6.23.24 Colossians 1:3–8 Trinity Lutheran, Bay City
3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints 5 because of the hope that is stored up for you in heaven. You have already heard about this in the word of truth, the gospel 6 that is present with you now. The gospel is bearing fruit and growing in the entire world, just as it also has been doing among you from the day you heard it and came to know the grace of God in truth. 7 You learned this from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf. 8 He is the one who told us about your love in the Spirit.
Plant a Seed and See What Happens
There’s a foolish saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” What a lie! Words are actually very powerful. A husband and a wife get into an argument. In the heat of the moment they utter the words that they know will hurt the most. “I never should have married you. You were always a loser.” Words that etch into the heart and the brain to be replayed over and over and over. Yet words can also be very therapeutic. During Covid sympathetic words of comfort and encouragement were needed to take people out of their fearful shell and give them courage to live again.
If mere human words can be so powerful, think then of divine words, spoken or written by God himself. God created the world through words. Hebrews 1 states that Jesus is “sustaining all things by His powerful word.” Hebrews 4:12 states, “the word of God is living and active.” In today’s epistle, Paul stated that the gospel is BEARING FRUIT and GROWING. When I go on a bike ride down by the Saginaw River, they have a nice four foot wide pathway paved with a couple inches of blacktop. Hundreds of people walk and ride on it daily, and it holds up just fine. But while you are walking on the path, you can see certain portions of the pathway that have been ruined by plants that have grown up through the blacktop, a couple inches of blacktop - they grow right through. That’s what the power of what a seed can do.
Think then about the human heart and the brain. It’s tougher than asphalt. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jesus said in Matthew 15:19 that, “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Your heart will convince you to do things that you know are wrong, harmful, and just plain evil. Your heart is full of YOU. It doesn’t want to listen to anything negative, anything against what IT wants.
What can crack into the heart? Will a hammer do? Think of how hard Pharaoh’s heart became, even when facing all kinds of plagues like frogs, lice, darkness and boils. No matter how much God hammered him with pain, he kept on hardening his heart further and further and further. Years ago there was a cult called the Branch Dividians who had holed themselves inside of their compound, and for some reason the government wanted at them. They tried to talk with them for 51 days, during which 35 people were released. The FBI got tired of waiting, so they went blasting in with tanks and tear gas. Well, the whole place went up in flames, and 76 people, including 28 children, died as a result. The sledgehammer approach only ended up with a lot more dead bodies.
So how do you crack the heart then if force doesn’t work? Even though force doesn’t produce faith, that doesn’t keep God from striking hard at times. He hammers with sickness and pain. He calls us things like wicked, sinful, rebellious, and ignorant. He tells us to repent or perish in hell. He uses the LAW. And that doesn’t make people too happy. Sometimes they hate God all the more. But not all the time. Sometimes those harsh words and actions soften people up and at least make them realize they need some help.
But after He softens us up, what is it that actually produces the miraculous change in people? What actually brings life within? It’s not the hammer. It’s the Gospel. What is it that makes the Gospel so powerful? Think about the wonder of it all. God came down into our world in human flesh. He chose to be born through the virgin Mary. He CHOSE to come down into this sinful world. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little bit claustrophobic. Tell me to live in a woman’s womb for 9 months? No way! Jesus was willing to come into this world, like that, for me and for you! If you and I were to become a worm to save worms, that is nothing compared to God taking on flesh.
Then think about the whole story of God walking and talking among us, eating our food, sleeping in our beds, walking on our streets. There are certain areas of the world that you just wouldn’t choose to go to, the inner cities of Detroit or Chicago perhaps. Think of the quarantined areas of hospitals. The sign on the door, “Do not enter without proper medical equipment.” Nobody chooses to go to those places. Even if you did, and you had to deal with hundreds to thousands of people asking for help, sooner or later you’d get sick of it. Yet here Jesus was, God divine, living in this filthy and sinful world, speaking with the people that even WE wouldn’t speak with. Touching the people that no one else would touch, and making them clean in the process! And never getting tired of it! What a story!
And that, of course, isn’t all! He allowed the people he was living for to put him to death. He let them make fun of him, spit at him, put nails in his hands and feet, and watch him die. He had to endure the most awful separation imaginable. Think about when a spouse dies after having spent 20 or 30 or 40 years together. The loneliness involved. You can’t imagine it. Well, the Father separated Himself from the Son on the cross, He who had been together from eternity! If you’ve ever watched a loved one suffer and die, you know how difficult that is. You hold their hand. You try to alleviate their pain in whatever way possible. But the Father Himself had to put His hammer down on Jesus in the middle of the process and punish Him for us. If you think you’ve been through suffering, you know nothing of it compared to Jesus. You didn’t volunteer for your suffering. Jesus did. We deserve our suffering. Jesus didn’t. That’s nothing but impressive.
When you’re sick and your mom or your spouse rubs your head, gets you a washcloth, brings you a heating pad - it’s that personal care that means so much at a time of need. Your friend sits with you and helps you get through an addiction. They mean the world to you for what they’ve done for you! The Holy Spirit points us to Jesus and says, “There! He came here for YOU! He wants YOU, the sinner, to be saved.” The Gospel shows that you don’t have to worry that God is going to punish you for something you’ve done, as if He is holding a grudge against you. Jesus already paid for it all. You don’t have to worry that you are on your own in this world, trying to fend for yourself. God’s angels are looking over you. You don’t have to fret that your fight against temptation is just a matter of self will. The Holy Spirit is living inside you. You don’t have to fear when you face a deadly diagnosis that will most certainly lead to imminent death. Through faith in Christ, death is your pathway out of this world, directly to heaven. The Gospel gives you hope!
It was the Gospel that had a profound effect on the people of Colossae. Epaphras brought it to them. He was most likely a disciple of Paul, who had spent three years in Ephesus preaching and teaching. We assume that Epaphras met up with Paul in Ephesus, and then took the Gospel back to his hometown of Colossae, which was about 100 miles to the east in the region of Phrygia. He told Paul what had happened in Colossae as a result, and Paul wrote a letter to the Colossians about it. In it, Paul writes with thanksgiving to GOD for what He did with the Colossians. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints 5 because of the hope that is stored up for you in heaven.
The first and foremost thing that Paul was thankful for was their faith. Faith isn’t just a belief that things will work out somehow. Faith isn’t just having a positive attitude. Faith is based on solid promises that are attached to what Jesus solidly did for us right here on planet earth. Because Jesus died and rose from the dead for us, we have HOPE of life eternal in heaven with Jesus and the saints when we die.
It’s that hope that generates love for all the saints. Here’s people who have the same love of Jesus that I do, the same guidelines for life that I do, the same goal as I do, to be in heaven with Jesus. Through Epaphras’ preaching, God had generated a strong congregation of believers in Ephesus who had become renowned for their love of one another. Paul was absolutely thrilled with what God did with them, and he let them know it. (And Paul wasn’t one just to compliment everyone and anyone. Read his letter to the Galatians and you see how he had some harsh words for them.)
Would he say the same thing about us here at Trinity? Would he say that we are well renowned for our love for one another? For our strong faith in Jesus? For our hope of heaven? That’s a hard thing to gauge. I see a lot of love from some of our members at times. I see a desire to grow from some of our members too, especially in our Thursday Bible class. I don’t sense a doom and gloom attitude here. I would say overall we are hopeful. Of course, this varies with every Christian. You naturally have members with stronger faith than others. You have some that are more loving than others, more hopeful than others. It is the nature of being sinful believers. Everyone has different strengths.
That being said, some of this can be contagious as well. When you have Bible class and there is good attendance, people are eager to learn, it can be contagious. More people want to come, so they eagerly invite them to come. Are you doing that? But when you only have 3-7 children show up for Sunday School, well then none of the kids want to come. We had a little 2nd grader come to church a few months ago. She was looking for some of her classmates, but none of them were here. Her parents were not members. So they stopped coming. If you have people coming to Bible class but nobody is asking questions, nobody is really taking an active interest, that can be contagious too. If nobody is singing in church, that can be contagious too.
So it all starts with YOU. You have to ask yourself, “How is my faith? How is MY love of the saints here? How is my hope?” How can you love those who are here if you don’t take the time to get to know anyone? To say “good morning” to them? Yes, I understand that some of you struggle mightily with social anxiety and depression. Jesus loves you just as much as the next person. But there’s still an ideal. There’s still a goal. There’s still a desire that God has for you to be more, even though He loves you as is too.
How can we have that model of faith, hope and love that would excite Paul? Paul makes it clear. You have already heard about this in the word of truth, the gospel that is present with you now. The gospel is bearing fruit and growing in the entire world, just as it also has been doing among you from the day you heard it and came to know the grace of God in truth. It is the gospel, knowing the God of grace in truth that bears fruit and causes growth. Think of it, by the time the last disciple - the apostle John - died - the followers of Christ grew from 12 to about one half of a million people, in the midst of suffering and persecution. Just like the seed grows through two inches of blacktop, the Word can grow in the darkest of situations.
That means that God will bless your faith when you continue to study the Word of God, when you continue to cling to Jesus in the Word and sacrament. Listen to what He has to say to you through Bible study, Bible reading, and by continuing to come to worship. Make some effort to grow! Don’t be lazy with your faith. Listen to the Word, and see the hope that God provides in Christ crucified and risen from the dead. Dig into God’s Word, and find more and more promises from Him from different angles and different books. But if you don’t keep listening to the promises of salvation and hear what God has to say to you on a regular basis, you are making it very difficult for God to work these powerful changes in you.
If that Word was able to change Paul from a persecutor of the church into the greatest missionary ever known, then who knows what it will do? When I used to do a Bible study in the state prison out in Norton, Kansas. Some of those guys were scary and rough looking. They were in prison for a reason! But the Gospel changed them! They were eager to come and listen and learn! They wanted to grow. It was fun teaching them. It was unreal! If God did that with Paul when he was UNWILLING, then think of what He could do with you when you are WILLING to learn and grow? If God could do that with the Colossians, then what might He do with you, and with us?
Years ago I took a little sapling that was growing in the front of my yard in Topeka, Kansas and planted it in the field right next to my house. Just this past week the current pastor took a picture of the front yard and sent it to me. That little sapling has grown to be a huge tree over forty feet tall in the course of just 12 years! It was amazing! Imagine what could happen in you, what could happen to our church, when we continue to stay in the Word. Your marriages could improve. Your children could be strong in the faith, grow up to be good and faithful Christians. You could have confidence like never before. We could find ourselves reaching out like never before, if we just plant more seeds, just little seeds, and let the Word do its work, because the Word of God is powerful. It doesn’t take much. Just plant a seed, and see what happens. Amen.
