Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Growing Up (Colossians 1:9-29)
Date: April 28, 2024
When I was in seminary, one of the courses we had to take was about practical ministry. Technically, the course was called “pastoral counseling,” but that basically translated how to be a good pastor in the day-to-day of ministry work. The professor tried to touch on a few different areas that we were going to face in ministry and which all the theology and language study and apologetics courses in the world weren’t going to prepare us for. One of the topics we covered in class was some best practices for how to do a funeral. That sounds kind of morbid, I know, but it’s part of the work, and an important one at that. We learned a variety of things the teacher—who had been a pastor for decades at that point—identified as “do’s” and “don’ts” in class, and those were pretty helpful. I don’t remember any of them in particular now, but I remember thinking this was probably actually going to be useful stuff then. But do you know when I really learned how to do a funeral? When my pastor and mentor took me along and involved me in the funeral of a man in the community who died during that semester. I listened to him, watched him carefully, and when I found myself having to do a service on my own a couple of years later, I just did what he did.
Learning something on your own is hard. It’s a worthwhile endeavor to be sure, but learning from, or at least with someone else is better. At the very least it’s faster and helps us avoid setbacks and frustrations we will likely otherwise have to slog through on our own. If we are going to become adept at doing much of anything in life, we need both kinds of learning. We need the personal motivation of self-learning, and we need good teachers to guide us along the right paths faithfully and well. Well, this same thing applies to our relationship with Jesus, and the authentic church understands both this as a fact and the role it was designed to play in the process.
This morning we are in the third part of our teaching series, Authentic Church. Over the course of this journey, we are talking about the things that make a church an authentic church. We are talking about how we know a church is a real church and not just a social or community service club in which all of the members happen to share a similar set of religious beliefs. We started out a couple of weeks ago by establishing the foundation for the whole venture. The authentic church is built on the foundation of Christ and Christ alone. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. If it’s not centered on Jesus, it isn’t a church. If we are going to be resting on the foundation of who Jesus is, though, this implies that we are going to be committed to the things He considered to be important. And the one thing He seemed to consider important above and before just about everything else was seeing people get and grow in a right relationship with God. If we are going to be faithful to our call as a church, we can’t be satisfied with anything less than that. Our job is to see people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Everything else is secondary.
Well, as I promised toward the end of our conversation last week, this morning we are going to come back to that idea of growing in a relationship with Jesus. After all, Jesus’ last command was for us to be making disciples as we go through our normal routines of life. A disciple is simply a committed student of a teacher. A disciple of Jesus is someone who is committed to His teachings and is growing in those teachings with great intentionality. In giving His followers this call to make disciples, Jesus was setting out before us what needs to be one of our driving priorities as a body. Getting people into a right relationship with God through Jesus is first. But helping someone across the line of faith and then leaving them there to figure out the rest on their own does no one any favors. We have to take the next step and help them grow in that relationship. Authentic churches do this on purpose. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, I’d like to look together at something the apostle Paul wrote that helps us better understand just how important this aspect of being an authentic church really is. Find your way over to Colossians and let’s take a look at this.
As a letter, Colossians is all about Jesus. Now, of course, all of the New Testament is all about Jesus. But what Paul does in this letter in a way that is more direct than in his other letters is to talk about who Jesus is and what that means. And one of the things Jesus’ being who He said He is means is that growing in a relationship with Him is worth our while. The Colossian church was experiencing some of this growth and Paul praised them for it. Look how this starts in v. 9.
“For this reason…” Pause right there. That expression means Paul is explaining or further unpacking something he said previously. Jumping back a few verses to the beginning of the letter we find a pretty standard greeting from Paul followed by an expression of thanksgiving that is again pretty typical of Paul’s letters. This particular expression of thanksgiving from Paul focuses on his joy at the Colossian believers’ commitment to and growing relationship with Jesus.
Seeing the growth being exhibited in the lives of the Colossian believers, Paul doesn’t want it to stop. “For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
Now, that’s a mouthful. So, what’s going on here? Breaking this down, Paul wants the believers there in Colossae to understand God’s will so they can live life in a way that honors Him. This is something he is not just hoping for; he is praying for it. Notice the link here between theology and lifestyle, between orthodoxy (believing the right things) and orthopraxy (doing the right things). The more and better we understand who God is and what He wants, the more and better we will be able to live our lives in line with that. Ideas have consequences. And what does God want? For us to be in a relationship with Him and for us to live in light of that relationship with Him. In other words, when you are learning about God and then putting that knowledge into practice in your daily routine, you are living in line with God’s will.
Still, though, we want to know what that looks like in practice. We like details. So, Paul goes on to unpack it further. The next two and a half verses lay out five different ways this should be playing out in our lives. It looks like our “bearing fruit in every good work.” What fruit? The fruit of the Spirit. When we are living after the pattern of God’s righteousness, our actions are going to result in more love and peace and joy and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control in our lives and in the world around us. When we are walking worthy of the Lord, we are “growing in the knowledge of God.” That is, we are coming to understand more fully and deeply just who exactly He is. Doing this will result in our “being strengthened with all power.” We don’t have the wherewithal to tackle any of this on our own. The closer we stick with God, the more of His power we are able to have flowing through us. When we are operating on His power, things that were not possible for us before enter the realm of possibility. This, in turn, increases our endurance and patience in the trials we face as a function of living in a world that is broken by sin. The greater our endurance and patience, the less likely it will be that we will fold in the face of trials of various kinds, but will instead continue pushing forward down the path of Christ. And when we experience all of this, the result is going to be our “joyfully giving thanks to the Father” who has extended to us the eternal life He promised us in His Son.
At this point, Paul pauses to offer a powerful reflection on the nature of Christ. These verses are absolutely worth your time to go home and read a few times until you start to grasp just how great Jesus really is. They are also an example of Paul’s tendency to chase rabbit trails when one thing he said triggered another thought. In this case, his declaration of the forgiveness of sins available in Jesus prompts him to reflect for a bit on just how amazing Jesus is. He gets back on track in v. 21 by reminding his readers that they weren’t always in this place of growth where they are now. “Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds expressed in your evil actions.” In other words, you didn’t buy any of this and your actions bore out your rejection. You did things that were not right because you didn’t understand what was right. This doesn’t mean people who aren’t following Jesus are hopelessly, irredeemably evil. That’s a silly charge. They are precious image bearers of God who don’t believe the first thing about Him, but who need nonetheless to hear the Gospel and to experience the love of Christ through His body. Apart from Christ as they are, though, they—and we once—are trapped in sin, and sin will always, ultimately be the place they land. Sin can take many different forms. Some of it seems pretty benign, but it is no less a rejection of reality for that fact. Indeed, when you reject reality, that will always eventually play out badly.
Thankfully, God didn’t leave the Colossian believers there anymore than He’s willing for anyone else to be left there. He provided the means of reconciliation. “But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him.” In Christ, we are washed clean of all our sins. It’s as if we’d never done them in the first place. This doesn’t have anything to do with us, though, and everything to do with Jesus. His death paid the price for our sin. Now, when we are willing to put our faith in Him, He covers us with His righteousness—His being rightly related to God and to people—and God evaluates us from then on in those terms. He looks at us in the same terms that He looks at His own Son. He does this because, again, Jesus has draped His righteousness over us like a garment.
The thing is, though, if we have had this garment thrown over our shoulders, we actually have to keep it on. God has done this amazing reconciliation work on our behalf in Christ, and we will get to experience it to the fullest “if indeed you remain grounded and steadfast in the faith and are not shifted away from the hope of the gospel that you heard. This gospel has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and I, Paul, have become a servant of it.” There’s no life to be found anywhere else. If we want to experience the joy of living in the will of God, there’s nowhere else to go except to Jesus. There’s only one true Gospel. If you’re not growing in this one, then you’re growing in another one. These others won’t furnish any of the benefits that the real one does. It’s an easy thing in a tough season to be shifted away from the Gospel to believing in something else that seems to work in that moment. There are all kinds of other ideas out there that seem to offer better short-term explanations for why we are going through what we are going through and how to get out of it. People love to offer quick, easy, sound-bite explanations for how to solve complex problems. You can get rich quick promising easy solutions to thorny problems. The trouble is, when you get into the real weeds of the problem, the easy explanations rarely manage to live up to their billing. The Gospel is sometimes hard, but it’s always right. The more we grow in our relationship with God in Christ, the better and more clearly we will be able to see that.
In the last part of our passage here, Paul shifts gears to talking about his own call from God to bring the Gospel message to the Gentile peoples of the world including the Colossian believers. As he puts it in v. 27, “God wanted to make known among the Gentiles the glorious wealth of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” God wants the news of the Gospel spread. That’s why telling others about Jesus is such a fundamental part of being an authentic church as we talked about last time. Yet having others hear about the Gospel message isn’t the end of the process. Growing in Christ is where things should be headed. And Paul gets this. Thus v. 28 here: “We proclaim him, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. I labor for this, striving with his strength that works powerfully in me.”
Look quickly with me at each part of this. The proclamation is first. Again, that was last week. What does this proclamation look like? Paul describes it as warning and teaching. We warn about the consequences of rejecting Jesus’ offer of life. Saying no to Jesus results in a person’s being left in the death of sin not just now but forever. It’s not a good situation. It’s the ultimate act of pursuing a short-term gain (which really isn’t all that much of a gain considering just the near-term consequences of sin) at the expense of long-term happiness. That’s part of the Gospel we need to share. It is indeed a warning. But we also teach. We teach what is true so that people can make the conscious choice of one path or the other. Whichever path they choose we are to show them the patient, gracious, humble love of Jesus because He loves them even if they don’t choose Him, and so must we. And we have to do all of this winsomely and well. That’s the “with all wisdom” part. Sharing the Gospel badly does no one any favors.
The next part is critical. We do all of this “so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” Growth in Christ is the goal. Helping people become more fully who God made them to be in Christ is the whole aim of our effort. Everything we do needs to be about being able to present all the people God brings within our sphere of influence as mature disciples of Jesus. And what does mature mean here? It means they understand properly who Jesus is. They grasp the glories of what He has done for us. They accept that His ways are better than ours and are committed with His help (which is very often ministered through His church) to walking in those ways instead of their own ways. They are able to give word to the Gospel and have made it their own. And they can share their story with other people in hopes of pointing more people in the same direction they have come. In other words, they are disciples who can make disciples. Authentic churches understand all of this and are fully committed to this end. Or, to put that more simply: Authentic churches grow people in Christ.
Okay, but what does this actually mean for us? Well, God designed us to be a people with whom anyone can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom. If that idea sounds familiar, it’s because I repeat it to you every single Sunday morning. Growing people in Christ is part of who God made us to be as a church. That alone doesn’t make us an authentic church, but it does mean this idea is a fundamental part of who we are.
Okay, but again, what does this actually look like? There are three different forms this emphasis takes. All three are necessary and valuable understandings to have in place if we are going to get this right. The first part here is that we need to be learning and growing ourselves. We need to be willing to do the work—sometimes hard work—of pursuing a greater, richer, fuller understanding of the Christian worldview. This will necessarily involve all three of those things I mentioned last week: engaging with God through the Scriptures, with God through prayer, and with God through the church. Those are essential ingredients for growth. If you take one of them away, you will stagnate. If you take two of them away, you will slowly decline. It is only with all three in place that meaningful growth will be able to happen. If you aren’t willing to do the work it takes to grow in your relationship with Jesus, nothing anybody else is going to do will make much in the way of a difference for you. Authentic churches grow people in Christ, but those people have to be willing to be grown, or all the dedication in the world won’t accomplish very much.
The second part is that you need to be in the posture of a learner. That is, you don’t just need to be doing the work to learn on your own. You need to be in the position of learning from another person. That can be me, yes, since I’m the pastor of the church, but if I’m the only one you are learning from on a regular basis, that’s probably a sign that you are not getting a steady enough diet of the spiritual food that will help you grow as you should be. You need to be in a group other (and smaller) than this one where you can learn alongside other believers on a regular and consistent basis. You need someone who is further along in their faith journey than you are to be pouring into your life from their cup. This doesn’t have to be formal. But it should be regular. Authentic churches grow people in Christ.
The third part here is that you need to be a teacher. And before you can even give thought to the objection, I know that some of you aren’t teachers. That’s not what I mean, so it’s not an excuse. You need to be pouring from your spiritual cup into the lives of the people around you. If you have been following Jesus for more than a few years, if you have given it anything like the attention it deserves, you know more than the person who is just starting out in his or her faith journey. That means that even if it is only a small amount, you have something to share with them about following Jesus that will make their journey that much easier. Authentic churches grow people in Christ. That takes all of us pouring into one another as we have received from the Spirit. It takes you sharing what you have learned with someone else.
Let me give you a quick example of a couple of places where you can get to work in pursuing all of this in pretty short order. We have Vacation Bible School coming up in a few weeks. We are going to have a whole pile of kids here those few days, a great many of which will not have made any kind of personal decision to follow Jesus. Many of them will have had some amount of exposure to the Gospel as this is a pretty churched area culturally speaking, but most won’t have been able to understand it to a degree that they can decide to accept for themselves. Many of you, though, have done that. You do understand it pretty well. That means you have a golden opportunity in the next few weeks to pour from your cup into theirs. That doesn’t mean you have to do any direct teaching, but being here, learning the names of some students, and loving on them can make quite a difference in their lives. Their seeing your faith in action by the way you love one another (and especially them) communicates volumes. Their seeing an example of someone who is a mature follower of Jesus could make an eternal difference in their lives. If you haven’t yet signed up to be a part of the fun, you need to do that. There aren’t any age limits on that either. Authentic churches grow people in Jesus.
Here’s one more and then we’re out of here. In a few weeks, we are going to send out two of our primary rotational teachers with our kids and youth to continue the work God has gifted them to do in another place. When Nate and Marisa go out from us, they will leave some shoes to fill. You just may be one of the people God is calling to help fill those shoes. You just may be the person God is calling to take an active role in growing other people in Jesus. Authentic churches grow people in Jesus. That’s exactly what we need to continue pursuing to His glory and our joy. And speaking of joy, expressing our joy in Christ through worship is the next characteristic of an authentic church we are going to talk about next week. Don’t miss that.