The scripture reading for day is from the letter of Paul to the Colossians chapter 1 verses 3 through 8 if you brought your Bible with you You can follow along there or you can follow along in the bulletin on page 5 Colossians chapter 1 verses 3 through 8 We always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth the gospel which has come to you as Indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing as it also does among you since the day you heard it and Understood the grace of God in truth Just as you learned it from a paffress our beloved fellow servant He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit The word of the Lord and all of us said thanks be to God. He may be seated Pray with me please father We do lift Rob and Amy Elise and Benjamin up to you We give thanks to you our great God the God of music and beauty For what they have brought to us we do commit them to you as they stay a part of our church family and yet at the same time move on to other callings we commit heavenly Father them to you with gladness and Surely Lord it would be their desire that the word of God even this morning would be heard That you would give me utterance and you would give my friends in this room ears to hear and to understand
And we pray therefore holy spirit that you will come and be among us now in Jesus name Amen What kind of Christian people worship like you and I have been taught to worship by Rob and common
What sort of people think about their lives so that worship really becomes the center
Worship is first isn't it? It is always first it must always be the primary thing Which draws God's people together? It must always be the primary activity which makes us Defines us as the people of God is the people of Jesus as the people saved by Jesus Worship is at the core of our very identity but so too is extending the kingdom in service in mission Outreach For example as boots despised earlier this morning in the activities our churches engaged in in West Dallas Surely what it means to be a person who was a follower of Jesus Christ is one who is learning how to give their lives away To be ministers As we sometimes say a bit casually not few sitters chair of sitters But people on the move People who understand that you come here to worship to be equipped To go and do something with your lives that honors the king
Now between worship and extending the kingdom there's a A connecting piece It's the connecting piece that our S our our session has been talking about for almost three years now very very earnestly And that you see reflected in a number of ways In the fact that 30 more small groups are starting this fall to give us a total of something like 160 small groups That have started in our church in just the last couple of years I don't say that because the numbers are important in fact The whole theme of the book of Colossians is that numbers are not important The bigness is not important That's showing us is not important The whole theme of what Paul is saying to this hidden people this people in this little town in Asia Minor that no one ever heard of this hidden city Is that our lives are hidden with Christ And that the most significant things are not the big outward things But I simply say that to tell you we must be equipped as disciples
And it is the irrevocable commitment of your elders and your pastors To be engaged in that process of helping you become the people who worship greatly And serve significantly Because the Christian who worships God and extends his kingdom Does so because he or she understands three things That this passage brings to mind Of course there are many others that a disciple will understand But there are three things that Paul repeats here as he actually does in 1 Corinthians 13 of all places As three of the greatest things in the world That must mark our lives If we're to be the people of God These three things Are faith love and hope in the order that he gives them to us in this passage They're a kind of triad Of the definition of a person Who is learning how to worship And learning how to give his or her life away In other words this key center connecting piece Must be there for every one of us our worship And our extending in our own service Teach us faith love and hope But we must also be diligent in the life of this church To do that In every conceivable way among every conceivable age group And every person in every station of life In our church faith Love and hope think of it perhaps as a kind of three-legged stool
Quickly familiar words, but are they familiar to your heart? That's my question They're familiar words here They're familiar words in the Christians vocabulary But are they familiar in our hearts? That's the goal your elders have That's the goal your pastors have Is to cause these words to ring in us because they live in us Because they become the definition of our discipleship
Take faith When Paul speaks of faith here to the Colossians When he gives thanks for what he has heard of their faith He is not so much talking about the object of their faith In some ways that will come a bit later In what he says here In other words it is not faith in something For which he gives thanks It is rather faith as an attitude Faith as a way in which their heart works Faith is the way in which they move through life
Do you move through life in faith in Christ or in non-faith in Christ? Faith in Christ or ultimately faith in someone or something else
What he is saying is that lives that are lived as saints, as brothers, as sisters, as he called them back in chapter 1 verse 2 Those who are disciples Will find themselves living under the direct authority of Jesus Christ And the direct authority of Jesus Christ will always cause faith and trust to grow in a person's heart
When Bob Simmons, our dear brother now in heaven, was sick for three years He had a friend named Kevin Turner Some of you know Kevin Kevin wrote him a note every day of those three years And in one of those notes which Bob shared with me He said this Kevin said this Faith is not based on a desired end result But on trust in our father's love for us In other words, I do not have faith that God is going to do this for me I do not have faith that this will happen that I will get healed That I will get the deal that my kids will grow up without any problems
Faith is not so much directed at the object as it is directed at the Lord which means It's an attitude of trust in the father's love toward us. It's living that way It's moving that way
Love that's the second one Well love is Not just a leg of a stool is it it's the center point of the Christian life we would all say that But what Paul wants to bring to us here as he does actually in other places in the New Testament Is to tell us that faith works through love Which means that you recognize faith when you see love You don't recognize faith when you see faith as much as when you see love. That's really what he's saying And so if you want to know if a person has faith you begin to wonder and see and watch how well we love one another
And that and to know that a person Who is moving in love is a person who is a disciple with friends You want to know what a disciple is a disciple has friends
People who love him or her those he or she loves And it's evident it's real It stirs faith in their hearts to move and act It's apparent Similar Paul says in Salim and I thank my god always when I remember you in my prayers because I hear of your love and the faith that you have Toward the Lord Jesus and all the saints You see what he said? I hear of your love and the faith that you have Toward the Lord Jesus and all of the saints It's no good to say I have faith in the Lord Jesus, but I don't have love for the saints It doesn't work Disciples of Jesus Christ in this church will be known by our love We will be known by our love before we're known by our doctrinal purity as important as that is We will be known by our love before we are known By the extravagance of our resources that we can share with the city or the world We will be known by our love before people know that we can plant churches all over the world we will be known by Faith expressing itself in love the way Paul puts it in Galatians Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that a great phrase? And isn't that what you want to be
Hope is the third leg of the stool The disciple stool the stool that the disciple sits on you might say Hope laid up for us in heaven now. There'll be more we'll have to say about this in chapter three of Colossians But Paul seems to be saying here that hope is the result of faith and love rather than the other way around in other words When you have faith in Jesus Not faith it's something good for you is going to happen, but faith in the love of the Father And that shows itself in the love that you have For brothers and sisters when that happens Something gives birth to hope in your heart And you and I begin to hope in a future In a wonderful glorious future that belongs to us that is laid up for us in heaven As the apostle says It's curious that even though the hope is future It's really a present reality and that's what marks it If I can put it to you this way the mark of a real disciple Is the difference of tone not words when he or she speaks about hope
A disciple who maybe really doesn't quite get it too much yet a young disciple a growing disciple or a weakened disciple Would say I know everything's going to be all right someday when I'm in heaven true But the tone of a real disciple is that somehow that future hope Works backward into the present moment So that today is filled with hope So that today has the sense of God's presence and blessing about it So that a disciple says today I walk with Jesus and that makes all the difference
I would never underestimate the past or the future Indeed if you understand what we have said so far about the book of Colossians in the last couple of weeks You know how critical the past is Because to be hidden with Christ the theme of this whole little book I believe Means our union with Christ that we are one with him specifically in his death and in his resurrection two past events mysteriously but wondrously when Jesus died Our old self died with him and when Jesus rose our New self rose with him It is a way of describing who we are whether or not we feel like it
I do not get up every morning and say Whoopie I died with Christ and rose with Christ. I don't If you do please come counsel me later
But by the training of the gospel we learn to do that by growth and discipleship by having friends With whom we share faith love and this hope We learn to recognize that our deepest identity is not this or that accomplishment. This or that occupation This or that list of honors we've received it is in fact That I belong to Christ. I'm hidden with Christ and when I realize this Then the whole double and tundra that I'm trying to share with you in these weeks The double meaning of being hidden with Christ comes into play Because when Christ is everything guess what? I'm happy to be just about nothing When Jesus is everything then I am learning what it means to walk quietly through my life And say that the small gestures of faith love and hope Or what really count. I'm learning to really believe That it doesn't need to be spectacular To be Christ like And I'm learning really to believe that it's a good thing To step down like Paul did not up To be less prominence To be hidden in prison like Paul was in Rome when he wrote this letter to a hidden small insignificant city in Asia Minor
I learned that it is better to be little with Jesus than big in the eyes of men
Because I learned that that is where the real life Of faith love and hope come from
Let me change the analogy if I might for just a moment And it's really one that's probably more apt to the text because it speaks of fruit
Think of faith love and hope as fruit on a tree Not legs on a stool When my children were young when christen carry were young I tried to teach them that there was a connection between what was going on in their hearts And the outward things that they did in other words I believe like many of you that Christian Parenting is not a matter simply of teaching your children the right thing to do But teaching them how to have a heart that is different That That bears fruit that is different And I got a lot of help from this for my friend stay palison and Paul trip and others his books are in our bookstore downstairs But the point is this Good root good fruit bad root bad fruit When we lived in Virginia we had apple trees in our backyard One apple tree died one spring Imagine if I went out and took the good Living apples off the good apple tree and I tried to staple them to the dead apple tree That's what a lot of people try and do in their Christian behavior They try and do the right thing they try and look like they're bearing the right fruit But it is phony it is fake and it is in the end dead No there is no fruit without root There must be life And where does the life come from It's hidden with Christ It's with you in your heart when your heart and life are hidden with Christ The root of the tree that produces these fruits is described by Paul here in verse six the grace of God in truth
This truth The truth of the gospel The truth that when Jesus died I died when Jesus rose I rose the truth That makes all the difference This is the truth that the grace of God applies to my heart
And bears fruit in the branches of my living There is no production of Christian fruit in your life. There is no Christian living There is no Christian faith Love or hope without the gospel of the center Without the grace of God working in your hearts to make the truth of the gospel which we get from this book Grow and be alive in our souls So that fruit is born
That is why everything That we will teach disciples to do in this church comes from this book
That is why we beg God to send his spirit Upon every time we gather in large groups or small groups Because there and only there in the presence of the spirit of God will the growth of grace Make the truth of Christ Come alive and bear the fruit That we must see that we want to see in one another
Let me make this pointed to you in the way that I think the apostle Paul does In this letter He speaks about a person in verse 7 The man's name is a pathras And he talks about the ministry of a pathras In the Colossian church in other words a pathras was the one who was Paul's emissary We've already said Paul never went to Colossians who did a pathras did And he speaks of him as the real thing He says he is a beloved brother and servant and faithful minister in Christ I mean, that's a pretty good thing to say about something In other words a pathras Was a model of what it is that Paul has just been describing A fruit bearing life That begins with the root in the word of God where grace is applied and nurturing so that out of the branches comes Faith love and hope This is a pathras He had faith in Jesus and therefore not that Jesus would do this or that for him but that Everything that Jesus would do would be for His own glory and His good and the good of the people in Colossus Colossus He had love he loves the brothers It's set of him here that he does so in fact if you look in the fourth Chapter there's a little note about a pathras towards the end Verse 12 a pathras who is one of you a servant of Jesus Christ greets you Always struggling on your behalf in his prayers that you may stand mature And fully assured in all the word of God In other words when he sang is that the credibility of the message The credibility of the gospel itself And the love of the messenger go together Don't we know that to be true in our own experience? Don't you listen to people that love you and don't you tend to Ignore people that don't love you A pathras was a lover of disciples And he exhibited faith love and hope in a way that modeled it out to these Colossian people
But here's the point Here's the point Who is a pathras How many of you would honestly say you know anything about him How many of you would ever say that maybe except for an occasional reading through the book of Colossians Somewhat quickly and seeing his name you have stopped to ponder anything about this man
What's the truest thing about him? He's hidden We don't know who he is He's a beloved brother A faithful disciple He's not a big name in the church He's not up there with a gustan and Luther and Calvin And St. Teresa He's an unknown But he is the key to what God did In this place without trying for one second to take Attention away from what the Lord is doing in your heart. I want you To know that I believe rob rucker is a lot like a pathras Was rob rucker public and seen of course But did he ever seek ever to be the center? Did he ever seek to be the prominent one in our midst? No, and that is true of many of you as well step down not up Become Less prominent somehow whatever that means Become hidden So that the gospel might be hidden in your heart So that you might bear the real fruit the fruit that lasts the fruit of faith love And hope Because as you are hidden with Christ as our lives are hidden with Christ United with him in his death United with him in his resurrection Willing therefore like him and like the apostle Paul and like all the apathrasists of christian history to step down not up As you do that Then you will begin to know what a disciple is And we will begin to know what a church is
And may God make itself for our good for our joy for our faith for our love for our hope for his glory