ENGAGE
This morning I need some help from all of the kids that are here. What can you all tell me about Peter Pan? [Let kids answer].
Thanks for your help. All those things are true about peter Pan. But the one thing I want to focus on this morning is that Peter Pan never grows up. Now I suppose that is OK for a character in a book or a movie, but when it happens in real life it’s not a good thing, is it?
I can remember going to my 40th high school reunion a couple years ago. I was amazed at how old all of my classmates looked, but the one thing that surprised me even more than that is that a few of them, while they may have aged on the outside, really hadn’t grown up on the inside. In a lot of ways, they were exactly the same people they had been back in high school.
TENSION
But what is even more troubling is that there seem to be a lot of people who call themselves Christians who never grow up spiritually. Even though they have matured physically, their relationship with Jesus really doesn’t look a whole lot different today than it did 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 40 years ago, for that matter.
And frankly that is a potential danger for all of us, isn’t it? So this morning, we’re going to learn how to make sure that we don’t become one of those spiritual Peter Pans.
TRUTH
Today’s message is the third in a series of five messages about our church’s discipleship path.
THORNYDALE FAMILY CHURCH
DISCIPLESHIP PATH
We began Two weeks ago with the first step in the process – Come. We learned that our invitation to others to “come and see” Jesus ought to be the natural outflow of our own personal relationship with Jesus.
Last week we focused on the second step in the process – Commit. There we learned that being a genuine disciple of Jesus requires us to be “all in” and to relinquish control of our life to Jesus. And we talked about three important commitments that every disciple of Jesus needs to make:
1) A commitment to a personal relationship with Jesus in which we say “no” to self and “yes” to Jesus.
2) A commitment to baptism by immersion, and
3) A commitment to membership in a local church
Today, we come to the third step in the discipleship process – Grow. As I’ve mentioned before, there is no perfect way to diagram the discipleship process and that is especially true when it comes to this third step. As we saw the first week of this series, spiritual growth ought to be something that all of us engage in continually as long as we’re here on this earth. So while we’ve identified it as a separate step in this discipleship path, it is actually something that ought to characterize our relationship with Jesus from beginning to end.
For the last two weeks in this series, we answered a series of 4 questions about each of the steps in the discipleship process and that was originally my intention this morning. But as I worked on the message this week, it became pretty apparent that was going to be a lot more than I could possibly cover this morning. So today we’ll just focus on the most important of the four:
1. What concrete actions can I take right now to take this next step in my relationship with Jesus?
Today, we’ll let the apostle Paul guide us in answering that question. We’re going to be looking at one paragraph from his letter to the church in Colossae, which we all know better as the book of Colossians. As far as we know, Paul had never visited Colossae. But while he was imprisoned in Rome, he got word about some of the false teaching that was going on in the church there. So he wrote this letter to combat that false teaching. And near the beginning of that letter, he addresses the root cause that had allowed that false teaching to take root in that church – the presence of a lot of spiritual Peter Pans in that church who just hadn’t taken the steps that were necessary to grow in spiritual maturity and their relationship with Jesus.
So go ahead and turn with me to Colossians chapter 1 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 9:
[9] And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, [10] so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; [11] being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; [12] giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. [13] He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, [14] in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
(Colossians 1:9-14 ESV)
The first thing we note here is the way that Paul prays for the people in the church there. Like most of the prayers we find in his letters, Paul’s prayers tend to be a lot different than most of ours, don’t they? Instead of focusing merely on physical needs, Paul prays primarily for the spiritual needs of the church community there in Colossae.
And because Paul’s prayer is so specific and detailed, there is a lot that we can learn from that prayer about how Jesus desires for us to grow in our relationship with Him and some practical steps that we can take in order to do that. And when we look at this passage as a whole we discover that…
Spiritual growth not about just getting me into the Bible;
It is about getting the Bible into me
Here in this passage Paul reveals that in order to get the Bible into me, there are…
Three stages of spiritual growth:
1. Knowing
Paul expresses the importance of growing in my knowledge of God at the beginning of his prayer in verse 9 when he prays that his readers would be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” and then again in verse 10, where he describes one of the characteristics of someone who is growing in their relationship with Jesus - “increasing in the knowledge of God.”
Obviously the key idea in both those passages is that of “knowledge”. But I am pretty sure that Paul had a much different understanding about exactly what that entails than most of us do.
In our culture, we tend to view knowledge from a western mindset, which is an extension of the way the ancient Greeks viewed the idea of knowledge. We tend to view knowledge as a means to achieving an end goal. That mindset leads us to accumulate a set of facts so that we can pass a test or so that ultimately we can graduate with a degree and get a piece of paper that documents that accumulation of information. And in our culture people who have done that are considered to have knowledge. They even put initials like MBA or Phd or MDiv or MD or JD after their name to make sure other people know just how smart they are.
But Paul, as a Jew, approached the idea of knowledge from a very different Hebrew mindset in which the focus was more on the path or the process rather than the end goal. That is why near the end of his life Paul was still engaged in the process of knowing God better, because in his mind it was the process and not the final goal that mattered.
If you’ve watched any University of Arizona basketball, you’ve probably heard Coach Sean Miller use the phrase “honor the process.” His philosophy is that if each player works hard and prepares properly the results will take care of themselves. So every day Coach Miller encourages his players to do just that in practice and in the classroom and in the other areas of their lives. Therefore, each day, the players aren’t so much focused on their long range goals as they are on just taking the next step in the process. And that’s been a pretty good formula for success.
That is essentially what Paul is praying for the people in the Colossian church to do – to honor the process. Rather than focusing on reaching the end goal, Paul was encouraging them to make sure that they were heading in the right direction by just taking the next step that God wanted them to take. And the way they were to do that was to be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding”.
The words “wisdom” and “understanding” help us to comprehend what that looks like in more practical terms. While those two words are certainly related, there is an important distinction between them.
The Hebrew concept of wisdom, which is woven throughout the Old Testament, was often equated with skill. For instance, in Exodus 35 we find that God gave Bezalel wisdom, or skill, for the purpose of building the tabernacle. By the time that the book of Proverbs is written, Solomon uses that same word to describe skill in living. In our passage, Paul uses the word wisdom in that same way. For Paul wisdom is the knowledge of how to live skillfully in a manner consistent with God’s will. We do that primarily by learning broad Biblical principles that ought to guide the way we live.
The Greek word for “understanding” is a compound word that literally means “to bring together”. The Greeks sometimes called it critical knowledge, which was the ability to apply overall principles to any situation which might arise in life. So in this context understanding is the ability to apply those broad Biblical principles to specific circumstances in our lives.
So it is clear here that when Paul writes about knowledge that he isn’t referring merely to the accumulation of information about God as an end in itself. He’s not saying that they just need to learn more facts about God. Instead, the kind of knowledge that Paul has in mind is completely suturing our lives with the understanding of who God is and what He has done so that we can honor the process and know what our next step is and then be equipped to take that step.
Many of us probably know people who are perpetual students. They have made a career of going to school. Theoretically they are accumulating all kinds of knowledge, but more often they end up accumulating nothing but a huge amount of debt because never really seem to do anything with all that learning. They may have a lot of “book smarts” but that really doesn’t do them any good in their day to day lives.
We certainly don’t want to do that when it comes to our spiritual growth. We need to guard against the idea that we get to know God merely by learning a bunch of facts about Him, when the only way we really get to know Him is through a relationship in which He leads and enables us to continually take the next step in the right direction.
2. Doing
Paul reinforces the understanding of knowledge that we just discussed in verse 10, when he tells his readers that the purpose of knowing is to “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him”, For Paul, the reason we are to know is so that we can do. That is certainly consistent with his Hebrew mindset, which viewed knowing and doing as just two different sides of the same coin, not two unrelated concepts.
I just want to make two brief point here.
First, while I certainly benefit when I get to know Jesus better and I put into practice the things I am learning, that is not the primary purpose for growing in my relationship with Him. The primary purpose is to please Jesus and bring glory to Him. And while we’re on that point, let me also point out that whatever growth I experience is all His work, too. Look at verse 9 again for a minute and you’ll see that the verb “may be filled” is a passive verb. That means that someone else – in this case God – is doing the filling. Paul doesn’t write “may fill yourself” there, does he?
Secondly, we see here that knowing without doing is a dangerous thing. That idea is so important that Jesus spoke about it frequently to His disciples. Here is just a small sampling of what Jesus had to say about that:
“My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”
(Luke 8:21 ESV)
“Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”
(Luke 11:28 ESV)
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
(Matthew 7:24-27 ESV)
It’s not enough to just hear the Word of God or read it. If we want to grow in our relationship with Jesus, we also have to do it.
3. Being
Beginning in the last part of verse 10, Paul uses four participles to describe who I will become if I am engaging in the first two steps of knowing and doing, So I can use each of these four descriptions as a tool to evaluate whether or not I am really growing in my relationship with Jesus. If I am knowing and doing, then my life will consistently display these four characteristics in ever increasing amounts.
• Fruitfulness
The idea of bearing fruit is certainly a topic that is worthy of its own separate message. But for now, it is adequate to point out that in the Bible, fruit is usually a matter of three things:
o Character. (The fruit of the Spirit)
o Conduct.
o Converts.
If I’m growing in my relationship with Jesus, then all three will be increasingly present in my life.
• Increasing knowledge of God
This means that none of us ever come to a place where we “know enough” and no longer need to grow in our knowledge of God. Discipleship, as we have seen this morning, is not about passing a test or getting a diploma. If you don’t know God any better today than you did a year ago, or even a month ago, then you’re not growing in a way that brings glory to God
• Endurance and perseverance in trials
In verse 11, Paul points out that the life that gives glory to God is “being strengthened with power”. But the idea here is not just that we are empowered to do what we want. Note that Paul links the idea of being empowered here with endurance and patience. There is little doubt here that Paul is addressing the way that disciples of Jesus bring glory to God when they handle trials with endurance and patience.
We’ve seen that right here in our body haven’t we? The way that people like Shirley Williams and Harold Grimm and Ryan and Natalie Fregoso and the Dodd’s and many of the rest of you have handled adversity in your lives absolutely brings glory to the God who sustains us in those times of trial. It’s easy to say that we’re growing during the easy times, but it is the difficulties in life that reveal whether that is indeed true.
• Gratitude
I think most of us would say that we’re grateful, but I wonder how many times we thank God for what He has provided while at the same time feeling that we deserve more. If we’re honest, a lot of us would have to admit that we think that if God really loved us He would give us more money, more stuff, more time, more friends, more influence and fewer bills, less illness, and fewer problems.
But as Paul points out here, genuine gratitude begins with the realization that our greatest blessing – salvation – is completely undeserved. It is 100% the work of a God who loves us and not a result of anything we can do. We ought to spend every waking moment of every day thanking God that He pulled us from the jaws of Hell and set us on a course for an eternity spent in His presence. We need to think often about where we would be if God hadn’t drawn us to Himself.
A life of gratitude also means that we don’t take our blessings for granted. When is the last time you thanked God for the breath you were able to take, or the grandeur of His creation? When was the last time you thanked Him for the Bible or the privilege of prayer or the ability to gather here with these people every week to worship Him? When is the last time you thanked him for your family and friends, or even thanked Him for your trials?
APPLICATION
With what we’ve learned this morning, let’s make this really practical by answering the question we posed earlier.
APPLICATION
1. What concrete actions can I take right now to take this next step in my relationship with Jesus?
• Read the Bible consistently and systematically
The primary way we get to know God and His will is through His Word. So we need to read it consistently and we need to read all of it, which means that we should be following some kind of systematic plan to make sure that we don’t just read our favorite parts and skip the parts that we don’t like or the ones that are more difficult.
As I shared on my blog a couple of weeks ago, there are a number of great reading plans to choose from. The important thing is that you pick one and stick with it. If you don’t already have a plan you’re using, our church has developed a plan to read through the entire Bible every four years. You can find a link to that reading plan on the website and each week the bulletin contains the Scripture reading for the week from that plan.
• Obey what I already know
Several weeks ago Mary and I went to Sabino Canyon with some out of town company. Before we started hiking, we looked at the trail maps and planned out our route and decided how far we were going to hike.
And if we’re really honest that is what most of us would like for God’s will to be like. We want to see the entire trail map for our life up front. We want to know what our lives are going to look like 5 or 10 or even 40 years down the road. We want to know where the trail ends. I think that the reason we would love to see God’s will like that is because then we could decide up front whether we even want to get on that trail at all. Or at a minimum, we could at least make our own plans for getting to the finish line.
But Paul never viewed God’s will like that. Paul just wanted to know God well enough so that he could understand the next step God wanted him to take so he could be obedient to that. We certainly see that in Paul’s life don’t we? How many times did Paul have to change his plans because God had another detour he wanted Paul to take? Paul didn’t get to do a lot of the things he wanted to do or planned to do because he was committed to obeying that next step that God placed before him.
Our lives really aren’t all that different than Paul’s, or at least they shouldn’t be. Instead of giving us the entire picture all at once, God breaks our lives up into small steps that must be obeyed one at a time. I think that is why Jesus frequently told His disciples not to be anxious about their lives and worry about tomorrow because today has enough troubles of its own. It is why He told them to pray for their daily bread, not bread for their entire life. It is why He told a parable about a greedy farmer who wanted to build bigger barns only to find out he would die that night.
• Participate in corporate worship
Paul’s letter that we looked at this morning was addressed to the entire church body and not just to individuals. We’re going to go into this some more next week, but the fact is that none of us are capable of growing the way God wants us to without being actively involved in a local church and especially in corporate worship.
• Be part of a small group
Corporate worship is certainly important. But it’s also important for all of us to be involved in some kind of a small group that is devoted to studying God’s Word together with other disciples of Jesus. In a large gathering like this you are hopefully being taught God’s Word in a way that you can apply it to your lives. But frankly 30 minutes or so of Bible teaching once a week will never be enough to produce the kind of spiritual growth we’ve been talking about today.
Certainly our own personal Bible reading and study can help us go further in our relationship with Jesus, too. But the way most of us grow best is to be in a smaller group where we have the opportunity to discuss the Bible and talk about how to apply it in our lives and hold each other accountable.
To be real honest this is not an area where our church has particularly excelled. And it seems like in our busy culture, it is getting harder and harder to get people together on a regular basis in a small group. We do have a few groups that meet during the week and you can find information about those in the bulletin or on the website. And if you can find one of those that fits your schedule, I encourage you to be a part of one of those groups.
But if that won’t work for you, we’re trying to provide some opportunities for that kind of small group interaction here at the church on Sundays after this gathering. We’re starting a new small group for parents with children that will be meeting each week and we also have our Bible Roundtable where we discuss the sermon and how to apply it in our lives. Even if you’re already part of another group, we encourage you to take advantage of those opportunities.
And if you’re interested in starting your own group, we would love to help you with that. Just contact any of our Elders and we’ll do what we can to facilitate that.
INSPIRATION
I hope that now you understand why I said earlier that…
Spiritual growth not about just getting me into the Bible;
It is about getting the Bible into me
That means that if I don’t want to be a spiritual Peter Pan who never grows up, I need to make sure that I’m constantly and consistently knowing, doing and being.
[Prayer]
ACTION
Have people complete the Connection Card on the bulletin and turn it in.
Discussion questions for the Bible Roundtable
1. In your own words, describe how our culture’s idea of knowledge differs from Paul’s. Give some examples from your own experience that demonstrate those differences.
2. What are some practical tests that I can apply in my own life to evaluate my own spiritual growth?
3. How should what we’ve learned today impact our personal Bible reading and study?
4. A lot of people today say they don’t need to attend church because they can read and study the Bible on their own and that there is a lot of good Bible teaching available to them on the internet. How would you respond to them?
5. Some churches hold a series of Discipleship classes and give a certificate or diploma to those who complete them. What are some of the potential benefits and drawbacks of such a program?
