The Gospel at Work
Colossians 1:1-8
Textual Introduction: This morning we are beginning a study of the Letter to the Colossians. Before we begin let me touch on a couple of points. First, I see no reason to abandon the traditional view which says the letter was one of the Prison Epistles written by Paul from Rome about AD 62, give or take a year. Second, while I tend to accept the view that Paul wrote to warn the Colossians away from a newly formed heresy which would have corrupted the essence of the Christian message, I don't intend to spend much time discussing it on Sunday mornings. I may elaborate during our Sunday evening meetings but even then it won't dominate the discussion.
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If you should travel to Turkey you might wish to visit the ruins of Colossae, but let me warn you, you won't see much. Anything of interest and value has been carted off by residents of local villages. Your travel agent might book you into the five-star hotel in Denizli called the Colossae Thermal Hotel but it has nothing to do with the ancient city to which Paul wrote.
The truth is, no self-respecting first-century travel agent would have sent you to Colossae, for by the time Paul wrote his letter the city's glory days were past. It popularity had been eclipsed by its neighbors Hieropolis and Laodicea.
How can a letter written to a first-century church in a backwater town in the Lycus Valley of Asia Minor have relevance to those of us living in the early days of the twenty-first century?
To understand we have to recall that these were the formative days of Christianity. At the time Paul wrote it's unlikely there were any second- generation Christians in this little church. No one could run down to the local WaI-Mart to pick up a copy of the New Testament.
Fortunately there were trustworthy preachers and teachers who tried to present the Christian message with integrity. The Colossian church had been founded by one of these, Epaphras. Unfortunately, there were also teachers who were not so trustworthy.
Colossae was located in a hotbed of religious ideas. It was common for people there to try to add notions borrowed from other religions to their own. Even the Jews in the Lycus valley had fallen into this trap. Influenced by non-Biblical thinking, some of them developed an unhealthy fascination with angels, a problem which Paul would mention.
In the atmosphere of Colossae it was inevitable that someone would try to mingle the fundamentals of Christianity and the teachings of some of the Greek religions.
I won't go into all the details at this point, but it seems apparent the Colossian church did face some teachers whose notions ran so contrary to the gospel preached by Paul, Timothy, and Epaphras that the Christians were shaken and unnerved. Using the clues Paul gives us it's possible to detect some of the elements of this false teaching and I'll point them out as we go through the letter.
The good news is, these false teachers apparently hadn't yet been successful when Paul wrote Colossians. The bad news is, as a result of their efforts to undermine the gospel the church experienced what David Garland has called "a crisis of confidence."
What shape did this crisis of confidence take?
Their confidence in Christ had been shaken. The missionaries had presented Christ as the incarnate Son of God. They argued that he was the long-awaited "Anointed One," the Messiah, the Redeemer who had been sent from God to undo the work of sin. He was God in human flesh. He turned the apparent defeat of Good Friday into the victory of Easter morning.
Furthermore, these earliest preachers had said Jesus would be the ultimate Victor in the conflict of good and evil. They taught their converts the earliest of Christian Creeds: "Jesus is Lord." By this they confirmed his deity and right to be worshipped.
Now, for some reason, the Christians in Colossae had begun to doubt this. Some may have even begun to wonder if Jesus could deliver on his promise of salvation.
Their confidence in their salvation had been shaken. Mark this down, it is important, you will hear me say it again: If you diminish the Savior, you will inevitably diminish the salvation he brings.
At one time the Colossian Christians believed their sins had been fully and completely dealt with. Now, they began to wonder if that was so. To borrow Paul's language, they believed they were spiritually incomplete, that the old bills of sin remained unpaid.
Their confidence in the Spirit was shaken. I'm being a little daring to say that because the Holy Spirit is mentioned only once in the epistle. Still, I'm not sure how else to put it.
Some of the Colossians seem to have come to a point where they were tempted to rely upon the power of rules and taboos to produce Christian conduct rather than the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. As a result what had once been the joyous pursuit of Christlikeness had become a drudging, tedious surrender to legalism.
Now, let's get back to the question I asked at the beginning: How can a letter written to a first-century church in a backwater town in the Lycus Valley of Asia Minor have relevance to those of us living in the early days of the twenty-first century?
What Paul has to say to the Colossian church is relevant because we, too, face something of a crisis of confidence.
Allow me to draw just one comparison. We, too, have begun to doubt what we have long believed about Jesus Christ. For centuries we have joined in spirit, if not in practice, those who recited the ancient creed:
I believe in ... Jesus Christ, [God's] only Son, our Lord, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
Today, every affirmation of that statement is challenged. You are bombarded regularly with reports of supposedly scientific studies which
suggest Jesus was simply an itinerant magician, or shaman, or story-teller who ran afoul of the law and was executed. One highly regarded scholar, who regularly appears on A&E and the History Channel, tells us that the story of the resurrection emerged after Jesus body, which had been buried in a shallow grave, was eaten by wild dogs.
We're told that preaching the gospel is the height of arrogance. What Paul calls "the message of truth" (vs. 5) is ridiculed by those who tell us there is no such thing as truth. Those who promote the self-contradictory, post-modernist chant "there is no absolute truth" have been so successful that many Christian young people can't bring themselves to say the gospel is absolutely true. They struggle with the idea of missions, wondering if we have any business trying to change other people's ways of belief.
What Paul writes to the Colossians will speak to us just as surely as it spoke to that little first-century congregation.
We can learn from Paul's approach to the Colossian crisis of confidence. How he does so may seem strange to us, even rude at times. H. Dermot McDonald commented on Paul's style in this letter: "There is therefore no timidity or hesitancy in his letter. There is, rather, a holy boldness, an almost stark brusqueness both in the tone and the tempo of his writing."
Paul will challenge us to be bold in a culture which treats religious beliefs like items on a smorgasbord where you may take what appeals to you and leave the rest behind.
At the same time, Paul will challenge us to be humble for he will remind us that we would not know the truth if God had not told us.
It's with that embodiment of truth called the gospel that Paul begins to rebuild the confidence of the Colossians. It's a good place for us to start as well.
When we examine what happens when the gospel is at work we will have a new sense of confidence.
We understand this when we see that...
THE GOSPEL AT WORK
MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE
LIVES OF THOSE WHO RECEIVE IT.
Paul, the Apostle of Christ Jesus, could have pursued the debate with elaborate argumentation and discussion. He will deal with some profound matters later in the letter but, for now, he prefers to begin with the basics.
He briefly reviews the impact of the gospel on those who believe its message. In three words he sums up what the gospel does.
First, the gospel gives birth to "faith." (1:4a) The first preachers of the gospel—the good news—rushed everywhere to tell the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ. They told of how God had provided his own Son to secure the redemption which made possible their forgiveness. They told of how Jesus had been crucified by the Romans and how he had risen on the third day. In some of the places where the gospel was first preached eyewitnesses could tell of seeing the Risen Christ. In any case, as the story of the "Christ event" was retold trust began to grow in the hearts of the listeners who opened themselves to the message.
As they heard what God had done for them—even while they were sinners, sometimes even idolaters—they began to believe that God really loved them, that their sins could be forgiven because of what Christ had done for them. That trust was such that they could say, Christ is all I need.
For some of you faith in God began to grow as you heard the stories of Jesus in a Sunday school class as a child. (That's a good argument for making sure your children are in Sunday school.) Others of you found faith as adults when you began to read the Bible or attend a church where the Bible was taught and preached. You can remember the great relief you felt as you discovered what God had done for you, that he had done what you could not do for yourself. You recall the kindling of faith in your heart, the faith which prompted you to seek baptism.
If that faith is now wavering, take a look at its original foundation. Have you forgotten the story of what God has done for you in Christ? Rediscover that story. Let your faith be reborn.
Second, the gospel gives birth to love. (1:4b) You might expect Paul to speak of our love for God, he doesn't. That's not unusual. In the New Testament love for others is often the primary evidence of love for God.
The false teachers who appear to have been trying to establish a beachhead in the Colossian church appealed to the all-too human tendency to want to seen superior to others. They would treat "ordinary" Christians (those not part of their number) as second-class citizens. The love prompted by the gospel will have none of that. It reminds us we are all sinners saved by grace.
In verse 8 Paul reminds the Colossians that such love is not generated by human effort. It is "love which is inspired by the Spirit." Most religions can muster a love for those who share that religion; the Christian gospel calls us to love both the insiders and the outsiders. The very make-up of the church is a testimony of the of this love. The Colossians had a love which was directed "towards all God's people." That means the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians loved each other, the Greek Christians and the Roman Christians loved each other, the Christians who were slaves and the Christians who were slave-owners loved each other. All of this resulted from the work of the gospel.
Not long ago I heard someone singing that old gospel song "Give Me That Old Time Religion." Remember how one of the verses says, "It makes me love everybody, makes me love everybody and it's good enough for me?" In a world where we are constantly reminded of racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred, maybe we would do well to recall the power of the gospel and to preach it with renewed confidence.
Third, the gospel gives birth to hope. (1:5) The city of Colossae was once a flourishing, popular resort. When Paul wrote this letter the glory-days were past. But that didn't matter because the gospel doesn't give a hope which is bound up in temporal circumstances. The Colossians had a "hope treasured up ...in heaven." That means it was safe, and secure, yet they could draw upon that account for living in the present.
Of course, that hope was linked to what Christ had done for them, particularly in the resurrection. His victory over death pointed to their victory over death. They could be confident as they faced the future because they knew Christ had made the future beyond their future secure.
Paul didn't know it at this time and neither did the Colossians but the city would be destroyed by an earthquake only a couple of years after this letter was written. Some reading this letter would lose homes and businesses. Some reading this letter would lose loved ones, some might be killed. Yet the hope they had through the message of the gospel was impervious to earthquakes, fires, famines, wars, whatever catastrophes might come their way. Their hope looked ahead to the time when the work of salvation would be finished in their lives, when they could look forward to eternity in the presence of the God who so loved them he gave his Son.
It's been said ours is an age without hope. Yet, Dave Hunt has written a book called Whatever Happened to Heaven? in which he wonders why the church has stopped preaching about the glorious future promised to believers.
We need to rediscover that part of the gospel. Our culture needs it; we need it.
Recalling how the gospel makes a difference in the lives of those who receive it is the first step in reclaiming our confidence. But we also need to recall how...
THE GOSPEL AT WORK
MAKES A DIFFERENCE
IN THE WORLD IN WHICH IT IS PREACHED.
The world was never the same after the preaching of the gospel. That's why Paul was so excited about the gospel being preached everywhere. He was excited because everywhere the gospel was preached it was "bearing fruit." On the one hand, that may mean that wherever the gospel was preached people were believing it. But I think he has something more in mind.
Certainly Paul .is celebrating thefact that thegospeI is a trans-cultural message. It wasn't a message for an elite group of people. During the next century a heresy would arise which stole some Christian terminology. The heresy, called Gnosticism, taught that salvation was for those who possessed "special knowledge" or gnosis. Some believe the Colossians were tempted to embrace a primitive form of this teaching. Whether they were or not, Paul wanted them to recall that the gospel was an invitation, to embrace the grace of God. As such, it had nothing to do with status or achievement
At the same time, I think. Paul had in mind the impact of the gospel on society through those' who had been changed by its message. In verse two, he greets the Colossians as "saints in Christ at Colossae." In calling them "saints" Paul wasn't pointing to any special holiness on their part; instead 'he' was underscoring their determination to be committed to God, to be God's people.
That commitment made a difference in how they lived. McDonald speaks of this:
Every Christian has two 'homes; and he lives in both places at one and the same time. Of course he is in Christ; that makes him a Christian. But he is at Colossae; he has a residence in the here and, a foothold on earth. Being in Christ, the Christian, as an individual lives and moves and has his being and being at Colossae, the Christian, as a human being, dwells and works and has his living. This fact of double environment carries with it a dual responsibility. Certainly the believer will acknowledge his responsibility to Christ. He will live under the lordship of Christ. But he is also at Colossae, and as such he has obligations there. He must bother about his Colossae; as he accepts the rights of citizenship so must he accept its responsibilities. Yet he is at Colossae as one who is in Christ."
"What a rich gain for poor Colossae that they, being in Him, were in it!"
I like that statement because it tells us that people who are touched by the gospel ought to make a difference in 'the world. Not only are we changed but we should be change-agents.
Jean Sullivan caught the core of this truth when she said, "The gospel is not made to dominate the world. It's the grain of sand that upsets the world's machinery. One can't inhale its fragrance and be content to leave everything the way it."
I recall hearing an interview with a man who was a radical in the 1960s; I was particularly, intrigued by a what he said about the, frustration he and other young people felt in, that turbulent time.. He said they had decided the 'old ways weren't bringing about needed change so they would try something new. The truth is one of the oldest ways to bring about change hadn't been tried in a long time. The gospel has proven itself again and again throughout history as the way to lasting social improvement.
William Gladstone saw the impact of spiritual awakening on Britain. Within his lifetime slavery had ended, child-labor was reduced and hundreds of social ills were addressed—all through the work of men and women touched by the gospel. Maybe this is what prompted, Gladstone, one of England's most famous leaders, to write:
Talk about the “question of the day.” There is but one question and that is the gospel. It can and will correct everything needing correction. During the many, years I was in the cabinet I was brought into association with sixty master minds, and all but five of them were Christians. My only hope for the world is in bringing the 'human mind into contact with divine revelation.
Do we have that kind of confidence in the gospel? As we explore Colossians together it’s my prayer we rediscover it.
Have you experienced the change the gospel can bring? It’s my prayer you will open your life to its message.
