Today we’re continuing our look into Colossians, last week we started off with the first half of chapter 1 > heaps of good things God is doing and has done for us packed in there.
Today we finish off the first chapter, and there are two main things in this passage: who Jesus is, and what that means for us.
Let’s do a flyover of our passage today to get into some of the key content and themes here:
We read Jesus is God in human form, the Father created heaven, earth and everything in it through him. He is the GLUE that holds together all things (talked about this earlier this year in our series on 1st Corinthians). He is the head of the church, God’s fullness dwells in him. He makes peace through his blood. Interesting image there.
We were ALIENATED from God, ENEMIES because of the evil we had done, but now we are the opposite: we are RECONCILED, HOLY in his sight, WITHOUT blemish and FREE from accusation.
What does Paul encourage us to do > continue in our faith, established and firm, unmoved from our hope held out in the gospel.
Paul himself REJOICES in his SUFFERING – that old chestnut, God speaking good into the bad – and the result of this hope in the gospel is what? ‘The glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.’
Before we go any further into all that, I’ve got a question for you this morning > and this is a question for you to chat about with the person or people next to you for a few minutes:
- When was a time you felt ALIENATED from God?
- And when was a time you felt RECONCILED to him, brought back into the fold, close to him?
Good to share some of those things, those times in our lives when we felt either really far away or really close to God > I think we can find ourselves in both of those places at different times. And what a great thing to notice that we all have some story of reconciliation don’t we, God has reached all of us in some way over the journey. Very cool to think about the full extent of God’s work among us!
So to dig into this a bit further, how does someone who’s ALIENATED from God or even an ENEMY of God, become RECONCILED, HOLY in his sight, WITHOUT blemish and FREE from accusation??
Being an enemy of God sounds like a pretty big ‘blemish’ doesn’t it…
To answer that question let’s take a look at what it actually is to be ALIENATED from God, to be an ENEMY of God…
What does it mean to be ALIENATED?
- ‘Estranged, excluded’ in the New Testament Greek, like being on the outside looking in.
- ‘Separation’ in Old Testament terms, like being cut off from the main group.
And how does this happen? Through sin, through our sin we are estranged, excluded, separated, cut-off from the love of God.
What about being an ENEMY of God?
- Jesus talks about enemies in Matthew 5:43-45 – “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
- Jesus acknowledges we have enemies, he has enemies himself, but he tells us to LOVE our enemies and NOT hate them > no better example than Jesus asking his Father to forgive the very people who put him to death on the cross.
Without Jesus, without God’s love and Jesus sacrifice in our place, these two things are all we would ever be: ALIENATED ENEMIES.
That’s all we can ever be without Jesus.
I think it can be really easy to forget the importance of this gospel truth, that without Jesus all we can be are ALIENATED ENEMIES of God. And the same goes for everyone else, everyone in our community – which includes our church, school, kindy and OSHC on site here (all part of our Bethania Lutheran community), same goes for our friends and family, the people we interact with day in day out, all people of all places.
All any of us can be without Jesus are ALIENATED ENEMIES. Not something we want to be.
But is that all, is that the end of the story for us? No way.
Our God is a God of RECONCILIATION, a God who reaches out to ALIENATED ENEMIES and continues to offer his loving, forgiving, comforting hand to them. He has FAVOUR, his GOODNESS and LOVE, he has RESTORATION to give those who – like us – desperately need it, we are all in desperate need of God’s saving grace.
Our God is serious about reconciling the lost – all lost people, just like you and me.
So if we’re going to be a community that’s serious about what God is serious about, we need to get serious about loving our community, the people we find ourselves in community with >
If we think of our church as our ‘spiritual home,’ that means there are a great many ‘spiritual neighbours’ to reach out to! And a great many ways we can love them > physical presence, building relationships, prayer, seeking ways to connect, making it a consideration of the full scope of the ministry of our church. Being open to finding ways, rather than closed off to the idea altogether > now that would be a missed opportunity right there.
This is a very clear call on our church, our community, God’s call to love our spiritual and literal neighbours as much as all the other people we interact with. God uses people to reach people, we see that time and again through the bible, through the history of mission in the church. This is God’s work, and we’re called to be part of it.
This call has been placed on our hearts, it’s part of our story, it’s part of the story of the presence of our church in this place > So how do we follow this call, how do we live it out, what do we do with this call that God has placed on our hearts??
It’s our job to figure that out! That’s where we need to go to work > not thinking we’re done when with church when we leave here on a Sunday, but instead remembering this is the ‘filling-up’ part, then we’re ready to go out and serve God’s kingdom!
What are the simple things we can do to be community-minded, to think of our neighbour and how we can love them? We can start with listening to what God says, seeking to learn more about what God says about this. Stay open and be on the look-out for opportunities, for ways the Spirit is at work in us and in the people around us. Offering what we’ve been graciously given – our time, our facilities, our abilities – and putting all that to work for the good of God’s kingdom, for the simple good of loving our neighbour. That’s what we’ve got to be on about here in this place, in the community we find ourselves part of.
Thinking back to what it looks like to be RECONCILED ourselves – us who are in need of God’s forgiveness and restoration just as much as the next person – we receive RECONCILIATION in our baptism by water and the Spirit, we receive it in the body and blood of Jesus given for us, and it doesn’t stop there > we are called not to keep it to ourselves but to do what? To share it with others.
That means there’s a sense of urgency in the call to love our neighbour!
It’s not a ‘maybe later, one day, when the time’s right’ situation. It’s a ‘here and now’ situation! What an amazing opportunity we have to hear the good news, to live it out, to share it with others. We don’t have to wonder where people are or go looking for people to share the good news with; we’ve got a huge mission field in our very own backyard, what an incredible, life-giving, God-given opportunity!
If we are only ever ALIENATED ENEMIES of God without Jesus, then we need to have a sense of urgency about knowing the love of Jesus!
Only then are we RECONCILED, only then are others RECONCILED, RESTORED, WITHOUT blemish and FREE from accusation. Only then can any of us be vessels who carry, as Paul says, ‘the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.’
Only then can the guilt of sin be washed away, and the hope of new life take its place //
Tom Kitson 