Filling in the Blank Space
Series: Jesus, Post-Resurrection
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
April 22, 2006
I have some bad news for you this morning. I have sensed the truth of what I am about to tell you for many years, but research is in. In a 2003 study, researcher, pollster, and church leader George Barna discovered this fact, and I’ll quote him directly.
"Less than one out of every ten churched teenagers has a biblical worldview. In other words, the result of their involvement at a church is that they can recite some religious facts, they made some friends, and they had fun. That’s wonderful, but we also find that most of them have neither accepted Christ as their savior nor altered the basis on which they make their moral and ethical decisions in life. For most teenagers who have spent years attending church activities their faith is not integrated into who they are and how they live."
Did you hear that? In a nutshell, the time our children are spending in church is not effectively centering them in a view of the world that has God at its center. They are making friends, having fun, and learning a bunch of facts they are stuffing in their heads, but they are not essentially being transformed into godly people. Their basic worldviews are still firmly secular – drenched in non-Christian, non-spiritual, and non-Biblical ideas, which lead to non-spiritual decisions, which lead to non-spiritual behaviors, which lead to the unfortunate consequences we see in the lives of people all around us.
Notice Barna did not say less than one out of ten teenagers has a biblical worldview. He said less than one out of ten CHURCHED teenagers. We’re talking about church kids here, folks – people who come to church a lot with their parents, who have grown up hearing Bible stories, singing hymns perhaps, and maybe even received Christian baptism. They’re not Christians – they are as secular, they are as lost, as the next person. There is no essential difference in the way they see the world, make decisions, feel, think, or act.
Why is this relevant? Because children grow into teenagers who grow into adults, who control the power structures of our world, and make decisions about the kind of society we live in. The church is failing its children and releasing them as teenagers into the most dangerous years of their lives with nothing to stand on.
So how about adults? How are we faring? Not very well. In a Barna study conducted in 2006, only 54% of adults claiming to be Christians said they were absolutely committed to their faith. Only 48% strongly agreed that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. 55% agreed that a person will get to heaven apart from Christ if they just do a lot of good things. 55% agreed with the idea that Satan is not an actual being, but just a symbol of evil. 42% of American adults believe that Jesus Christ committed sins while he lived on earth. How has the church failed to convey the truth about its most essential doctrines? Remember, these are 2006 figures. I could go on, but this is not a sermon about statistics, it’s a sermon about a crisis of belief. The church is not creating a Christ-centered belief-system in its children. They are growing into teenagers without Christ-centered worldviews, and then into adults without Christ-centered worldviews. The church is suffering acutely from a belief problem – not that people don’t believe anything at all, but that so many claim to embrace Christianity, yet deny its most basic beliefs.
I approach you with all of this today because we are beginning a study of the book of Colossians. We talked about the resurrection of Jesus Christ last week. We talked about the fact that we believe literally in that resurrection. We talked about how a mythical resurrection equals a mythical hope, and how a true resurrection equals true hope. So it seemed fitting after that that we would turn from Christ’s resurrection and check out who Jesus is today – right now as we sit here. Thus I have entitled this series, “Jesus, Post-Resurrection.”
We see that Paul the Apostle (who wrote Colossians – and Titus) believed very deeply that beliefs matter - not only whether they are sincere or not, but whether they are right or wrong. Paul believed that some ideas are clearly right and some ideas are clearly wrong. Remember our study on Titus? Right teaching leads to what? Right living comes from what? Wrong teaching leads to what? Wrong living comes from what? This can only be true if there is actually a such thing as right teaching. And if there is a such thing as right teaching, there is also a such thing as wrong teaching. This is a concept increasingly foreign to Americans, in our society that says “whatever you believe is cool, as long as you’re sincere.”
If you brought a Bible today, go ahead and turn to Colossians. If you are not used to finding things in the Bible, open up to the front and you’ll find a table of contents. The book of Colossians is in the section called the New Testament, and is between Philippians and 1st Corinthians.
Are you there? Good, now at the top of the page you’ll see that the book is labeled Colossians. If it doesn’t say Colossians you’re in the wrong place. Now if your Bible is like most Bibles, you have the name of the book at the top, then there’s some amount of white space between the title and chapter one of the book. That white space is the topic of today’s message!
See, at the beginning of every single book of the Bible, there is white space. Every time you see that white space, I want you to think of one word – background. Let that white space remind you that whatever you’re looking at did not spring from nowhere. There were circumstances that gave rise to it and those circumstances were rooted in history – a place and time. The Bible is a book about spiritual reality that is rooted firmly in this physical reality where we live, so the Bible has people and places and things and relationships. When you see the white space at the beginning of any book of the Bible, let it be a reminder to you to find out a little bit about what goes there. Find out who wrote the book, and when, and where, and why. I never begin reading a book of the Bible without learning that information first. It’s like coming into the middle of a conversation! Today I’m going to spend a bit of time filling in the white space in Colossians. Please stick with me. This is stuff you need to hear and understand in order to really get a clear picture of what Paul is saying in this book.
I’ll start right at the beginning by mentioning that Colossians is what you will sometimes hear referred to as an “epistle.” This is just a fancy term for a letter. Colossians was a letter written to the believers in a city called Colosse (kol-ahz’-ay). Colosse was one of a trio of cities located about 125 miles southeast of a city called Ephesus. The other two cities in the trio were Laodicea (lay-ahd-i-see’uh ) and Hierapolis (hî-uh-rap’uh-lis). These names are not yadda-yadda throw-away. I’m going to tell you now why they are important.
Paul never visited Colosse and did not really know the people there. We see this in 2:1 where he writes,
Colossians 2:1 (NIV)
1 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.
Paul was in the city of Ephesus doing ministry there for three years and during that time, a man named Epaphras (ep’-uh-fras) was converted. Epaphras lived in Colosse. He had heard the gospel message and given his life to Jesus in the city of Ephesus, then gone home and shared the gospel with people back in his hometown of Colosse – and it is through the ministry of Epaphras that the church at Colosse was formed. I wanted to point this out because those of us who have been Christians a while and read through the Bible often assume that Paul had personally visited all the churches to which he sent letters, but that is not the case. Paul had never visited Colosse and had never met most of the people there.
At the time of the writing of this letter, Paul was a prisoner in Rome – imprisoned for teaching about Christ. This Epaphras guy had come to visit him, and reported that a new teaching was invading the church at Colosse and causing trouble. There was a name for this new teaching – it was a heresy called Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, which means to know. The “Gnostics” believed themselves to be “in the know,” in other words they claimed to have superior knowledge of spiritual things. Their beliefs were a mixture of some Christianity along with Jewish law, Greek philosophy, and Eastern mysticism. [Sidenote: This is interesting, since the beliefs of most non-Christian Americans today are mixtures of Greek philosophy, Buddhist and Hindu theology, Marxism, Deism, Secular Humanism, and a philosophy called Scientific Materialism. It’s just that most of the Americans who hold these views don’t know where they came from! This is an approach I like to call “religion a’ la carte.” A little bit of this, a little bit of that…Without deep grounding in a specific belief system, most people end up just kind drifting toward a hodgepodge containing elements of dozens of belief systems, not arranged in any particular order.]
Anyway, Gnostic philosophy taught that all matter (all physical substance) was evil, including the body, and therefore God could not possibly come in contact with matter, and therefore Jesus could not really have been God in the flesh. The Gnostics denied that Christ was the Son of God, and claimed to have a superior grasp on reality.
Their system of belief was supposed to give the adherent a special “full knowledge” that others did not possess. The Gnostics loved the word “fullness,” and used it all the time, so when you read the book of Colossians, you’ll find Paul using that word frequently as well in reaction to their use of the term. (Suggestion: Read Colossians and underline ever use of the word “full” or “fullness.”) Since they rejected matter, their doctrine called for rigorous rejection of bodily things like eating, drinking, and even touching things. It was this heresy – this faulty belief system – this rejection of the complete preeminence of Jesus as God – that Paul addresses in his letter to the Colossians.
By the way, something else interesting that ties this issue into modern times. If you read The DaVinci Code, if you plan to see the movie, the stuff purported as “fact” there is nothing more than ancient Gnostic teachings, re-packaged for the 21st century. The idea that Jesus didn’t die on the cross but married Mary Magdalene? Ancient Gnostic idea. The idea of secret, recently-discovered Bible books that were suppressed by the church and kept out of the Bible, like this Gospel of Judas we’ve heard so much about on the news lately, or the Gospel of Thomas the media picked up on and was harping on a few years ago? Not new books by any means, and not new discoveries, and not covered up by the church, but Gnostic writings known to all the religious leaders in ancient times and simply considered to be ridiculous. The best way for you to understand how ridiculous they are is just to go on the Internet and read them yourself. In those books, Jesus pretty much dares people to figure out what he is saying, and challenges them to understand, saying that if they can somehow unravel the mysteries, they will achieve oneness with God. That’s Gnostic heresy for you – that oneness with God comes not through Jesus himself, but through some kind of inside knowledge.
That’s the belief problem Paul addresses here in Colossians. It’s interesting, isn’t it, because in our study on Titus, we also saw in chapter one that there was a belief problem, only that was not this Gnostic heresy we’re talking about. (A “heresy,” by the way, is simply defined as any belief that rejects the formally accepted beliefs of a religion.) The problem at that time was that some of the Jewish Christians were telling the non-Jewish Christians that they had to observe Jewish customs in order to receive Christ in their lives. Paul told Titus, “This is false, and you must confront those who are teaching this. Now 1/3 of the Bible’s New Testament was written by Paul, and in nearly all of the books he wrote (which were all letters to churches or individuals) he deals with belief problems, and all the problems come down to either Gnostic heresy, or Jews trying to get Christians to follow Jewish customs. Paul clearly believed deeply that belief matters – not just whether you believe, but what you believe. That’s why I get concerned when people who claim to be Christians do not accept basic Christian teachings. Christianity itself would not be in existence without this book (hold up Bible), and in the New Testament, what you could accurately refer to as “the Christian’s handbook,” the writer of 1/3 of that handbook deals with belief problems in practically every one of his writings. What are we to make of that? My conclusion is that belief matters – not just whether, but what. And to take it one step further, not just what, but in whom. And at last we have arrived at our book study, because the “in whom” is the subject of the book of Colossians.
This Gnostic heresy had crept into the church at Colosse, so Paul writes Colossians with one basic emphasis – Jesus is Above All. He is God in the Flesh – the Living Word of God – he is first and last, beginning and ending. There is no one above him, before him, or even beside him. Paul writes to declare, defend, and display the preeminence of Christ (preeminence simply meaning “superiority,” literally meaning “coming before.”).
You know there are many people in our society who are willing, like the Gnostics, to give Christ a place of eminence – to admit that he is among the best spiritual teachers who has ever lived. But not many are willing to give Him his rightful place of preeminence – absolute superiority over all other humans, teachings, philosophical systems, and ways of thinking about reality and spirituality. So our time and the time of Paul are not really that much different. People in the church were beginning to think beliefs didn’t really matter – that a person could still call themself Christian while believing things that run counter to Christianity. Sounds much like our society today. Paul wrote Colossians to say that some things are really true for everyone in all places in all times – and to depart from those truths – even in great sincerity – is sincerely wrong.
Colossians breaks down this way. In chapter 1, Paul declares the preeminence of Christ. In chapter 2, he defends the preeminence of Christ against other world views. And in chapters 3 & 4 he shows how Christ’s preeminence is displayed in our lives and relationships.
But no sense overstuffing you today. We have looked at the crisis of belief that exists in the American church today among both kids and adults. Then we dove a little into the background of the book of Colossians, written by the Apostle Paul to address a crisis of belief in the church at Colosse. We learned about the place and circumstances of the writing of the book. Most important, we looked at the specific problem Paul addresses – the Gnostic teaching that Jesus was not the Son of God. We saw how that teaching is one that has been plaguing the church since the church began, and discovered that The DaVinci code is simply a modern re-packaging of that ancient heresy. Finally, we saw that to combat this teaching in the church, Paul wrote a letter to the Colossian church to declare, defend, and display the preeminence of Jesus above all. I’d say that’s enough for this week, and we haven’t even looked at verse one! No sense hurrying. We’ll take our time and be sure to really get familiar with this stuff as we go along.
