Sermon Tone Analysis

*MAGNIFYING CHRIST*

*SUNDAY MARCH 2ND, 2003* \\ \\

When kids are real little, maybe not even a year old, they can barely speak.

Parents will often ask them a question.

They put their kids through a routine.

Especially if you're a firstborn, you have to go through these kinds of routines a lot.

One of the questions parents ask their kids over and over is, how big are you?

Dozens of times sometimes they'll ask a kid, week after week, month after month, so that you think the kid would get sick of it: "How big are you?"

And kids always give the same response.

Anybody know what they say?

So big.

That's right, kind of a sing-song and with the hand deal -- so big.

Kids say, "I'm so big.

I'm enormous.

I'm huge.

There's no telling how big I may be, just vast."

Now, this is not a scientific response, of course.

You could not use it in every context.

Like if your spouse were to say, "How big do my hips look to you?" you wouldn't want to say, "So big."

But with little kids we want them to say that because we want them to know they're growing.

We want them to think of themselves as becoming increasingly independent and strong.

We don't want little kids to think of themselves as small or weak.

We don't want them to lack confidence because we know the way they think about themselves matters.

It's going to get reflected over and over in the way they live.

The way they think of themselves is going to get reflected in the way they live.

Now,           this morning we're going to devote this time to maybe the most important question in the world, and the question is, how big is your God?

That's right, he is so big.

You don't have to answer that one, but that's not a bad answer to the question.

How big is Christ in your life?

Because friends, I am deeply and passionately convinced that the way that you live will be a direct consequence of the size of your God.

The problem that most of us have is that our God is too small.

We are not convinced that we are absolutely perfectly safe in the hands of a fully competent, all-knowing, ever-present God.

We're not convinced of that in our bones.

There was a movie a few years ago -- some of you may remember it -- called "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

They were normal-sized kids, but they got shrunk way down.

I think if some of our lives were made into a movie, the truth of it is, we've kind of shrunk God down.

"I have made you too small in my eyes," goes one of our songs around here.

Now, tomorrow morning when you wake up, what's going to happen if you live with a shrunken God? You're going to live in a constant state of fear and anxiety because everything depends on you.

Your mood is going to be governed by your circumstance.

When you have a chance to share your faith, you're going to tend to shrink back because what if you're rejected or what if you can't find the right words?

It all depends on you.

You're not going to be able to be generous in your giving because your financial security depends on you.

When you need to give somebody a strong word of confrontation or challenge you're going to be likely to pull your punch because if you don't live in the security of a big God's acceptance of you, you become a slave to what others think.

If you live tomorrow with a shrunken God, when you face the temptation to speak deceitful words to your kids, you'll probably do it.

When you have a chance to get credit for something at work that doesn't really belong to you, you'll probably do it because you won't have the trust in a big God who sees all in secret and one day will reward.

If somebody gets mad at you or disapproves of you, there's a good chance you'll get twisted all up in knots because you don't have the security of knowing that if a giant God loves you, what difference does it make what anybody else thinks?

When human beings shrink God, friends, they offer prayers without faith, worship without awe, service without joy, and suffering without hope.

It results in fear, retreat, loss of vision and failure to persevere.

The little God syndrome is misery and tragedy.

A lot of us go through days with a little God.

Now, it's against this backdrop, this tragic scenario, that the writers of Scripture never tire of telling us the God we serve is no little God, no tribal god like the people in ancient times were used to thinking of -- just little tribal gods.

There's another movie that came out a few years ago called "Big" about a little kid who magically becomes big, fully grown.

Is your God a shrunken God, a small God?

Or is he big?

As big as the God of the Bible?

In all the New Testament, I don't know that there's another passage that gives us a greater picture of the exalted Christ than this section in Colossians.

So I'm going to read it.

Actually the first set of verses, 15 through 20, are almost universally understood among New Testament scholars to have been a hymn -- such exalted language and careful pictures of this cosmic Christ that it was used as a hymn to express praise, wonder and awe of the early church.

Most likely Paul writes it here because at Colosse, there was a heresy this church faced.

We know some from just careful study of the book that among other things it tended to view Jesus as just one among many gods.

There was a belief system in those days, the belief that God was purely Spirit, which we believe also, but that matter, physical creation was evil, was bad, and so God would have nothing to do with it.

Therefore, the idea that Jesus could have become God made flesh was unthinkable to them.

So they kind of believed in Jesus, but he wasn't a big Jesus.

He wasn't God.

Well, in our day, friends, we wouldn't subscribe to that kind of heresy.

We don't think of ourselves as being heretical people, but I think a lot of us live with a kind of implicit heresy that shrinks Jesus down.

Let's read Colossians 1:15 and following, and just let the significance of each line sink in.

This is majestic language, friends.

Speaking of Christ now.

/"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him.

/

/"He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

/

/"For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross."/

Now, that's the hymn, and then 21 through 23 Paul is applying it now to the church at Colosse.

/"And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him -- provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.

I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel."

/

Friends, how big is your God?

Several years ago now, I was walking with some elders from the church that I used to serve in Southern California.

We were walking near the ocean in Newport Beach, California.

As we were walking, one of the places that we went past in Newport Beach was a bar, and there was a fight that was going on in the bar.

It spilled out the door like an old western or something, several guys who were beating up on one guy.

He was bleeding from his forehead.

It looked pretty bad.

Well, we had a sense, "We've got to do something," so we went over to break it up, just three of us.

We were elders and a pastor at a church, didn't have much experience in breaking up fights spilling out of bars.

I missed that class in seminary.

I must have been gone the day they did the "how to break up a fight spilling out of a bar" class.

So we went over there, but I don't think we were very intimidating.

We did the best we could, but I don't think it was like Arnold showing up or something.

But while we were there, these guys are looking at us and all of a sudden there was fear in their eyes, and they started to slink away.

Then we looked behind us and saw that out of that bar had come the biggest guy I think I have ever seen.

He was literally, I think, about six foot-seven, weighed probably 300 pounds.

It looked like two percent body fat to me.

It looked like if Hercules ever married Xena, the Warrior Princess, and they had a child, you know, this is what it would look like.

We called him "Mongo," but not to his face.

We made that one up later.

He just stood there and flexed.

All of a sudden, my attitude was transformed.

I said to those guys, "You better not let us catch you here again, friends," bad news.

We were different people.