Christians without goals are a little like Alice in the fairy tale ‘Alice in Wonderland’. In a conversation between her and the Cheshire Cat, Alice asked, ‘Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here’? ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’, said the cat. ‘I don’t much care where’, said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go’, said the cat.
Mark Twain shortly before his death wrote, ‘A myriad of men are born; they labour and sweat and struggle;...they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; ...those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It (the release) comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them—and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence […] a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever’.
The apostle Paul wants us to have purpose and direction in life. He wants us to have the full riches of complete understanding which come from being in Christ. The Lord Jesus gives us purpose and direction in life.
Imagine we are with Nympha in her house church as Paul’s letter is being read (Col 4:15). The apostle opens by praising our faith in the Lord and Jesus and our love for one another. He prays that we will continue in our Christian walk as God fills us with a knowledge of his will. The apostle rejoices in the person and work of Christ, such praise lifting our church to new heights as we reflect upon the grace which has been lavished upon us. The Christ whom we now worship partakes of the divine nature, his primacy touches every part of creation, and he is the head of the new creation which is the church. This same Christ reconciled us to God. Once we were alienated, lost, we rejected God’s rule over us. But we who were unholy have been made holy through Christ’s death on the cross. And so we have a wonderful hope laid out before us if we continue trusting the Lord with great endurance and patience, giving thanks to the Father in everything.
Then Paul truly opens his heart to us as he speaks of his labour for our church. He has given so much of himself in order to support us. He says that God commissioned him as a servant in order to present to us the word of God in its fullness (Col 1:25). We ought to remember that we have Christ in us, the hope of glory. Paul is labouring with all his energy to present us mature in Christ (Col 1:28). There’s been lots of encouragement in his letter. Paul does not tire in commending us for our continuing faith in the Lord Jesus. Now, before moving on to address the spiritual opposition confronting us, the apostle tells us the purpose of his writing, so that we might be built up in Christ, so that we are well prepared for the scoundrels that constantly question our salvation.
Come with me to chapter 2, verses 1 to 3, ‘I want you to know how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’.
Paul begins this section with a beautiful conjunction of words, ‘My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love’. The truth of the gospel sets us free. Within the cradle of gospel truth, we are called to unity and to a wonderfully expressive freedom which comes when following Christ. After a service of ordination, a sad-faced woman came up to the newly-ordained pastor and said, ‘It’s a grand thing you are doing as a young man—giving up the joys of life to serve the Lord’. There’s a commonly held belief that to be serious about our faith means that all joy is gone. But the apostle states the contrary, ‘My purpose is that their hearts may be comforted, being knitted together in love’.
Paul is concerned about our spiritual state. His purpose isn’t that we be healthy and merry, and rich, and great, and prosperous; his purpose is that our hearts may be encouraged and comforted through the trials of this world. Matthew Henry says, ‘The prosperity of the soul is the best prosperity, and what we should be most solicitous about for ourselves and others’.
The Christian can find life terribly discouraging. The intolerance of the gospel is felt as much today as it was in Paul’s day. There is a litany of language designed to unravel the confidence of the believer’s heart. Words like, ‘you fundamentalists are all the same’, ‘there is no such thing as truth, ‘reasonable people don’t believe in miracles and the resurrection’, and ‘churches are full of hypocrites’. It’s a very confusing world because the world is very confused. In one essay, Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne describe cosmopolitan Sydney in these terms, ‘We are unchurched, multicultural, apathetic, spiritually indifferent, relativist, and [a] fundamentally hedonistic society’ (essay in Telling the Truth, 103).
We are under constant pressure to acquiesce to the ebbs and flow of this world. We often baulk at telling others we are Christian because compromises our desire to be accepted. Religious pluralism is like a gun constantly pointing at us, threatening to blow us away if we insist on promoting absolutes like sin, death and judgment. It’s disheartening when religious leaders also have a finger on the trigger. Public church leaders such as Bill Crews and John Spong attack the plain meaning of Scripture. They scorn evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is the word of God intended to rescue a fallen humanity. Earlier in the year, Bill Crews on his 2GB program denied that Adam and Eve were historical persons—never mind that the New Testament doesn’t think this way. The gospel that Paul proclaims in Col 1 is still under attack and therefore those who proclaim it are under attack.
Paul comforts our hearts by reminding us of the gospel and the riches that we have in Christ. And if the world is not our home, then surely our home is with one another. So our hearts should be knitted together in love. Paul has already commended the Colossians for their love for all the saints (Col 1:3)—it’s a fundamental Christian virtue. What sought of love ought we have for one another? Is it similar to a love between husband and wife, or is it like the love for the kids and grand-kids, or the ‘almost-love’ I have for our nuisance dog!
Jesus tells us about the love that knits us together. In John 13, he says to his disciples, ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’. In what sense is the command to love one another ‘new’?
The command is new in the sense that Jesus has raised the bar for loving one another. He goes beyond the Old Testament which says to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ (Lev 19:18). It’s no longer love one another as yourself, its now love one another as I have loved you. That’s a new standard—we are to love one another as Jesus has loved us. This command in John 13 follows the washing of the disciples’ feet. How are we to love one another? With servant hearts. Earlier, on the way to Jerusalem, Jesus said to James and John, ‘Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:43–45).
We bind ourselves together in love as we serve another. Our love for one another is expressed as we lovingly serving each other. Notwithstanding health, it shouldn’t be difficult to fill rosters, should it? A servant looks beyond himself or herself. A servant is outward looking, not inward looking. A servant denies himself and acts in the interests of others. A servant is sacrificial. A servant watches his language and a servant goes the extra mile. You know it may even be possible to do many things in church over a lifetime without ever being a servant. The starting point for Christian service is a heart saturated with the grace of God which overflows in acts of service in the faith community.
Notice how Paul is serving the Colossians: he reminds them of the gospel, he applies the gospel to their situation, he struggles on their behalf, he prays for them, he encourages them. He makes time for them. He is loving enough to teach them and correct them. Even when he can’t be there, he doesn’t forget them. This is how we serve one another.
‘My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, so that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ’. In the NIV it sounds like the ‘full riches of complete understanding’ are a result of ‘being encouraged in heart and united in love’. One gives way to the other. But I don’t think the original text makes such a tight connection.
Rather, here is another reason why Paul is struggling for the church. He struggles so ‘they may be encouraged in heart and united in love’, and he struggles so that they ‘may have the full riches of complete understanding’. For such understanding consists in nothing more or nothing less than knowing ‘the mystery of God, namely, Christ’. And ‘in Christ’, according to verse 3, are ‘hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’. It is unlikely there is any real difference in meaning between ‘wisdom and ‘knowledge’. Take them together to give the sense that ‘Christ is the one in whom is to be found all that one needs in order to understand spiritual reality and to lead a life pleasing to God’ (Moo, 169).
This world is very, very seductive. Even though it may not convince us to abandon the gospel, it does a mighty good job of convincing us that secular materialism offers a complementary freedom. Freedom that comes from turning jobs into careers, constantly acquiring the latest technology, owning the largest house the bank will give us. The desire to lavish our children with material possessions.
We live in a constructed reality which pretends to offer us spiritual freedom. Indeed, if we think that reality is not as bad as Jesus makes out, this reshapes our thought life. If we do not think of this world as ‘the dominion of darkness’ (Col 1:14), and the people therein as ‘alienated from God, enemies in their minds because of evil behaviour’ (Col 1:21) then we do not understand the most basic spiritual realities.
The apostle struggles so that we will know the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are found in Christ. Dick Lucas says, ‘Once it is agreed […] that there are no essential truths outside of Christ, and that therefore there can be no essential insights hidden from anyone who is now in Christ, it becomes possible to maintain mutual confidence and love among themselves’. The one gospel has been revealed to all of us. Therefore, there can be no spiritual elite. There can be no-one here with a knowledge beyond what is revealed in the gospel. I don’t have anything more to tell you than what is available to all of us in the Bible. Since we are at peace with God through the blood shed for us the cross, we relate to one another as recipients of the same grace. Therefore we can confidently serve one another as Christ has served us.
Middleton and Walsh rather bluntly say, ‘what makes an argument that is alternative to the gospel sound plausible is the implausibility of the Christian community itself’. In other words, if the truth of the gospel is not lived out in the church, this makes alternatives to the gospel look more attractive. They say:
’Of the friends of mine who have abandoned Christian faith, very few of them stopped believing in Christ because of intellection problems with the Bible or because they were seduced by some other worldview or belief system. Rather, they tend to abandon Christian faith because of the irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension and lack of compassion they experience within the Christian community. Rather than finding the church to be the community that most deeply encouraged them in their struggles, they lost heart in their discouragement and lost their faith in the process. Rather than experiencing the church as the site of the most profound hospitality, love and acceptance,they felt excluded because of their doubts and struggles’.
When Paul explained to us the supremacy of Christ in verses 15–20, his language was compact and dense. But this was no university lecture intended for the head and not the heart. When I studied engineering it was all for the head and no-one really cared about the heart. But not so here! It is the content of the gospel that defines who we are and therefore how we relate to one another. Churches that are unloving and fragmented have not grasp the gospel which Paul explains in chapter 1. The truth about Jesus transforms and renews us. The truth sets us free for service, it encourages our hearts and unites us in love.
When a house is well constructed it weathers the storm. A friend of mine owns a house on the northern beaches that simply became run down with age. Its on a headland, exposed to all the elements, especially salt spray and strong winds. When Jim rebuilt the house a couple of years ago, he went to the extra expense of ensuring the roof could withstand cyclonic winds. It cost a bit more, but it was inevitable that the winds of destruction will come howling and threaten the integrity of the structure (now I’m sounding like an engineer).
It’s just as inevitable that the winds of destruction will come howling through our lives. When we rebuild our lives with gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, we will weather the storm. Of course, if we compromise and use cheap building materials then we risk falling in a heap. ‘A bit of Christian doctrine here, a bit of worldly philosophy here’ won’t work. Sure we might be able to withstand some of the assaults from the evil one. But when the 1 in 100 storm hits and we’ve compromised on building a solid Christian life, the storm may well blow us away.
Say Jim had decided not to prepare his house for the worst case situation. The house is vulnerable to terrific winds but from the outside no-one could tell. You can’t see the ties that secure a roof to the foundations. The strength of the house is behind the bricks and out of sight. The house might look secure, but without the ties its a disaster waiting to happen.
Friends, I pray that your Christian life is not a disaster waiting to happen. To us you might look safe and secure on the outside, but perhaps you’re vulnerable to the storms of false teaching. As people drive past, they might even comment on how well your house looks. Nice lines and features, a great paint job. Lot’s of makeup—and the ladies look good too! But when the Lord Jesus drives past he sees a house waiting to collapse in the next big storm of false teaching because it is not adequately prepared.
Look at verse 4, ‘I tell you this’, Paul says, ‘so that no-one may deceive you by fine sounding arguments’. The fine sounding words of false teachers will not penetrate a solid edifice, held firm by what the Lord Jesus has done on the cross. We will not be deceived by the philosophers of our age when our lives have grasped the gospel that Paul has explained to us. We are reconciled to God by faith in Jesus, and everything we need to maintain that relationship comes from Jesus mediating our cause before our Heavenly Father, and the Holy Spirit ministering to us each day.
Before Paul addresses the deceptive philosophy threatening the church, he tutors them in the gospel and he thanks God for their faith in Christ and their love for all the saints. There are many people these days taken in by scams and some lose enormous amounts of money. Recently, there have been scam appeals for the NSW flood victims. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a woman ‘gave her credit card details to a man who phoned pretending to be collecting for flood victims’ (SMH, 26-9-09).
We dare not be swindled and lose the treasure of wisdom and knowledge that we have in Christ. We recognise a swindle by knowing the shape of the genuine gospel article. I have spoken to many people close to death. When the flesh divests itself of dignity as it approaches death, the state of soul is there for all to see. And often I can see what I haven’t seen before. I see the state of the heart that has always been known to God. With all my pastoral heart, I urge you to have a life firmly rooted in the gospel so no-one may deceive you with fine sounding arguments, so that you may continue to live with Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Paul looked at the Colossian church and he saw something there worth fighting for. He saw an orderly church composed of people who were strong in their faith. Even though the believers were being attacked by false teaching, they were responding in victory. They were holding their order and standing firm. And so Paul commends them in verse 5, ‘I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how orderly you are and how firm your faith in Christ is’. We have something worth fighting for: let us hold our order and may our faith stand firm in Christ, for in him we have the victory.
