Called Out Of Darkness Into Light

As we see in today’s letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians, we see that Paul really believed that when you make that sort of commitment there is something very special happening up in the heavenlies. There is like a completion of a rescue mission. In fact, he writes in Colossians 1.13-14 “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” It as if God reached down into this dungeon and snatched us out of this dungeon and placed us into a new kingdom, a whole new domain. The kingdom of the Son. The kingdom of Jesus. I don’t know what you think of that. To be honest, I am not sure exactly that that is what is happening there. But I really do like that imagery. Especially if you had kind of a sordid past and you went from living this way to living that way that is really what it describes. It is a removal from a dark life to the life of the Son. As this passage makes clear, though, Paul is not simply talking about individuals. You see, what happened to me really happens to most believers or people that accept Jesus Christ. They know that something has happened. It has happened on an individual level but it also has happened at a collective level. The operative word here is us. Paul says “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness”. He is talking to a church so he is reminding the church that they have been collectively raised up from the dominion of darkness and placed into the kingdom of the Son. As we continue to consider our core values and especially the value of community that is important. Because individually we need to know about that transaction or that rescue, but collectively as a church we need to be reminded that God has reached out in all of us and picked us up from the dominion of darkness and placed us into that kingdom of the Son. Consequently, we are all called collectively to live differently; to live as children of the light.

I think if you have been a Christian long enough you know that a lot of Christians don’t live that way. When we are out in the world and we look at statistics and really when you look at like divorce statistics, the Christians don’t do much better than the non-Christians. You look at things like work ethic and things like how people behave at sporting events or how they behave at work and they are not that much different than the rest of the world. That is a shame because we are called to be different. The thing that every person deals with today or the things that the pastors deal with today were the same problems that the apostle Paul was dealing with 2000 years earlier. He was dealing with people that had forgotten their call. That had forgotten that they had been removed from the dominion of darkness and placed into the kingdom of the Son, so he would spend time reminding them about that. Paul had a unique view of the church. He didn’t think the church was going to someday be a place where you come in and sit at pews and stare at the heads in front of you, you listen to some music, you listen to a sermon, you eat some snacks, and you go home. That is not Paul’s view of the church. In Paul’s eyes, the church is the primary instrument that God is going to use to advance his kingdom-building agenda on earth. Paul believed that there was a spiritual realm. I know a lot of people don’t believe that is a spiritual realm. Paul is very clear that there is a spiritual realm and that there is a battle going on in this spiritual realm between darkness and light. In fact, in Ephesians he says “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” He believes there is a battle going on. He was serious about making sure that people understood this concept of being a child of the light, of being someone who was given the light, who has been removed from darkness into light so he expected them to behave differently. Paul’s method of operation was to go into these churches and to teach them. Then what he would do is he would write a letter and remind them. This is what I taught you and this is what you know and now I am going to remind you about it. If they still didn’t listen he would give them kind of a gentle kick in the behind in his own special way. That is what he would do.