What is on your own list right now — the one you wrote yourself and keep failing?

He came to faith as an adult, and one of the first things he read was Peter quoting Leviticus: *be holy, for I am holy.* His reaction was honest. *Whoa. Hold on a second. Be holy? That's a thing?* He knew he was many things. Holy was not one of them. So he did what most of us do. He built a list. Go to church. Feed the poor. Stop the Friday nights that ran till four in the morning. It was a reasonable list. It was even a good list. It failed. Not because he was lazy, but because he kept doing the very things he had already decided he would not do. He called it *the religion of Jay* — and he could not keep up with the religion of Jay. You have a list too. It may not look religious. Be more patient. Be less on your phone. Be the kind of person who has it together by now. You wrote it you

Where are you still living like you have to earn a place you have already been given?

There is a strange little moment in Exodus. Moses sets apart the equipment of the tabernacle, and Scripture calls it holy. The tongs are holy. The spoons are holy. The candelabras are holy. Sit with that. The spoons did not volunteer. They did not serve, or give, or try harder. They just sat there — and God called them holy. Which means holiness cannot be mainly about doing. If it were, a spoon could never qualify. Holiness is about being. It is a state, not a performance — the result of belonging to God, of being set apart by him and near to him. The spoons were holy because of whose they were and where they stood. This reframes the whole question. You have been asking *what do I have to do?* Paul is asking something else entirely: *why are you still living like someone who belongs to

What good thing have you been treating as the substance, when it was only ever pointing you to Christ?

The word Paul uses for *substance* is **soma**. Body. So the picture is not abstract. There is a body standing in the light, and it throws a shadow. The festivals, the food laws, the new moons, the Sabbaths, the whole apparatus — all of it is the shadow. Christ is the body casting it. A shadow is not a lie. It is real, and it tells you something true: someone is standing there. The Old Testament sacrifices were not a mistake. They were a shape on the ground pointing to the one who would come. But once the person walks into the room, you do not keep talking to the shadow. That is the strange thing the Colossians were being talked into — going back to the outline when they already had the person. And it is what we do when we would rather have a system than a Savior. A system is manageabl

What have you been straining to produce that you could instead receive by staying close to Christ?

Watch a branch closely and you will notice it never strains. It does not manufacture anything. It has exactly two jobs: stay attached, and hold what shows up. The fruit is the vine's work. The branch simply drinks. Psalm 1 says the same thing with a different picture — a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season, its leaf refusing to wither. Not a tree straining to produce. A tree standing where the water is. Now imagine that tree deciding it could do better. It pulls itself up, walks into the desert, and plants itself in the sand. Nothing about it has changed — same trunk, same roots, same branches. It shrivels anyway. Not because it stopped trying, but because it left the water. This is why *try harder* keeps failing you. It is not too demanding. It is aimed at the w

What would change this week if you stopped fighting that one sin and started feeding on Christ instead?

Two hundred years ago a Scottish preacher named Thomas Chalmers gave a sermon with a title worth remembering: *The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.* His argument was simple and it has outlived him. You do not get free of the thing that has you by gritting your teeth against it. You get free by coming to love something else more. Which means the honest diagnosis of the sin you keep returning to is not that you have insufficient willpower. It is that you have not yet seen Jesus as bigger than it. Somewhere in you, that thing still looks better than he does. That is uncomfortable, but it is far better news than *try harder*. Willpower runs out. Affection does not have to be manufactured — it grows by looking. So the answer to a week of failure is not a stricter list. It is a longer loo

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Greater Than (Week 5)

Greater Than Your Religion

Colossians 2:16-23

Jay Reynardus Sunday, August 9, 2026

Icebreaker

Everybody has a list they wrote for themselves — be more patient, be less on your phone, be the person who has it together by now. What is one item on yours, and how long has it been there?