COLORADO SPRINGS, Co. — Audio of the last sermon preached by Officer Garrett Swasey, who was killed last week during a shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood facility, shows the pastor presenting the message of the gospel.
As previously reported, Garrett Swasey, 44 and a married father of two, has served for seven years at Hope Chapel in Colorado Springs. He spent six of those years on the police force of the University of Colorado.
A biography on the Hope Chapel website outlines that Swasney provided oversight to the congregation’s Care Groups, and spent time “sharing his teaching gift as part of the teaching team and sharing his guitar skills on the worship team.” He had preached to the congregation the Sunday before last, as well as the week prior.
“We were once enemies of God. To truly grasp this, we need to understand man in his natural state is opposed to God,” Swasey taught during his final sermon. “[I]t’s important also to understand that God is opposed to man because of sin. So there’s this clash going on between God and man because of sin.”
“With God we have this mentality we don’t want to change. I like my sin! I enjoy my sin!” he declared. “So in the midst of all of that we decide to change God!”
Swasey noted that men often do not understand how serious sin is to God.
“People say, ‘I’m a halfway decent person! God’s going to let everyone into Heaven, because He’s so loving and merciful,'” he explained. “This really diminishes the idea of what sin is, and how it impacts our relationship with God and how opposed He is to it.”
“We tend to want to do our own thing — ‘rugged individualism.’ But in spiritual matters we are utterly dependent on Christ,” Swasey continued. “We cannot stand before God on our own merits!”
He explained that man’s life is not to be lived for himself, but to the glory of God.
“Our objective is not to bring glory to ourselves but to bring glory to God. How? By transforming our lives through the gospel. Apart from that it can’t be done, not in our own strength,” Swasey said. “Everything we have comes from the Lord and everything we have should glorify the Lord. And everything we need is provided by God because Christ is sufficient.”
“We must consider the object of our consideration,” he proclaimed. “Let us exhort one another to consider Christ, not as we would imagine Him but as He is written about in the Scriptures. And finally, let us not harden our hearts to the gospel!”
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