1) Introduction
Imagine you are comfortably asleep in your bed. You are awakened by a crash as a window is broken. Your heart begins pounding as adrenaline pumps through your veins, preparing your body for fight or flight. You pick up the phone. The line is dead. The door bursts open. Four heavily armed men in dark clothing and masks grab you and your spouse, handcuff you, blindfold you and hustle you in the back of a van. After hours of travel, you are taken out of the vehicle, brought into a remote cabin. Listening to your abductors phone conversations, you realize they are holding you for ransom. You have just been kidnapped. How does it feel?
In our passage this morning, we’re warned about kidnappers. Not the kind I just described, but a more insidious variety. These kidnappers don’t break into your home. They don’t use violence. They use logic, persuasion and stories of their own experiences to convince you that you really want to go with them. But like all kidnappers, once they have you, your life is pretty much in their control.
2) Background
Paul writes to the Colossian church because they are in danger of being taken hostage, and he wants to warn them. They were at the point where they wanted something more than what they had learned. They probably had lots of opportunities to learn about different religions and philosophies.
Colossae was a Greek city which had been taken over by the Roman government and also had a large number of Jews who had lived there for centuries. So if they had a hunger for different ideas, there was no shortage of them. Now understand, we’re not talking about people outside the church, but even the Christians in the church were seeking more spiritually. Some of the ideas seemed compatible with their faith. After all, weren’t they just trying other ways to seek God?
3) Go back to the beginning; Press on until the end
Paul tells these Colossian Christians, “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him,” keep walking the same path that they started on. He describes how they were “rooted” in him. This was a one time event – experienced when they first committed their lives to him. This is what we call justification, when Christ took our sins away on the cross. But God didn’t plant us just to sit there. There is an ongoing work that God wants to do in us. We are to be continually built up, and strengthened in the faith. God wants to shape our characters and make us like Christ, to draw us into an ever deeper relationship with him. This, too, is a work that comes from God. The $10 word for it is sanctification – the process of becoming spiritually mature. By continuing to walk with Christ, we cooperate with the process that God is accomplishing in us.
It wasn’t that the Colossians didn’t want to move on to spiritual maturity. It was just that thought they could reach that goal by walking on another path, but Paul tells them that they need to go back to the beginning, and to press on to the end.
Many of you are as big fans of the Princess Bride as I am. Inigo, the Spanish swordsman who has vowed to avenge his father’s death, finds himself separated from his friend Fessick, Vizzini, his leader and benefactor (in the loosest possible sense) has been killed. He doesn’t know what to do or where to turn. So he goes back to where he first was hired by Vizzini to wait. When they try to remove him, he cries out,
"I know you Vizzini…when the job went wrong you went back to the beginning… And this is where we got the job, so it’s the beginning. And I am staying ‘till Vizzini comes."
He went back to the beginning, and he was determined to stick it out until the end. Paul was exhorting his readers in a similar way. To go back to the beginning, to what they had learned, to the path on which they had begun, and to stay on that path to the very end.
4) Be Thankful
And then, with an almost “throw away line” Paul adds that as we continue our walk with Christ that we are to be “overflowing with thanksgiving.” There are only two active verbs in these verses, two things that we are responsible for. The first is walking, that is to continue following Christ. The second is that we are to be overflowing with thanksgiving. A life that is rooted in Christ, and being continually built up in him will naturally be filled and overflowing with thankfulness.
It will come as no surprise to you that our culture does not encourage thankfulness. In fact, corporations spend billions of dollars every year to help you to be discontent. And with all that we have to be thankful for, how often are we content. How often is our focus on what we have, rather than on what we don’t have?
But if you slept in a bed last night, and the heat was on; if you couldn’t decide which of your clothes to wear; if you brought one of your Bibles; then drove in your car to get here; if, like me, you need to cut back on what you eat, because we have the opportunity to eat not only enough, but more than we should, you have much to be thankful for.
We have learned to “feel our pain;” we have not always learned to “feel our joy.” We have forgotten, if we ever knew, that it is possible to choose to be thankful for what we have rather than be unhappy about what we don’t have.
Before I leave that, I need to add that I don’t mean that we should never listen to that little voice of discontent. In fact, some of us need to heed to that voice. Often the first step when God is trying to move you somewhere else, either physically or spiritually, is that He allows you to be discontent with where you are. And in order to bring about change, we need to listen to that voice. But do seek to be thankful for what you have.
5) The Warning
Then comes Paul’s warning, “Don’t get taken captive, don’t be held hostage” by the philosophies around you. Philosophy here extends to any set of ideas or beliefs, or even any worldview. Paul describes them as “hollow and deceptive,” that is, they looked great on the outside. It’s like a beautiful castle set up on a hill. You climb the hill, enthralled with the castle’s beauty. But you open the door, and there’s nothing inside. It’s empty. Its beauty was a lie. And so, says Paul, is a worldview that is based on merely human traditions, rather than on Christ. The Colossian Christians looked at the wisdom of their own day. It looked so rational and practical. It was contemporary, the product of the latest research and technology. But it was a lie. And lies, especially beautiful, well-crafted ones, have a tendency of entangling both those who tell them and those who believe them.
Some of you have been Christians for a long time. You may have experienced disappointment with God. You may think that your faith is fine for Sundays, or that going to church fulfills a certain religious compartment in your life. But you’re still be looking for answers to the deepest questions in your life.
Maybe you say, “Hey, the Bible is great, as far as it goes, but it’s a really old book. It was never meant relate to a world of space flights and cyberspace. We know so much more now than what they knew then. Christianity is great… but it’s not enough to meet my needs.
Just like the Colossians, we are surrounded by philosophies competing for our attention, our loyalty, or maybe just our money:
Astrology in the newspapers
Psychic Friends on the television
Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door
There are more scientific philosophies, such as psychology. Psychology can help us to know how we got where we are, and at it’s best, to help us move on to what we can become. But if, in the name of psychology, we allow the past to define our future, we give it too much power. We’re in danger of being held hostage.
People all around us are constantly hawking philosophies and worldviews
Some of them may even be compatible with our faith. But many of them are not. Some of them are pretty enticing. No matter how much you may laugh at it, haven’t you just once wanted to call and find out what one of those psychics would say?
(And don’t you think Paul has some nerve? To make a single sweeping statement about the all philosophies of the world being hollow and deceptive? How dare he slam other people’s beliefs like that. How intolerant! How politically incorrect! But then he goes on to contrast between the philosophy held out by the world, and the faith which we have received from God.)
6) The Fullness of Deity
“For in Christ, all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.” This is certainly not news for us. We have heard countless times that Jesus is fully God and fully man. It is such an abstract truth, it seems easy to nod our heads in assent. What follows is not so easy to swallow, to even to comprehend.
“And you have been given fullness in Christ.” OK, we’ve been given fullness. But what does that mean? Filled with what? The same root word is used for the fullness of God which is in Jesus, and the fullness which is in us. The implication is that we are filled with the same thing that Jesus was filled with: the fullness of the Deity. But that’s outrageous, isnt it? It sounds heretical! But listen to Eph. 3:18-19 (NRSV) Paul says, “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
I don’t know about you, but this is astounding to me. First let’s get straight what it doesn’t mean. Many of you are familiar with New Age beliefs that “We are all gods.” Now, frankly, I don’t want to offend anybody, but I know many of you… some of you I know rather well… and if you’re gods, we’re all in big trouble. The only thing that would be more scary is if I was a god. This verse does not mean that someday we get to be Jesus, or God, or even a god with a little “g”,– but it does mean that we get to be like Him by being filled with Him. It does mean that there is no empty, aching hole in our beings that cannot be filled with the grace and love of God.
There were several possibilities for what specific problem Paul is addressing in Colossae. One is a form of Jewish mysticism which had as its goal to see the vision which Ezekiel saw of a “heavenly chariot with God visibly enthroned above it.” The requirement to attain such a vision was meticulous observance of the law, rites of purification, a period of fasting and other disciplines, and the help of angels.
Paul looked at these sincere believers. They were longing for a fuller experience of God, but they were being taken hostage by a lie about how to get that experience. They were going through these harsh rituals in the slim hope that perhaps they could have this mystical experience that would bring them closer to God, if only for a short time. Their desires weren’t wrong, but they were trying to fill them in a way that could only draw them further from God. Paul is saying, it’s good to be thirsty, but don’t drink gasoline! Don’t be held hostage! Don’t get caught holding an empty bag, when you have been offered fullness in Christ!
Our faith, our God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is sufficient for our needs. And if we feel a lack, it doesn’t mean that we are on the wrong road, it means that we need to keep moving, keep walking on the road which God has laid before us. For as we keep walking, Further up and further in, we will experience the fullness of God in our lives.
If you have been a Christian for any length of time, there is a good chance you have been disappointed. Perhaps a prayer has not been not been answered for something desperately important to you. Perhaps someone you loved has died, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe a marriage or other significant relationship has fallen apart… or just never materialized. Maybe you are desiring some spiritual experience others have had, that seems to give their lives a meaning yours doesn’t have. To all of those things, God says, “Don’t be taken captive. Don’t get caught holding an empty bag, while the fullness of God is offered to you.” Go back to the beginning; press on to the end. Keep walking on that same path you started on. It is the path of life, of grace and forgiveness, and the path to the very fullness of God.
