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Paul's Letter to the Colossians - 1
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Colossians 1:1-14 (New International Version) Colossians 1
1Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
2To the holy and faithful[a] brothers in Christ at Colosse:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father.[b]
Thanksgiving and Prayer
3We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints— 5the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel 6that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God's grace in all its truth. 7You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our[c] behalf, 8and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.
9For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. 10And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully 12giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you[d] to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. 13For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14in whom we have redemption,[e] the forgiveness of sins.
Paul's Letter to the Colossians
If the world gets you down at times, you will be glad to know that God has a plan. It’s hard to imagine that any of us could completely escape being down in the dumps from time to time. I feel a little bit of joy drained every time I hear of another Canadian soldier’s death in Afghanistan. Perhaps for you it is hearing one of those news stories that provides more evidence of humanity’s depraved condition. Even though the story had a happy ending, I still find it hard to believe someone would steal a computer from a person visiting with a relative at the Princess Margaret Lodge here in Toronto. You would think taking advantage of cancer patients would be off limits for even the most desperate of criminals; or maybe there’s something going on that’s very personal—a family crisis, illness, financial difficulties. Whatever it is, the world gets you down, but as I said God has a plan!
You are probably glad to hear that, but might wonder why, if God does have a plan, there isn’t more evidence of that plan being implemented. That’s a good question. The best answer to that question is this: the plan involves you and me. This is what we are going to take a look at through this month—God’s plan to change the world through people who are transformed. Our focus today is the content of the prayer for God’s people in Colossae that Paul is praying from his prison cell, most likely in Rome around the year 60.
We will focus our attention today on verses 9 to 14 of chapter one. Paul prays that these Christians will be filled with the knowledge of God’s will. We need to take a bit of time with this phrase, for it likely points us to something going on in the Colossian church. As some of you will know, most of the time Paul writes to deal with a particular issue. One of the things it is good for us as Christians in the 21st century to realize is that from the beginning of the church there have been those who for various reasons have sought to weaken the faith in Jesus as Saviour.
The term “gnosticism” is used to refer to one type of these false teachings. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge and this is used to characterize this sort of teaching because all of it asserted that salvation was only possible for an enlightened elite who gained that status through knowledge. We need to be careful here. Christianity at its best has never thought of knowledge as unnecessary or harmful. However, faith has always been understood as the gift of God, available to all who will receive it, not the special preserve of those on the inside who gain access to salvation through knowledge. The attractiveness, of course, of this sort of teaching is that if you can gain salvation by becoming one of the elite your status is enhanced above that of the normal folk who are left to merely wish they could be like you. In my opinion much of New Age teaching in our world is a first cousin to gnosticism.
What then is Paul doing when he prays for Christians to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will? Paul recognizes that knowledge is important. Paul is certainly one of the towering intellectual figures of the first century. Knowledge for Paul, however, was never simply about its accumulation. It was always about what was done with that knowledge. The reason he prays for these Christians to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will is in order that they may lead lives worthy of the Lord.
There are a couple of things for us to see in this phrase. First of all there is the one word in Greek which becomes “lead a life” in English. It is one of those great words. In its most basic form it refers to walking around. It came to be used in reference to how one lived because in all times and places the important thing about life is not what is merely contemplated within the mind but what informs and motivates one’s actions when you are “walking” through the business of life. This idea is expressed today in the phrase, “you can’t just talk the talk; you need to walk the walk.”
The second thing to be seen is again one that has always been part of the life of the church. For example, one of the things we know from secular historians is that the church began to have a significant influence on the culture of Rome, the capital of the empire, when the city was dealing with a horrible plague. Everyone who could fled the city, except the Christians, who in vast numbers stayed in the city to minister to the sick. Craig Keener in his Bible Background Commentary, points out the pagan priests were expected to act in a manner appropriate to their priesthood, somehow worthy of the deity to which their temple was devoted. Nothing less can be asked of Christians!
Let’s go further in examining this process. Of all the ideas we could look at, let me point out what I think are two big ones. Both of them, I believe, help us see the broad strokes of God’s plan for the life of the world. The first is the renewal of creation.
You might wonder how creation got into this. Paul tells us that the purpose of being filled with the knowledge of God’s will is to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work. If Paul had said “fully pleasing to him as you do good works,” this would have made perfect sense. But he adds the garden image of our walk in life bearing fruit.
According to the Genesis story creation began in a garden. Paul’s thinking would not have been complicated by theories of evolution, but at the same time Paul would not have been bothered too much by the question of whether or not Eden was a literal garden. It is the meaning of the story that concerned Paul. The garden is a symbol both of the beginning of creation and where creation goes off the rails. When Paul talks of Christians bearing fruit in lives that are pleasing to God, he is talking about our being involved in the work God is doing to renew the creation.
One of the things the creation story tells us is that our lives will bear some sort of fruit. When our first ancestors disobeyed God, their lives bore the bitter fruit of disappointment, disease and death. The plan of God is to undo the results of disobedience through those in whom a new creation has come into being. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The second of Paul’s broad strokes is in verse 12, where he speaks of the Father, who has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Another part of this image is contained in the phrase in verse 13 where he speaks of God having transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son. Here are two images that come from the history of Israel.
“To ‘share in’ the inheritance of the saints is to have a portion of the heritage belonging to God’s people. There is an obvious allusion to the inheritance of ancient Israel in the Land of Promise and the share of the inheritance each Israelite had. Christians, as the new people of God, also have an inheritance, and each believer has a share allotted to him” (“Colossians,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, v. 11, 179). To put it another way, not only does the plan of God involve the renewal of creation, but God is also creating a new people who will be fit to enter into a new promised land because they are leading lives worthy of the Lord.
This reversal of history is also seen in the word translated transferred in the NRSV. The NIV says simply that God brought us into the kingdom. To get across what Paul means we should probably say that God has resettled us in the kingdom of Christ. I say that because in the ancient world this word was used in secular literature to speak of what a victorious king did when the citizens of a conquered territory were taken from one country and made to live elsewhere. This is what happened to God’s people at the time of the exile. Paul, however has taken that dark time of history and redeemed the concept. Christians are people who have been conquered by the love of Christ, moved to a new land where they become citizens of his kingdom.
Here is where I think Paul answers the question that lurks in the background of this text. How is it possible for me to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him? I know I need to be careful painting all of you with the brush of my spiritual failures, but I think all of us struggle with this issue to one degree or another. At the best of times our walk with God is three steps forward, two back. How can my life be fully pleasing to God? The truth is, left on our own, it can’t be.
We are not, however, left on our own. Christian faith is not easy to pin down, to manage, to quantify. There is a point at which we make a decision to be a follower of Jesus, and while we do not re-make that decision on a daily basis, we affirm that decision each day. There is a process. There is growth. There is spiritual formation.
Look at our text one more time. Paul tells the Colossian Christians that he prays for them—
to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will
to lead lives worthy of the Lord
to bear fruit in every good work
to grow in the knowledge of God
Do you see the circle here? Through the love of Christ God has taken me captive and made me a citizen of a new place, the Kingdom of Christ. As I open my heart and mind to God, God reveals something of his will to me. When I do God’s will my life is pleasing to God because what is accomplished through my life is something of the good I was designed to do. God blesses my life with a further and deeper and greater understanding of his will. When I do God’s will my life is pleasing to God because what is accomplished through my life is something of the good I was designed to do. God blesses my life with a further and deeper and greater understanding of his will. When I do God’s will… that’s the circle.
Every once in a while I will see the television broadcast of the worship service of a large church. Often when the camera pans the audience people will be seen writing things down in a notebook or in the margin of their Bible. The Bible that I use for my personal reading is even called The Notetaker’s Bible. It’s got extra wide lined margins.
I suspect there is not a single one of you that feels any better about the world just because I have a Bible with a place for insights and ideas and something I might preach about some day. Oh, but if something of the knowledge of God’s will gets into my life and gets translated into the good work that God has in mind for me, our world is going to change. That’s God’s plan.
B
