Note: the following is the manuscript for the message and will not match exactly the recorded message above.
The idea of an ultimate and absolute truth is a difficult concept today. Even among those who believe in God, or a higher power, that we have souls, and that there is an afterlife would recoil at the idea that there is only one way to know God and enter heaven. In addition, what we claim to know is filtered through our personal experience. This book of Colossians, then, should come as a shock to those who are skeptical about Christianity and even to those who follow Jesus.
What I am going to say in the remainder of this series will challenge you to consider that there is indeed an absolute truth, and that this truth is only found when you decide to follow Jesus and love him with all your heart, mind, and behaviours.
Colossians reminds us that Jesus Christ is the only person who can provide everything we need to know about God and our relationship with him. It reminds us that our sin, which causes separation from God, has been wiped clean forever because Jesus died on the cross. And, it reminds us that any power that would seek to destroy the church or wipe away God’s truth has been disarmed and is ultimate going to be destroyed by Jesus and his church.
Review
Last Sunday, we looked at the overall context and message of Colossians. It is a letter written by Paul to a church that was experiencing cultural pressure. We saw in chapter 2, that there were some in the church who were bringing in deceptive ideas, unnecessary religious practices, and reducing the unique greatness of Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation and foundation of the Christian faith.
The aim of Paul in writing this letter was to warn the Colossians against these deceptions creeping into the church. There were ideas that seemed wise, but were only a shadow of what God did through Jesus. They had no power and no substance.
And so, the letter serves as a reminder of what is central to the church. What we believe in and why we exist. We become resistant to the lies by staying close to the truth. The truth is this: the church is built upon, has its only hope in, and exists for the unique greatness of Christ. We, the church, are here to demonstrate the character and teaching of Jesus, and invite others to follow Jesus with us.
Like the Colossian church, we are under cultural pressure. The world around us is changing at a rapid pace. Christian beliefs are not and have never been congruent with secular culture or other religions. The church was at odds with the Roman way and Jewish way because they discovered that hope is found in Jesus, not in wealth or religious obedience.
This does not give us permission to distance ourselves from the world. Rather, the church is a demonstration of the forgiveness and reconciliation that comes through faith in Jesus. This means we will behave in a way that will seem to the world a bit odd.
For the church in Colossae, it required them to eliminate the social hierarchy that existed in a culture that knew know other way. In the church, the ground was level. Slaves and masters, men and women, parents and children all ate at the same table and had the same access to the benefits of God’s grace.
What we are exploring in the coming weeks is just how we, the church in Hoadley, can receive Paul’s letter as our own. What will we be known for? What benefit will we bring to our community? As we enter today’s passage, we will explore this by examining what it means to be a fruitful church.
Introduction
The passage we are looking at today is a part of a longer introduction that continues through chapter 2 verse 5. This extended greeting is Paul’s way of explaining the position from which he is writing as well as the purpose of the letter.
In the first section of the letter, Paul greets the Colossian church and mentions that his pastoral apprentice, Timothy, is with him. The greeting includes an adaptation of a common way to greet people at the start of the letter in those days, which would be something like, “William, to the church in Hoadley, greetings.” The word greetings was similar to the word grace.
Paul, however, adapts the greeting to be more aligned with the Christian faith. He writes, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father.” He sees grace not as a throwaway greeting, but as a reminder of God’s goodness to his people. Peace is added, which is from the Hebrew word Shalom, which not only means peace of mind and heart, but encompasses all the blessings and benefits of being a part of God’s family.
Keep those two words in mind. We will come back to them throughout the series. Grace and peace. God’s goodness and complete blessing. Paul then goes on to tell of how he and Timothy are thanking God for the Colossian church. He is basically saying, “We are pleased to hear from Epaphras that the gospel which is expanding all over the world is bearing fruit in your lives as well. It is bearing fruit because you are expressing your eternal hope through active faith and love.”
They are thankful for their faith in Christ Jesus and the love they had for all God’s people. It is a faith and love that spring from the hope of eternal life. How does Paul know about this? Because it is bearing fruit. Verse 6 says, “the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the world just as it has been doing among you.”
What I want to explore today is how to be this sort of church. How can we be a fruit-bearing church? The three key words in this passage are faith, hope, and love. These are three words common in Paul’s writing.
1 Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
1 Thessalonians 1:3, “We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Romans 5:1-2, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.”
Faith, hope, and love are inseparable characteristics of a fruitful church that has experienced the grace of God. Each characteristic is both a source and the evidence of a church that is alive. They are, however, not instant and not easy characteristics to adopt. They do not come automatically and they do not come quickly.
Hope – Inward Confidence
In other passages, as I read earlier, faith, hope and love are emphasized differently and seem to be fruits of salvation. Here, Paul writes about the Colossians’ faith in Christ, their love for all God’s people, and that this faith and love spring from the hope store up in heaven.
The suggestion is that the source of faith and love are found in hope. The fact that we have a hope of eternal life with God in the future is a powerful motivation for constant faith and costly love in the present.
In this passage, hope is referring not so much to a hopeful state of mind. Rather, its focus is on the thing hoped for. In the Message translation of the Bible, the first part of verse 5 reads, “the lines of purpose in your lives never grow slack, tightly tied as they are to your future in heaven, kept taut by hope.”
If you’ve ever tried walking on a slack line, you may know what this means. A slack line is usually tied between two trees. When it is tied well and tight, a person can confidently hop onto it, and if they are skilled, they will be able to walk and jump on it. But if it is tied loosely, or to an unstable object, it will be impossible to do anything on the line, even for a skilled person.
When your hope is tied to the promise of eternal life through Jesus, you can be sure it is secure and stable. Keeping it tight, however, is another matter. It is a matter of resisting the urge to tie your line to another source. Money, position, power, comfort, security, romance, validation, etc.
When hope is tied to temporary things, you will not have the same level of confidence that you would have if it is tied to the promise of eternal life. Our hearts are designed to rest only in one thing: an unhindered relationship with our Creator.
This is the only universally available source of confidence. If confident hope is conditional upon status, productivity, wealth, or security, there are millions in this world who are without hope. But, if confident hope is based on the promise of eternal life through Christ, it is available to all.
Faith – Godward Trust
Going back to the slack line metaphor, one of the things that is helpful when trying to keep your balance, is to keep your eyes on a fixed spot ahead of you. Don’t look down at your feet. Don’t look around you. Look ahead at something that will not move.
Faith is not just blindly trusting that something desirable is going to happen, like wishful thinking. In the Bible, faith is directed toward trust in God. And, it is not only personal trust in Jesus and commitment to follow him. It is also the belief that certain things are true about him and about ourselves.
Romans 10:9-10, “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”
Faith in Jesus means our whole being has a new bearing in life. We look at him for stability. Not our circumstances or what other people are promising. God is our fixed point of references. We take our cues from Jesus and we live according to the reality that we belong to him. He is our master.
With every step we take, we have our gaze fixed on the promises of God.
Love – Outward Embrace
I used the term outward embrace for love because what Paul is concerned about here is the relationships between people in the church. The context of the early church was the existence of a very clear and widely accepted social structure. There was no concept of equality.
What Christianity did was level the ground for all people to have access to God and to the benefits of being called children of God. And so, it was expect that, in the church, there was equal access to everything for everyone.
Col. 3:11 – Here (in Christ) there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all…
A sign of a fruitful church is that it is a loving community, not restricted to those with whom we have a natural affinity, but which extends to all who come to Jesus. We read in verse 8 an emphasis that Colossian church was a church marked by love in the Spirit. This is a special kind of love. A love that has no judgment or preference. A love that breaks down barriers.
Conclusion
If we want to be a fruitful church, and if we claim to have the hope that Paul talks about in this letter, then we are called to live with faith and love. In doing this, we will be a witness to our family, our friends, our neighbours, our coworkers the confident hope that is unlike any other hope.
Through our faith and through our love, we will show them what true hope means by trusting in the promises of God enough to love the most undesirable among us. How will we show them the hope that we have as followers of Jesus if there’s no difference in how we respond to troubling things in the world?
If there’s no difference between us and anyone else, then the gospel has had no impact and has no effectiveness in our life.
If you are hearing all this and you don’t have the confident hope in eternal life, then look around and find someone who seems to respond differently to the trouble in this world, who seems to have a confidence that is hard to explain. Ask them to help you see this hope.
This is a challenge for all of us. If we want to be a fruitful church, we will stay close to Jesus, we will fix our eyes on him as the source of our hope. We will walk with confidence because we know that to hope in anything other than God will result in a faith that is unstable.
And, we will embrace anyone and everyone with love, knowing that in Christ, all are made equal.
God did not establish his church through some magical or automatic force. He established and continues to grow his church through people who hear the truth, understand the hope that it promises, and demonstrate it through acts of faith and love.