Almost everyone is determined to make their life count for something. Steve Fossett was a well known adventurer who was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon. He also sailed around the world five times non-stop, he also a powered aircraft license. On September 3, 2007, Fossett was reported missing after the plane he was flying over the Nevada desert failed to return. A while later a hiker found his identification cards. He was confirmed dead on 3 September, 2008.
This guy really did something we his life. Fossett set 116 records in five different sports. He left his mark on this world—at least for a few years he will be remembered for making a difference.
Does not the Teacher in Ecclesiastes seem a little tactless when he rather dryly says, ‘Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days’ (Ecc 9:9). More gloom from the Teacher. ‘No-one wants to live a meaningless life, thankyou very much Teacher, so go back to your lonely corner on the other side of the room. We don’t need your bluntness today’!
A life that counts! That’s what we want, a life that counts! We admire people with the gall to push the boundaries and demonstrate remarkable ingenuity and self-sacrifice—these are the lives noted by others. Henry Ford and the motor car, ‘You can have any colour you want as long as its black’. The doctors on RPA who do such amazing surgery—others say Bill Crews and the Exodus Foundation. Sometimes you can even land yourself in a ‘hall of fame’. There’s the sporting hall of fame, the Australian Stockman’s hall of fame, and the Rock and Roll hall of fame.
The Book of Colossians describes a life that won’t land you in a hall of fame—although it may land you in jail. Indeed, Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians from jail, yet he considers his life worthwhile as he suffers for Christ. And from jail he commends the Colossian saints for their faith in Christ and their love for the all the saints. From God’s point of view a worthy life is a gospel-centred life. It’s a life of hope for the riches in heaven. It’s a life that has at its centre the Lord Jesus Christ.
Come with me to Col 1:10, ‘And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way’. A life which counts is one worthy of the Lord because it pleases him in every way’. When placed alongside the energetic claims of the false teachers, to some of the saints at least, the Christian life look too unassuming and so unspectacular. And so the possibility of false teaching entering the church. In contrast to those scandalous claims, the Christian life is about ‘working out our salvation with fear and trembling’ (Phil 2:12), its about living a life worthy of the Lord.
God never commands us to do something without providing us with the necessary resources. When we ask God for what we need he will give us what we need. This is the whole point of verse 9. There can be no successful Christian living unless we pray as Paul prays in verse 9. And so verse 9 must precede verse 10. (There’s also a mathematical reason why verse 9 is before verse 10). ‘For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding’.
Our Christian lives must be one of asking God to continually pour into us a knowledge of his will, and spiritual wisdom and understanding of his Word. Notice how much God is giving us. He is filling us with himself! I hope you weren’t asleep when I said that! In Christ we share in the divine nature! Indeed, the grammar of verses 9 to 14 indicates that God’s amazing ‘filling’ of his people governs this whole section on Christian conduct. We have no success our Christian lives unless God fills—unless he fills us with his Spirit so we can live worthwhile and profitable lives. God fills us with his power which enables us to bear the fruit of the Spirit. God fills us with strength which produces endurance and patience, and he fills us with thankfulness that comes with the knowledge that we now live in the kingdom of his Son.
God wants you to know that what he expects from you is within your reach. Ask and he will fill you and he will continue to fill you to cause you grow in Christian maturity. Now the idea of ‘fullness’, ‘abundance’ and ‘riches’ has a special place in the letter to the Colossians. The false teachers were boasting that fullness and satisfaction comes by immersing oneself in traditions apart from Christ. And dear Epaphras, the best he could do was turn on the tap on half-way; his gospel was incapable of filling anyone with anything.
Our false teachers are no different. This world promises to fill us with good things. ‘Being religious can only take you so far’. They say, ‘It’s OK to be a Christian as long as you don’t take it too seriously’. They say, ‘buy a lotto ticket and fill yourself with the happiness which money brings’. We have songs that say, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’, ‘I’m a material girl’. Fill yourself with possessions, fill yourself with self-indulgence, ‘For the most important person in the world, you’. Fill yourself with the joy of a career and blow anyone who stands in your way! Be economically productive and fill yourself with meaning. Then go out and spend and spend some more. Our world could rewrite verse 10, ‘live a life worthy of the Federal Treasurer and please him in every way’ or ‘live a life worthy of your self-centred ego and please it in every way’.
Let’s take the risk and pull the Teacher out of the corner (but only for a minute).
‘Teacher, what do you say about the world’s idea of living a full and rich and satisfying life’? And the Teacher says, ‘Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless’ (Ecc 5:10).
Why not fill our lives with leisure? And the Teacher says, ‘Laughter is foolish…I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure….everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind’ (Ecc 2:2, 10, 11).
And the Teacher has one more thing to tell us. When we think that we have reached the peak and have a full and satisfying life, then this happens, ‘As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds taken in a trap, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them’ (Ecc 9:12). Things are going well until the doctor tells you that you have cancer. The serious car accident. The shattering death of a loved one. A full life can quickly become rather empty.
In the end, the Teacher is left with just enough breathe to tell us how to live a full and meaningful life—and one which endures. ‘Fear God and his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’ (Ecc 12:13). In the language of Colossians, the world fills us with a ‘deceptive philosophy’ (Col 2:8) which promises satisfaction, but ultimately it leaves us empty and marooned. But in the gospel of Jesus, God is recreating us as he fills our lives with meaning and truth which enables us to know life in its abundance. A full and complete life is one of faith in the Lord Jesus, its a life which overflows with good works, it is one that is growing in the knowledge of God.
Remember that God never commands us to do something without providing us with the necessary resources. When we ask God for what we need he will give us what we need. There can be no successful Christian living, no pleasing God, unless we pray as Paul prays in verse 9, ‘For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding’. It is within our reach to live a life worthy of the Lord. Of course we’ll stumble and full and repentance is just around the corner. Living a godly life is had work and we cannot do it on our own. But he who commenced a good work within us will bring it to completion. Paul says elsewhere, in Eph 2:10, ‘For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do’.
So lets have a look at some at some of those ‘good works’ as described in verses 10, 11 and 12. You’ll notice four participle clauses: starting at the end of verse 10 with ‘bearing fruit’ and ‘growing in the knowledge of God’. Then ‘being strengthened with all power’ in verse 11, and ending with ‘joyfully giving thanks’ in verse 12. We briefly consider each of these in turn.
A life pleasing to God is ‘bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God’. This resonates with the language of creation: God said to man, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, subdue the earth’ (Gen 1:28). That wasn’t going to happen without Eve, and soon people spread out and filled the earth. Now here we are—the same language directed to the Colossians and ourselves. The call is to be fruitful and grow and spread out (as Paul has already described in verse 6), this is a call to take the gospel into the world and fill the earth with good works because we are recreated in the image of God.
What the original humanity failed to do, we are able to do as the Spirit of God works within us. As people respond to the gospel a new humanity comes into being—and we are part of that new humanity as we live in Christ. And there are no shortcuts to maturity. It took us years to grow into adulthood, and it takes a full season for fruit to mature and ripen. The same is true for the fruit of the Spirit. Bearing the fruits of the Spirit, like physical growth, takes time. There are no shortcuts: as you grow in your faith in the Lord Jesus you will learn to know God better and better.
Living a life worthy of the Lord is a high and difficult calling. In verse 11, Paul reminds us that God gives what he commands. We are ‘being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might’ (Col 1:11). We are being strengthened by God and that strength is continuously available to his people. And although Paul doesn’t say so, we know from his broader teaching that this power comes through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Do you know that the power that strengthens us is the same mighty strength that God displayed when he raised Christ from the dead? The Christian life is anything but unspectacular. The power within us is not usually felt as we might feel the power from an explosion. It can be but that’s not the usual experience. It is more like a slow release. The power of God slowly stirring our hearts—and don’t underestimate the amount of power that takes! Someone has said that ‘If Christians fully understood what they have in Christ we would have to place seat belts in the pews to hold them down to keep the order’.
Paul then says in verse 11 that the purpose of God’s strengthening is that the Colossians may have ‘great endurance and patience’—the very greatest endurance and patience. In his commentary, Dick Lucas says, ‘It is through great endurance that the servant of God commends himself. By it he learns to hold his position under attack, and quietly to persist in the paths of righteousness and truth. Through patience the Christian learns forbearance and self-restraint, especially with the people who test him; he also finds here the secret of steadiness when divine promises and hopes are deferred’.
We don’t want to be like the man in Los Angeles who was arrested for improperly discharging a weapon after shooting his toilet bowl five times with a .38 calibre handgun. He claims that he just got upset. He couldn’t take it any longer. His daughter had flushed a hairbrush earlier in the day and clogged the pipes. So he shot the offending toilet.
Friends, how we need to learn endurance and patience in the Christian life. With one another and with God. ‘Through patience the Christian learns forbearance and self-restraint, especially with the people who test him; he also finds here the secret of steadiness when divine promises and hopes are deferred’.
Paul adds a final word describing the life worthy of the Lord, ‘joyfully giving thanks’. Perhaps Paul ends this way because the giving of thanks implies that what has been received has not been earned, but is a gift. And so the flip side of grace is thankfulness. It is a life overflowing with thankfulness because we have received so much and it is not of our own doing.
We give thanks not for a fallen world, but for a world being renewed as the gospel bears fruit in country after country. We give thanks though inwardly we are wasting away we are being spiritually renewed. We give thanks for opportunities to share the gospel and bear the burdens of others. We give thanks because even though they may put us in jail, we are free in Christ. We give thanks because our sins are forgiven, and, as verse 12 puts it, ‘God has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light’. And we give thanks—verse 13—because God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son. The language of inheritance, forgiveness and rescue remind us that we have been plucked from one empire in order to be free in another kingdom.
This is how we please the Lord: ‘bearing fruit’, ‘growing in the knowledge of God’, ‘being strengthened with all power’ and ‘joyfully giving thanks’. This is not fanatical Christian living, it is a description of the normal Christian life which seeks day by day to please the Lord. It is a life which is worthy of the Lord who gave his life so that we can life.
The Greek word for ‘living’ (verse 10) is the same word for ‘walking’(ðåñéðáôῆóáé). Occasionally in the Bible a person’s lifestyle is pictured as a road one walks along. And the righteous are confronted with alternate ways and decisions must be made. Have a look with me at Proverbs 2:12–20:
Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who leave the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways. It will save you also from the adulteress, from the wayward wife with her seductive words, who has left the partner of her youth and ignored the covenant she made before God. For her house leads down to death and her paths to the spirits of the dead. None who go to her return or attain the paths of life. Thus you will walk in the ways of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous.
False teachers offer an alternate wisdom—another road to take in life. But their words are perverse as they tempt us to walk in dark, ungodly ways. In our Christian lives we seek the path of wisdom. And God says that he will fill us with this wisdom as we seek to please him in every way. We will not succeed in the Christian life unless the Spirit of God is working within us. And we know the Spirit is working within us when we are living a life worthy of the Lord. When we are living a dynamic, Spirit-filled life. I’ve seen too many Christians crawling around on their all-fours, dragging themselves through their Christian life looking like spiritual death warmed up! Immature, plodding and complaining, barely coping with church, unable to talk about spiritual matters, crawling rather than walking.
This is not the life Paul is describing for us. Like the Colossian Church, we are called into a life of freedom. We are free to please the Lord: bearing fruit, growing in the knowledge of God, displaying endurance and patience, and giving thanks to the Father for the salvation won for us in Christ. ‘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 redemption, the forgiveness of sins’ (Col 1:13).
