin.
And there we have it, Grace, right?
Mercy, intimacy, and now grace. That is what Jesus is offering
you today. And let me tell you, like if you
are stuck in that place of sin this morning, the very first
step and my invitation for you today is to tell someone.
When you tell someone, it takes what's hidden.
It brings it into the light. When it's hidden, it has power.
When it's exposed, it has no power over you.
You know you won't find yourself naked and exposed in front of a
whole load of people. That's not how Jesus operates.
That's not how the Kingdom operates.
What you'll find is mercy, intimacy with Jesus and grace.
And then your family are going to help you walk in in in a new
lifestyle. And that lifestyle is the
Kingdom of lifestyle. And let me tell you this all
right, Jesus doesn't lower the bar.
He doesn't lower the bar. In fact, if anything, he raises
the bar in Matthew chapter 5 from verse 27, Jesus says, you
know, you've heard it was said you should not commit adultery.
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has
already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Can we just take a moment to just appreciate how serious that
is, how, how high the bar is? And, and you know, the fact that
our society is so hyper sexualised, like everywhere you
look, it's like, and yet that doesn't mean that the bar is
lowered for us. Like it's hard.
And maybe what you do when you respond to this and when you
read something like this is you go, oh, right, well, I just
really need to try not to sin. I really need to try hard not,
not to do that thing, whatever it is.
And so you try really hard not to do it, but then you get
tempted and then you do it. So you feel really guilty.
And so you go, right, well, I really need to try not to do it
then. But then you get tempted, you do
it, you feel guilty, so you say you're not going to do it.
And so this spiral happens and you just feel more and more
guilty and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and you
feel more and more trapped, stuck in this like, don't do it,
don't do it, don't do it kind of reality.
And, and hey, we're talking about sexual morality, but this
applies to, to any of those things, impurity, evil desires,
greed. How on earth do we break out of
that? How do we overcome this?
I'll tell you a story that that T and I endured in our last
home. We every time we went into our
bathroom, every time we stood on a particular tile, we noticed
that a little bit of liquid was kind of like seeping up from
under the cracks. So we, we did the responsible
thing. We called a plumber.
We said, hey, would you just tell us what that is?
It's probably water, isn't it? And and he was like, well, in
order to really investigate what I need to do is we need to take
out the bathtub. I'm going to cut a Long story
short, whatever the worst scenario you're imagining right
now. Yes, it was that.
And, and I'll just add one more detail.
The other side of our bathroom wall was, was a bar and, and
specifically the the bathroom of that bar.
Yeah. So some, let's just say there's
some stuff that we didn't want to come up in our bathroom was,
was coming up. And yeah, yeah.
And, and, and our plumber generally, he, he said to me, I
used to work in drainage. This is still the foulest thing
I've ever seen. So, so, and listen, this stuff
was probably coming up for a long time, but maybe even years.
There was no smell, no sign of it because it was all hidden
under this bathtub. Why am I telling you this
horrible story? You know, there are things that
feed us or habits in our lives. They're a bit like that bathtub.
Can I say you something? There's nothing wrong with
having a bathtub. It really isn't.
In fact, I'd say it's probably a good thing to have a bathtub.
But sometimes those habits, even though in and of themselves they
are, they are, they are fine. What they do is they cover the
mess and the stuff that we need to get rid of.
And so sometimes what it is that we need to do is actually we
need to RIP out some of the some, some of the stuff and some
of those habits in our lives so that we can get to the mess and
so the Lord can do a deep clean. That that passage in Matthew
continues that says, if your right eye can cause the Jews to
stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.
It's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your
whole body to be thrown into hell.
You know, for some of us, we need to gouge out Instagram,
throw it away. Maybe it's alcohol, maybe it's
certain TV shows or just like the music, like the things we
consume. You know, like I say, they're
not bad in and of themselves, but but for some of those
things, actually, we need to move our guardrail to the other
side of those things. And in other words, like prune,
prune the leaf from the branch. Does that make sense?
Amazing. Paul.
Paul lists off some things. Also, the second list is kind of
all about things like like how we live life together, like
anger. So we need to cut off anger,
rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying.
And look, we're all on a journey.
So we, we should have grace for each other when this stuff does
seep out. But but I want to say like we
shouldn't be complacent in trying to eradicate these things
from our lives just because maybe we think, well, they're
small sins. Everyone does that.
Like we should pursue purity. And, and let me just pick up on,
on one of those right on filthy language.
I think Jesus heart is that he wants us to be people who don't
do that, who, who don't use filthy language and we're
different from the world. You know, like I say, we, we we
apprentice under Jesus. We try and live like him and we
never see Jesus swear or use filthy language in the Bible.
I mean, sometimes we see him with some pretty impressive put
downs. Like one minute he calls Peter
like the rock from which he's going to build the church and
the next minute he says, get behind me, Satan.
Like sometimes I think when we stub our toe, instead of saying,
oh, you know, we need to just say get behind me, Satan.
And he had some pretty iconic put downs.
Like he, he called the Pharisees a brood of Vipers.
Yeah. It's like, it's like, like
offspring of, of snakes. I I wonder, like if you, if
you're someone who swears and you're trying not to, maybe the
if you think of the last person you swore at, maybe instead of
think about what would have happened if instead of you
saying, oh, you and whatever you said, maybe you could say, oh,
you offspring of a snake and see, see how see how that would
go down just anyway, the point is guardrails, guardrails is the
point. All right, so stage 1 was what
we are re routed. Love it.
And now even louder. Stage 2 was love it.
OK, stage 3 we're nearly there renewed.
So Paul says stop lying since you've taken off your old self
with its practices and have put on the new self which has been
renewed in the image, in the knowledge of in the image of its
creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew,
circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian sky then slave or
free, but Christ is all and is in all.
OK, put, put off the, the, the language Paul uses is like
taking off, taking something off, like clothing, like taking
off a jacket and putting on a new jacket.
In other words, to say like the inwards, the interior change has
been accomplished already by Christ, like you are already a
new creation because of what Christ did on the cross.
But now, now that we're rerouted and, and we're pruned, it's like
we, it's like we're living that out and our outward lives are
reflecting that inward change. So, so I want you to imagine
that it's, it's a bit like this, like, so I mean, tea and I have
moved house since. If you ever come to our house,
just don't be worried about it. We've never had any issues with
this bathroom. It's great.
But I, but I want you to imagine, like imagine I go home
this afternoon and then out of nowhere, the previous owner, the
guy we bought the house off like waltzes in and says, get your,
get your feet off the sofa, change the channel.
I don't want to, I don't want to watch football.
Get me a beer. Can you imagine how weird that
would be? I've I would look him in the
eyes, I'd say get out, you offspring of a snake.
And, and because because you don't live here anymore, you're
not well, you know, this isn't your home.
NT Wright says when a tide of passion or a surge of anger is
felt, it must be dealt with as the alien intruder it really is
and turned out of the house as having no right to be there at
all, let alone to be given orders.
Like, it's all linked. We, you know, when we're
uprooted from earthly things and rerooted into heavenly things
like, like, like what we're pursuing is different.
And because what we're pursuing is different, the way we behave
and, and, and, and the way we live with each other is
different. And because the way we live with
each other is different, we're a renewed new people living out
this new creation reality reflecting the image of the one
in in whose image we're made. And it gets better because as we
do that, our old worldly divisions fall off like the
things that maybe once divided us no longer do.
So we become a united people. Like, doesn't the world need
unity right now? What if we couldn't we be those
people? And you know, when our
identities are no longer rooted in our worldly positions and
instead of rooted in the one who unites us all, you know we move
from entitlement to service. What a beautiful picture.
Serving each other, serving our communities, serving the nations
and the Kingdom. Friends, let's set our minds on
heavenly things, allowing the Lord to re root us in soil that
gives us life. And let's allow the good
gardener to prune us, cutting off the things of our old lives.
And in doing so, let's become a renewed people, living lives
that reflect that we are new creations made in the image of
God, united in the Kingdom. Why don't we stand?