THE SUPREMACY OF CHRIST
COLOSSIANS 3:12-17: THE LOVE OF CHRIST
SERMON #7: MAY 11, 2008
JERRY L. HILLYER, II
Introduction
12Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
15Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. 17And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
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12-14So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
15-17Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
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One of the aspects of the Bible that intrigues me most is where the authors chose to begin their letters, histories, and Gospels. Of course, I don’t operate under the assumption or conviction that the Bible was written merely by human authors. Instead, I think the testimony of Scripture is that the authors spoke as the Holy Spirit instructed them or, rather, that the Holy Spirit spoke through the human authors. OK.
My point is that, at some point, the Holy Spirit so moved and convicted these authors to write these pages for someone and they have been preserved for us. And when the Holy Spirit so moved these people he so moved them to write certain words and to write them in certain ways and in certain sequences. So Paul can write in Corinthians:
This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.
So when Paul writes in Colossians 3:12: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved,” he is not merely expressing the happy thought that God has selected us to be saved or Christians or disciples. He is using special language here that asserts our relationship to God’s covenant people, namely, Israel. Somehow or other, in some way, WE, Christians, are those people whom we read about in Genesis through Malachi.
This is what intrigues me. Paul could have used any words he wanted to describe who we are or what we are about or how we relate to God. But he chose these words; or these words were chosen for him. So RC Lucas writes:
“…in the making of Israel God was calling a people to himself to be specially his own, revealing by their obedience the divine character and purposes. So to be part of the new Israel is a call to the Colossians to demonstrate the family likeness by imparting to others what they had themselves received. As the Lord has (for example) forgiven you, so also you must forgive (verse 13) is one of the regulating principles of living, according to the New Testament.
“…it is God’s purpose that in the local church should be seen a glimpse of the new man, and through this, a glimpse too of the God in whose image he was made, and by whose grace he has been redeemed.” (151)
Indeed, Paul wrote, “You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Immediately after he tells us we are being remade into the image of our Creator, he goes on to tell us what sort of things will define the life that is recreated in God’s image? Paul, writing under the authority of the same Spirit that told him to refer to members of the church in terms that were used of Israel—God’s chosen people, holy, dearly loved—describes for us that image of God that God is defining in us as he continues to purify, sanctify, and recreate us into His own image.
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Obviously, there is not time to delineate meaning for each of these qualities that Paul lists here. So, I’ll make just a couple of general observations about these verses in the hopes that you can understand what Paul means when he says things like: Be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, and patient. I think straightforward imperatives are fairly easy to understand.
The First point I’d like to make is this: If Paul has started this conversation by telling us that we are the ‘chosen people of God, holy, and dearly loved…’ then it is unreasonable for us to continue or end as anything less than the chosen people God, holy, and dearly loved. This may sound like a tautologous, but consider this: some think that once we get saved, so to speak, that we can go off an live and act and be any old people we want. But there is no mistaking what Paul is getting at here: We have to press on in this characterization: he wouldn’t be writing it to us otherwise, now would he?
In other words, this character is not a foregone conclusion each day. I think we have to wake up each and remember what God has called us to be, and decide that we are going to be it.
If he says we are being recreated in God’s image, therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy, and dearly loved here is how you ought to live, then we ought to continue to conduct ourselves in this way from first to last. It’s easy to forget that we are being recreated and that we must continue to make ourselves available to God’s creative activities in our lives; we must not do the things that prohibit his activity in our lives.
I don’t think he can tell us we are God’s chosen people today and somehow we are not God’s chosen people tomorrow. We are to continue as…God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved: making adjustments, correcting course, keeping in step.
Make certain that what you are today, you are tomorrow; keep yourself available and aware of God’s activity in your life. Oh, we get discouraged and think that we are in and out and in and out. But that’s not how it goes at all. You and I are not yet all that we were made to be even if we are becoming all that he made us to be. There is no perfection this side of eternity. So remember that you are God’s chosen people, holy, and dearly loved: it is dangerous to forget lest we grow weary and become discouraged.
Second, relationships in the church are governed by verbs. Notice what the apostle says here:
• Clothe yourselves…
• Bear with…
• Put on…
• Let the…
• Let the…
• Whatever you do…
I fully realize that the work of sanctification is a Spirit driven work, but who among us here today will deny that Paul is saying we must bear some of this responsibility for the change that takes place in our lives? We have to clothe ourselves with all sorts of action; we have to take at least a secondary, Spirit motivated initiative to change. One we understand who we are—God’s chosen people, holy, and dearly loved—then we understand why he expects these changes to take place in our lives.
I get, and I think you do too, that this is the work of the Spirit in and on and among us. I think this is one reason why the church exists: Where better to learn compassion from God’s point of view than among people who need compassion? Where better to learn forgiveness from God’s point of view than among people who have been forgiven? Where better to learn how to love than among people who are decidedly difficult to love? It’s like marriage. I don’t happen to think the primary force driving the necessity of marriage is happiness. Oh, happiness is important don’t get me wrong. But the motivating force driving marriage is holiness. Why do you think the relationship between Christ and the church is defined as a marriage?
So what I’m saying is this: Don’t sit back and hope that you will be different each day when you wake up just because you hope to be different: Take action! Get in the game! Get involved in the dirty lives of people where you will be tested, tried, and challenged.
Third, this new way of living stands in stark raving contrast to the old way of living. He said in verses 1-11 of this chapter that we have been raised with Christ. He said that we are to set our hearts and minds on things above. He said we are to put to death whatever belongs to the old way of life which did little more than invite the wrath of God to fully vent.
As God’s people though we are fully expected to be different. Look at these things he says about us: bear with one another, forgive, be patient, love, live in peace, unity, be thankful, live in the Word of Christ, do all things for the sake of Christ and not yourself, sing to God, admonish one another. All these are not things that characterize the world in general. I don’t think I can emphasize this enough when I say that we are called to be the polar opposite of the world.
We are defined by things that define and characterize the Lord Christ, not things that define and characterize the world, the flesh, the old way of life that we put to death.
Fourth, the very fact that he has to tell us to be and do these things implies, at minimum, that in some way they are not being fully practiced among us. Or, I might say it this way: The fact that Paul tells us to bear with one another, forgive one another, love one another, admonish one another, be patient with one another, implies, at least, that we are going to be involved in situations where we have to do these things. In other words, we are going to come up against people who will undoubtedly get on our nerves!
The body of Christ is a strange beast at times. People are strange creatures. Sometimes we get it, sometimes we do not. We have to learn how to bear with one another—dealing patiently with people who are not up to our levels of maturity. We have to learn how to forgive one another which means, at minimum, that there are going to be times when people hurt us, take advantage of us, or deal with us treacherously. We are going to have to admonish one another which means that always we have to be brutally honest with one another. We have to be patient with one another which means there will be people in the church, in the body of Christ, who are very difficult to deal with.
Look, the body of Christ, in other words, is not a perfect place. The church is a people—God’s chosen people—and it is a place of decided imperfection. The reason we have to be commanded to love, and bear, and forgive, and be humble, and compassionate—is because we are a people who are often and prone to being exactly the opposite of such things. We are still fleshy people who come together with different sets of problems: I have this issue, you have that. We have different ideals and dreams. We come together knowing that at home the dishes are undone, the bills are waiting, and the car is out of gas. We come together knowing that an aunt is dying, a brother is suffering, a daughter is giving birth, a son is going to war. We come together knowing that the next day work and the time clock beckons. We come together knowing that at the end of the week we will trade all our hours for a handful of dimes.
This is the church—in all its glorious, majestic, God-made earthiness: here we are most real, most difficult. People who come to church looking for all the answers I think come for the wrong reason. The beauty of the church is not that we have all the answers but that we have all the problems and we bring them all together in one place and worship despite those problems. This is why we have to be reminded to be compassionate and humble in the church and towards one another.
Here tempers are tested and characters are tried. Here a people, a new people, are forged and created in the image of God. Here it is easy to get upset and bent out of shape. Here it is easy to let anger, short tempers, and careless words enter into our dialogue. This is why Paul says sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude. Here it is easy to be taken advantage of by people who, week after week, ask us to cover their shift in nursery, or shovel the snow, or pick me up from church. This is why Paul says ‘whatever you do in word or deed to it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.’ Here, where people may not progress along as quickly as others, it is easy to grow impatient and to despise others. This is why he says we must, over all these things, put on love.
We have to be reminded because we have forgotten. We have forgotten what it means to be lost, what it means to have people angry, what it means to be loved. This is why Paul says over all these things put on love which binds them together in perfect unity. Surely we know how to love? Surely this is something done so frequently that we need not be reminded, let alone commanded, to love. The question is: If this love were being expressed, demonstrated, and lived would we have to be told to do it?
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God’s chosen people, holy, and dearly loved are different. In Christ life is not the cutthroat ugliness that is the world of flesh. And yet in Christ is in Colossae. In here, in both, we learn to let these things become in our lives. We let peace rule, we let the Word of Christ dwell in us, we let all things be done for Christ. In here, in Christ and in Colossae, we learn to let ourselves be defined by God’s character and not our own. In both places we let ourselves be defined as God’s chosen people, his holy people, his dearly loved people.
Soli Deo Gloria!
