Growing in Christ

Colossians 3:1-17

February 16, 2003

Colossians 3:1-17

¹So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ²Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your^£ life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

⁵Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). ⁶On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.^{£ 7}These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.^{£ 8}But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive^£ language from your mouth. ⁹Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹In that renewal^£ there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

¹²As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. ¹³Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord^£ has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. ¹⁴Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. ¹⁵And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. ¹⁶Let the word of Christ^£ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.^{£ 17}And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Let me get this straight, according to these words, I'm to put to death what is earthly… fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, in other words put to death the sin in my life…

And while I'm at it…the verse continues…clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

What?!  Didn't we just cover this a few weeks ago? Didn't we just look at another place in scripture and insist that there is nothing we can do on our own to save ourselves from sin or to save ourselves draw ourselves successfully into God's presence, into perfection?  Didn't we say that this is why Christ's sacrifice is so critical, because it breaks us out of our cycle of failure, guilt and imperfection by offering a free pass, a gift of grace and eternal freedom from the burden of sin…

Then why these warnings?  Why bother?  Can we really escape from impurity, passion, greed and the like?  Or maybe more properly, why these warnings to work so hard?  Aren't I already supposed to be over this, all sin behind me, all done with "evil desire" and greed and the rest?  Do we really have to work so hard to achieve compassion, kindness, meekness, humility, etcetera.  Didn't Jesus' sacrifice on the cross do something to alleviate this burden already?

Well yes and no. 

By virtue of our relationship with Christ, something should have been fundamentally changed in us, in our minds, in our hearts, in our very beings that should have made greed and fornication and evil desire a non-issue. 

So why all the warnings?  Because they're not really warnings.  They're not really commands that say, "Do this or die!"  "Do this or go to hell!"  Not with the same weight they had before Christ came into the picture for us. 

The wages of sin are still death.  Sin is not without its consequence.  And like we said, sin never really can be flushed from our system. 

The rest of that passage is "..the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. [1]

Sin is never really lost to us, yet despite sin we are saved, given a taste of eternity, given a glimpse of what is possible, given hope for something far greater and more pure and more noble, loving and compassionate.  Can we ever attain it?  No.  Can we move closer to it?  Yes.

Remember what we said last week.  The person who encounders Christ, is struck by the loving nature of God.  That God chose to sacrifice his son and himself in his love for us.  The option was the sinful, horrible, hateful, retributive and destructive way of the world, destroy the Roman Empire, destroy the temple,  the religious powers that ruled and take their spot at the head of the table, but to do so would have been destructive to His own nature, message and identity of compassion, grace, love, forgiveness and mercy.  So God allowed himself, his son to be destroyed rather than give in to the sordid way of the world and the imperfect Creation.

Can we move against our nature and embrace God's nature?  It is not only difficult but near impossible for humans to go against the grain in the that way. 

But seeing what Jesus has done, and what God has done through Jesus, we are given a glimpse, we are given a taste of God, we are given hope.  When Jesus chooses love, is killed and then climbs up out of that tomb, we are given hope, that compassion doesn't always lose, that nice guys don't always finish last, that hatred, power and violence aren't the only way to victory.  We are given hope.

And hope is the beginning.

The Apostle Paul not only tells us to "Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly" and "clothe yourselves with love" which are really against the grain for us and truly impossible to adhere to perfectly.  He also tells us to adhere start with hope.

Just before I read that long passage from Colossians 3 to you this morning.  I read another passage first, that passage form Colossians 1 I read in Armenian.  Let me read it to you now in English:

Colossians 1:3-8

³In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, ⁵because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel ⁶that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God.

Hope… Faith… Love… Bearing Fruit…

Do you remember several weeks ago when we spoke about a spiral process of sin?  Do you remember How the Apostle Paul described in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans that sin first begins in folks because they forget to thank and acknowledge God?

Do you remember how the Apostle Paul insists that from ingratitude and self-centeredness, come "degrading passions," and from "degrading passions," come "debased minds" and then come the individual actions and messed up behavior: "envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, slanderers, and the rest."

Well the same Apostle Paul describes a process, an organic, simple, normal, natural process that leads us out of that spiral of sin.  It all comes from the hope we experience in Christ when we hear about, witness and experience that Christ died on the Cross because he loved you.  That He loved us so much that he gave it all up, didn't capitulate to the nastiness, horror and hatred of the world and was still victorious!  When that hope takes root in one's soul, says the Apostle Paul, then comes faith, then comes love, then comes bearing fruit – fruit of the spirit, like joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, and self-control![2]

Just like the spiral progressions down into sordid sin, we find here a progression, a natural process out, toward God and the Christian life. 

It's not for nothing that the color for ordinary Christian life is green.  It's the color of the process we call growth, of organic, natural, slow, steady, spectacular and fruitful growth.

Listen again to the picture that Paul paints:

^"4for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, ⁵because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel ⁶that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God"

From Hope… to Faith… to Love… to Bearing Fruit…

It takes time, it takes focus, focus on Christ and the sacrifice of the cross, and the miracle of the resurrection.  It takes patience, in oneself and the other sinful, growing, imperfect Christians around us.  It takes hope.

Time…When James A Garfield, the 20^th President of the United States, was president of a college, a man brought his son for acceptance as a student, for whom he wanted a shorter course thant the normal course in which all the other students registered.  "The boy can never take all that in," said the father.  "He wants to get through quicker.  Can you arrange it for him?" 

President Garfield, who was a president an educator and a minister said to this man, "Oh, yes.  He can take a short course; it all depends on what you want to make of him.  When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but it only take two months to make a squash!"[3]

Spirituality, holiness, perfection don't come through one decision, one flick of a switch, "O I'm a Christian now, I'm one of the perfect, holy ones!"  There are no short courses, no short-cuts, no gimmicks, it takes time to grow, to mature, to allow hope to grow into faith, and faith into love and love to bear all manner of fruit.

Focus on Christ is essential as well.  Where do we look for security in this process of growth and moving toward God?  We look up, up into the Cross, up as the sun rises on Easter morning and takes the ascending Son of God toward heaven.  Look up into God.

A house painter was at work atop a tall ladder that leaned against the second story gable of a house.  A small boy playing nearby discovered the base of this thirty foot ladder and began to climb it.  His mother, suddenly realizing that the little one had gotten away from her, took off in search of him and found him perched high up in the sky about ten feet above her head.  She swallowed a panicky scream, just as the man at the top of the ladder looked down, saw the child and instantly perceived the peril.  Signaling the mother to be silent, he calmly said to the child, "look up buddy, look up here to me, and keep climbing."  Rung by rung, he coaxed the child even higher: "Come on now, keep looking up, keep coming."  At last the child was safe in his arms and he passed him through an open window into the security of the house.  Each of us is on a ladder, if we look down, if we look back at what the world has to offer, we can easily grow dizzy and swoon and reach out to the power promises and slinky, snakey temptation of evil and down we go.[4] 

Up into the cross and into growth, natural and organic, built on hope and not on guilt, fear, anxiety or pressure.

Finally I want to read one more passage of the Apostle Paul to the Colossians again from the first chapter:

Colossians 1:9-14

…we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, ¹⁰so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. ¹¹May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully ¹²giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. ¹³He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He talks of patience, and again of being saved from the power of evil.  He talks of a long steady road to spiritual wisdom, understanding, strength and lives worthy of the calling to which all humans have been called, worthy of Christ himself, pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God.

I hope and pray, that as we look upon the cross of Christ, and come to understand the love that God has for each of us, we would all find ourselves on this road to wholeness, gladness and God himself.

Amen