This is a beautiful passage of Scripture. I love the picture it paints. Do you think in pictures? Who here is a visual learner? I definitely am!
My Dad was an accomplished artist, and he always taught me that when it comes to a painting, to visual design, the eye must be captivated by something in a painting, then the eye must be led, through the composition to the focal point of the painting.
Everything in the painting serves that focal point. If a work of art doesn’t have a point of focus, the eye wanders, it cannot land. It grows tired, bored, and then moves on. My Dad put a great deal of time into the composition of a painting. He discarded or paintings of his own that he felt were not good compositions.
The same is true of music. The songs we sing have verses and choruses. The choruses, which always repeat, are the focal point of the song. The key lyrics must be in the chorus. The verses point to the chorus. When I’m writing a song, I toil over the composition of it.
I’ve discarded hundreds of song ideas because I couldn’t get the composition right. I’ve noticed over the years that the songs of mine and other people that we do most often here, that are chosen by our other worship leaders, are always the ones with the best compositions.
There’s a ‘recipe’ for a good painting. There’s a recipe for a good song. And in this passage that we’re spending time with together today, there is a recipe for peace.
The Apostle Paul, the writer of this, one of the earliest letters to the church that we find in the Bible, was great at composing or putting together an inspired thought that worked at a gut level, at a head level and at a heart level.
In this passage his composition leads us through the essential ingredients of peace. He actually refers to the ‘ingredients’ or ‘components’ as a type of ‘clothing’ that we ‘put on’. So we’ll key that in mind as we get into the text.
Each ingredient pulls us along to the key focus, the key purpose for which he is writing, which is that the peace of God, the peace of Christ become a real, tangible thing that impacts our daily lives.
The Hebrew word for peace is ‘shalom’. It’s a deep, rich word that as we go along today we’ll hopefully gain a greater appreciation for.
Why was the idea of peace, internal and external, important to the early church? Didn’t they live before things got so stressful and complicated like it is today?
Nope. The early church was an outlaw movement. To know the situation of the people Paul wrote to helps to understand why he wrote it and why it can be applied on at least two different levels.
So the church is an outlaw movement, known as “The Way”.
It’s in the bad books of the government of the day because while everyone in the Roman empire was expected to pledge allegiance to the emperor and affirm that “Caesar is Lord”, actually worshipping Caesar as a god, the early Christians refused to do that.
There message was “Jesus is Lord!” They followed another king and proclaimed themselves to, like Jesus, belong to another Kingdom.
They were viewed as traitors to the state, and - this is weird - because they didn’t worship the visible carved statue pagan gods they were considered atheists. Since they worshipped God who, after Christ ascended, was not visible to the naked eye, the Christians were considered ‘atheists’.
Weird eh? We were the first ones referred to as atheists, and yet we worship the only true God. One of the stranger things in our history.
So because the early church was an outlaw movement, hunted down, fed to the lions literally for their refusal to turn their backs on Jesus, they were a movement under siege.
They were not, externally, at peace.
Daily pressures from just being Christians - you can imagine the strain families would have been under trying to keep their kids safe, struggling daily with pressure to renounce their faith just so they could stop being hunted like animals.
The daily experience of belonging to Jesus was an enormous challenge that is way outside of the experience of the western church at least.
But perhaps as we think about Paul’s audience, the ones he wrote to in this letter, we can understand why peace was such an important thing, why it IS such an important thing today for you and for me.
So to the Christians in the city of Colossae, Paul composes a lyric that points to the chorus of peace, the peace of Christ, and while doing that he unpacks for us the verse that point to the chorus.
The verses are the ingredients of God’s peace, the peace of Christ, the peace that passes all understanding. Let’s take a closer look.
Paul begins this section with a ‘therefore’. That always means that he is connecting what he is about to say to what he has just said. Right before this passage,
Paul has been talking about setting our hearts on Jesus, and being careful not to get tripped up by returning to the practices of our ‘old self’ - the sinful things that were once totally normal occurrences in our lives - things that are no longer practiced with abandon by the ‘new self’ of the Christ-follower.
He finishes up by saying that the ‘new self’, our life that has been redeemed by Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross - the new life in Christ - is available to every human being.
Ingredient to Peace #1
So this first ingredient to peace is knowing that we are loved: Colossians 3:12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved,
There’s an incredible joy in knowing that you are loved. It’s why marriage is such an excellent thing...the love shared between a couple is sealed by a covenant of life-long companionship and partnership.
You get to spend your whole life figuring out this thing called ‘life’ with another person who has by God’s grace promised to be with you for as long as you live. Marriage is awesome.
Knowing you are loved creates a great feeling of security and calm. Knowing that you are loved, not for being perfect, but just for being who you are is wonderful.
Recently a good pastor friend of mine - a male friend - expressed appreciation for an event I co-ordinated in which he was able to speak to a number of other pastors, something that went extremely well and that he was deeply blessed by.
He sent me an email expressing thanks where he said: “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say: I love you”. Love between friends is also beautiful and sacred. Whether in marriage or in friendship, love is a healing thing.
Paul here says to the church at Colossae, and God through Paul’s words says to us: “you are God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved”. We begin with two things.
The first is that God loves us. Isn’t that good news? Now it’s true that God loves the whole world. But the Scripture is saying something unique about you and I as followers of Jesus.
It says that we are chosen by God. God set you apart to believe. God moved in your life, perhaps your family’s life before you that made the soil fertile for you...to enable you to respond in faith to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
You were chosen to belong to God through faith in Christ. You were picked by God out of a great number to respond in faith. Many have heard the gospel. Few have responded.
Many are called, few answer.
Because God worked in you to respond in faith, the blood of Jesus Christ covers all of your sins, making you holy before God. So you...we...are chosen, holy and dearly loved - the beloved of God. That is the first ingredient in knowing true peace.
We have peace because we embrace the reality of God’s covenant love for us. We experience peace in the midst of whatever we’re facing as we live out the reality of our belonging to God. Being the beloved of God.
Ingredient to Peace #2
Next it says that as God’s beloved, we are called to ‘clothe ourselves’, to ‘put on ourselves as a garment’ compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. These 5 qualities have something to do with our relationship with God, and a LOT to do with our relationship with each other.
To have compassion - that is not to sympathize with another person - it is not only that. The word compassion means ‘to suffer with’. The ‘passion of Christ’ refers to the suffering of Christ on the cross’.
So we have peace one with another when we are close enough to each other to truly care - when we suffer with each other.
Our dear brother Kirk Grimes is in hospital right now. I heard that he had a fall, and I went to visit him later that day. I went to visit him after a series of meetings earlier in the day...it had been quite a busy day.
And as I drove to the hospital I prayed for Kirk, but I was also thinking of many other things. As I found his room and realized how terribly he was suffering with brutal pain in his back - although he was in the cardio ward - my heart was broken with his suffering.
Frankly, everything else, for the time that I was there, kind of ceased to exist. Nothing else, no other dilemma came close to being as important as how much my dear brother in Jesus was suffering. Circumstances don’t allow him to be on any painkillers.
We prayed, read God’s word together, talked for a while, and I left. I left hurting. I left with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye for my brother. I left, also, confident of God’s presence with him in this deepest of trials.
I think Kirk intuitively knew that I was hurting for him. Later that day Darlene visited him as well and spent time praying and playing worship music for him.
We’re called to have compassion one with another - and to be present as we are able to each other in our suffering. When that happens, the relationship deepens. Love is conveyed and understood. And there is peace, despite the storm.
Ingredients to Peace #’s 3,4,5 and 6
Likewise we’re called as God’s people to demonstrate kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. The opposite of these things are meanness, pride, harshness and impatience.
Those, of course, are things that damage relationships. If and when they flare up between people, a wedge is driven between them. Where once there may have been accord, there may have been peace, there is now brokenness in the relationship.
Likely most of us have experienced - being on the giving or receiving end of these worser qualities - and we’ve felt the relationship drift, be wounded, maybe even die. There is no peace between us. There is little trust. Little confidence.
We feel compelled, in the worse cases, to keep looking behind our back.
Mark Twain said: “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” Mother Theresa said: “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
Kahlil Gibran said: “The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.” And Paul, in the book of Ephesians said: Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Eph 4:32)
A good way to think of humility is: “to have an accurate understanding of yourself”. When we know who we are, we will be aware of our strengths and weaknesses.
In fact to be humble means in part that we’re self-reflective rather than judging others.
Gentleness and patience perhaps do not need any unpacking. Suffice it to say that compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience when they are active in our lives are essential pieces of a life of peace.
Ingredient to Peace #7: 13 Bear with each other
One meaning of ‘to bear with’ is to hold up one another, to sustain each other through hardship. But there’s a another meaning of the original Greek word: anechō (an-e-hoe)
When Rick Tobias, the former President and CEO of Yonge Street Mission, was the director of Evergreen back in the day (1986), he was interviewing summer staff. I had been on staff the previous year and was returning in a leadership in 1986.
So he had interviewed potential staff and had decided to bring on the team one particularly lovely and fascinating young woman. Rick told her that her team leader, me, was decent enough, but that also pretty quirky.
The young woman discovered soon enough that that was true. Eventually she decided to bear with the team leader’s quirkiness and, so, she eventually married me. Thanks for that, Hon!
We’re called to bear with one another, whether it’s the things about us that are quirky (we all have them, you know!) or if it’s the things we struggle with - fear, self-esteem, wounds from our past, even our addictions - you name it.
We’re privileged to be brothers and sisters in Christ, and so we bear with, endure, and abide those things in one another that we may sometimes find a bit hard to take. That gives us elbow room to grow.
Ingredient to Peace #8: Forgive
This is a biggy, and its absolutely critical to having God’s peace and to not getting stuck in a bad experience, so that we relive it again and again and stew in our bitterness, which only ever makes us bitter people. Forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
If I were to tell you that I want more of God’s peace and at the same time I refuse to forgive you for something you’ve done, I would hope that you would tell me that I want the impossible.
The one who forgives doesn’t forgive and forget. That’s not found anywhere in the Bible, it may surprise you to hear.
The one who forgives is greater than the one who is forgiven.
That’s because the one who forgives, in truth absorbs in themselves the true hurt caused by the other. He or she doesn’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t minimize it or make light of a serious offense.
The one who forgives accepts what has happened (as opposed to living in denial), makes the conscious choice to not hold the thing against the person, when, in all reality, the person does not deserve to be release from the debt they owe.
The one who forgives commits an act of grace, of unmerited kindness. And in doing that, the one who forgives releases the one who has offended to grow so that they can grow become a better person, rather than being chained to the past.
The one who forgives also helps themselves by not letting the offender live in their head rent free as they relive and perhaps retraumatize themselves by looping in their minds the hard thing that has happened.
Our forgiveness of one another can’t be guarded, cautious, half-hearted. The model of forgiveness that we’re to follow is to forgive as God has forgiven us. You know how much you have been forgiven. I know how much I have been forgiven.
Perhaps enough said. There’s lots to be said about forgiveness, and we’ve spoken of it a lot from this pulpit. Being a forgiving person is directly related to being a person of peace and to experiencing the peace of Christ.
14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Love completes the composition we’ve been studying. The term for love here in the original language, the Koine Greek, is not a watered down meaning of love. Love is an endangered word in our culture because we use it to express our enjoyment of a TV show or a candy bar and we use it to express the deepest affection that can be shared between people.
The word Paul uses here is actually one of the few Greek words we hear fairly often in the church: Agape, God’s love. We’re called to actually put on or express or manifest God’s own love.
That leads me to perhaps the most important thing you can take away from today’s message. We can ‘put on God’s love’ or ‘wear’ God’s love only when we know His presence. God’s presence is the key to loving.
And in truth it is the key element in true, lasting peace. The presence of God in us produces the above virtues, and, like a perfectly balanced ecosystem, those virtues keep us aligned with God, keep us knowing God, keep us in a state of loving God with our whole hearts.
And so, the fruit of it all is that the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. It is the peace of Christ that we need.
Human peace always has a shelf life. We know that strife, or war is never completely vanquished from this planet.
But Jesus, the Prince of Peace, laid down His life for humanity, and He did so to bridge the distance between us and God. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace”. (Ephesians 2:13-14a).
Personal peace, the kind that passes all understanding, begins with knowing Jesus. In time that peace will fill our lives. The Jesus Community, His Church, will forever be, at our best, bearers and messengers of His peace.
May the message of the church, may the message of the Yonge Street Mission, always be that people can experience the love of God, the redemption of God and the peace of Christ only through the Son of God. May we always be ready to say” “Know the love of God through the Son of God”. It is the best gift we have to offer our community and this city.
May the peace of Christ, His shalom, His deep, rich, whole, healthy, lasting, life-giving, nurturing peace, fill your life, and may you know the joy of the Lord as a result. Amen.
