The scripture reading this morning is from the letter to the Colossian Church written by the Apostle Paul. We have been spending several weeks looking at this letter and continue to do so this morning and beyond. If you have your own Bibles, please open them to Colossians chapter 1. If not, you may follow along with the scripture passage that is printed in your Bulletin. I'm going to begin at chapter 1 verse 19, which is actually a bit of what we read last week as well. I get a little bit of a carryover and overlap for reasons that I think will be plain in just a moment. Please stand for the reading of God's Word. Colossians chapter 1 at verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I paw became a minister. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Let's pray together. Thank you, Father, for this portion of your Word. And thank you, Lord, for the depths of it that we will never fathom this morning or any morning until the time we hear you speak of it directly to us from the throne of grace. But give us ears to hear, hearts to believe. Give me utterance, Lord, to speak clearly and not complicatedly. Help us to love you because we have loved your word and see ourselves as its servants and living under it together this morning. We pray in Christ's name, amen.
How many of you know the name Alexander Souls in Ethan? I'm sure just about everyone in the room. Very famous Russian novelist. What you may know a little bit less about is some of the details of his biography. He was a fascinating man still is. You still alive. He actually lived through the worst of the Soviet Union's time of power and domination. He predicted its downfall and its end long before anyone else did. He knew that inherent in it were the seeds of wickedness that could not stand the test of time. But before communism fell, actually a number of years before it fell, 12 or so years before it fell, Alexander Souls in Ethan came to the United States and gave what I happen to consider the second most important address of the 20th century given in this country. He gave it at Harvard University which in some ways for good or evil represents something of the best the West can do if you know what I mean by that. And Souls in Ethan said some very, very striking things in that address was called the Exhausted West. He not only spoke about the evils and the wickedness of communism, but he spoke as well about the fatigue, the moral and spiritual fatigue that he saw in the West. And he said that he could not recommend to his children and grandchildren Western civilization as an alternative to the corruption and wickedness of the Soviet Union. Very startling thing to say. Some of you may recall that he was taken to task by the liberal press. The liberal press in this country burned him at the stake because he seemed to be criticizing the very country that it given him the right to say what he had said indeed that is true. But Souls in Ethan was speaking out of a profound sense of the nature of evil and a profound sense of what makes wrong wrong. Some of you know he became a Christian in the Russian Gulag that is in a concentration camp during the time that the Soviets were in power. A friend of his snuck in little bits of the New Testament and would read them to Souls in Ethan as he was sick actually at his bedside and those little bits of scripture gradually over time God used to knit together the framework of Souls in Ethan's faith and he became a believer. But this is what he said in 1978 at Harvard. He said gradually it was disclosed to me in the Gulag that it is impossible to separate good and evil in terms of political states or in terms of the differences among classes of people or between political parties and institutions. Rather he said the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Now he said this is a Christian. I don't know how many people he were hearing in that day understood that he was a Christian but he understood profoundly the nature of evil that it's not necessarily associated with that political system or that way of doing things or that government or that power structure. It's actually associated with the human heart and that the line the division between good and evil runs through every person's life. GK Chester's in the famous British journalist a hundred years ago responded to an inquiry that came to him from a London morning newspaper. They sent out a call for essays. They wanted to print essays from famous journalists and writers at the time answering this subject. What is wrong with the world? And Chesterton responded in his own wonderful, inimicable way with two words. He said, dear sir, I am your sincerely GK Chesterton. Well he got that right, didn't he? And he said in a more humorous and light fashion exactly what Solzenitsyn is saying. The amazing thing about this passage and what Solzenitsyn was saying, Chesterton, with the whole of the Bible really says, is that we need to understand the colossal universal nature of all that is wrong with the world. But we also need to understand that that always is specific. It always goes through the middle of one human heart, yours and mine. And so in this passage, which has as its theme reconciliation, Paul is speaking about the nature of reconciliation, first of all of all things of the universals of everything. He says in verse 20, through Christ, God reconciled all things, everything on earth and in heaven. He's speaking about the scope and the nature of the reconcilatory work of Jesus Christ. But then he also speaks about the specific nature of it. In verses 21 and 22, he says, and you, he has now reconciled. And in verse 23, the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and is coming to you. You see, Paul is describing how serious the human dilemma is in a way that affirms the seriousness both on a cosmic and universal level and on a personal and specific level so that reconciliation, if it is to be real, must take place on both levels. The theme of the whole of the Bible you might say is not only the reconciliation of individual lives to God or of God to individual lives. It is also the reconciliation of the whole of the created cosmos, everything in heaven and earth. Out of joints, out of kilter, not straight, not what it was meant to be.
And if you look at this passage closely and I encourage you maybe to glance occasionally at the words here as I speak that are before you, you will see that he repeatedly describes the problem both in universal and specific terms, three universal problems that are also specific in their need for being straightened out. The first is that our minds are alienated from God, verse 21. You who once were alienated and hostile in mind, alienated means estranged. It is not just that our minds misunderstand a little bit. Paul is nothing that our minds just don't quite get it, that our thinking is a little bit off, that we need a little tweaking. He's saying something much more profound. He is saying that the essential nature of human thinking is out of joint, is unstraight, is crooked as a result of all that's gone wrong in the world, all that the Bible calls sin. And he sees that the mind is the great intake place of the human being. Into the mind comes the facts, the realities of this life. As a man thinketh so is he. Out of our minds we find our lives being lived, our hearts are affected, our behavior is affected by what goes into our mind. So our relationship with God is characterized as one of a strangement of thinking. We are alone in our minds. How much poetry? How much of great writing, centers on this theme of a strangement and aloneness? It is one of the great grand themes of the whole of literature and the reason it is is because it is one of the great grand themes of a whole of our lives. We are alone, Paul is saying, our minds have isolated us, our minds play tricks on us and we find ourselves thinking out of joint incorrectly. And for many, this alienation rises to the level of hostility, Paul says, so that we are hostile in mind as the term that he uses. This emphasizes that the whole complex way our minds work is geared to resist God. Now if you think that is harsh, I can understand. If it's the first time that perhaps you've heard that way of putting it, I'm trying to introduce you thereby to the way in which the Bible describes the good news. The good news is that you're a whole lot worse than you think you are and that you're a whole lot more loved than you ever dreamed. You see, you must understand that the difficult thing for us to face is that our thinking is broken and because our thinking is broken, everything else in our lives is perceived incorrectly and wrongly. The second universal problem that is also a specific one is the result of our state of mind and it is that we do evil is what he says here. The word evil is the word poor noise. It is where we get the word pornographic. Now what Paul is saying here is that the evil that comes out of our minds is pornographic and you want to say no wait a minute Skip. I've got some problems but that's not my problem. I understand but he's using pornography in a much broader sense. Pornography you might say is that evil mindset that produces ways of thinking and then ways of acting that are caricatures, distortions of the real thing which if you think about it, that's what pornography is isn't it? It's a caricature, a distortion of the real thing and so hostile deeds out of our living become that which is like a cracked mirror. It's like in a house of mirrors in an amusement park when you see yourself in it, one of those funny mirrors and you're all distorted. That's the way our actions are God says. The third universal problem that is also specific is that we easily drift away from the hope of the gospel even once we've heard it to something else. Verse 23, we shift from the hope of the gospel that we have heard but Paul says in the face of all three of these specific tendencies that are concrete to each one of us and yet also universal. He says but now God has reconciled you. Not just everything in heaven on earth but you. The reconciliation is both universal and specific. The word reconciled. What does it mean? It means to bring together to make consistent or congruous as you might say I reconciled my checkbook or you might say I don't reconciled my checkbook. It is to attempt to make things match up to line up to straighten up like straight bones. If you have a problem with your knee you would go see an orthopedic surgeon. Ortho means straight. Petic comes from the word paydye which has to do with children but probably particularly children's skeletal structure. So an orthopedist is a person who makes bones straight or how about the word orthodontist. To straighten one's teeth you go to an orthodontist. Ortho straight. So the word means don't teeth. Some of you know that I have had orthodontistry three times in my life and none of them were successful. None of them were really because of cosmetic needs. They were mostly because of the ill health of my mouth and my bite. The third time it was so bad they had to break my jaw before they could do the orthodontistry. The interesting thing about orthodontistry is you can't do it yourself. You can't straighten your own teeth. The first time I had orthodontistry I was in the fifth grade and I had a little girlfriend at the time. My teeth were sticking out a bit too much but I didn't want to get braces because of my little girlfriend. So every night for a month before the date I was supposed to get braces I went to bed pushing on my teeth like this. It didn't work. To straighten out your teeth or to straighten out your life you need intervention from the outside and as we have seen already in the book of Colossians there are three kinds of reconciliation that are alluded to in this passage once again. Three kinds of making straight. One is orthodoxy, straight teaching. There is a kind of emphasis upon what goes into our minds, the content that we hold in our minds, whether it's true or not. Because Paul says it makes an incredible difference whether what you believe is true according to God's word or not. The second kind of straightness is orthopraxy. Praxy meaning practice or behavior. In other words straight action so that our deeds no longer grow out of hostility but that our deeds grow out of the straightness of the way our minds are being taught to think under God. And the third kind of straightness is orthocardia. Orthostrate again, cardio, heart so that our hearts are straight. Alienated estranged minds are orthodoxized you might say by good teaching. They are straightened out to think correctly. That's why we put an emphasis on Bible teaching. It's important that we conform our minds to the content of God's truth. Second, instead of doing evil we are orthopraxied you might say. We're being made holy and blameless. Interestingly enough holiness and blamelessness as the words are used right here in this passage are not so much a reference to our moral condition as they are to our moral position. The way you see this in this passage is in the prepositions. What form of speech? What part of speech shows you your position relative to something else? It is always a preposition. So again and again in this passage we read things like this, by Christ, through Christ, for Christ, with Christ, in Christ. John Stott says we live by the prepositions of the Bible which is his way of saying that these things called prepositions actually locate us in Jesus or outside of Jesus. In the reconciliation that Jesus brings or outside of the reconciliation that Jesus brings. And the question therefore that is raised by prepositions to you this morning is where do they say you are? Arthur Wood came up after the eight o'clock early service and he said this to me, he wrote it down so that I could remember it. It's very very important about prepositions. He says if prepositions are not important I would just as soon the million dollars comes from you to me. Prepositions are very important, aren't they? They locate you positionally. And the big question that is raised by this passage is are you in Christ? Are you to use Paul's theme language that we're using hidden in Christ from chapter 3 verse 3? Is your life straight? Not in the sense of being goody goody but is it focused on the mind? Is your mind focused on Christ? Is your behavior focused on the behavior of Christ that you have learned? Are your hearts shaped by Christ? Those are the questions that are raised. So instead of shifting away from the gospel he says that we've become those who have orthochardia or straight hearts. In other words we're steadfast and stable. That's the word that he uses here. What a wonderful thing to say. I can't think of a better thing to say about a friend than that my friend David has a stable heart, a steadfast heart that he doesn't waver. This kind of orthochardia is what Jesus gives to you. It's what he builds into you as you live in him under his word, in his church, with his people, by his truth. Notice all the prepositions. And then he goes on interestingly to say that there are three things that affect this stability and steadfastness of orthochardia. Real quickly one it comes from hearing the truth. The emphasis there is upon hearing the truth. He says not shifting away from the hope of the gospel that you heard. What assures that you are stable. What assures that you're a Christian is what you listen to. Not what you see. This is, I wish there was more time for this but this is the extreme difference between right and wrong, broadly speaking. Ease in the garden saw that the fruit was good for food, desirable, beautiful to her eyes and desirable to make her wise. In other words, she shifted the focus or the locus of her interpreting her reality from her ear. What God said, what she heard to what she saw and her downfall was made certain by doing that. We are to be people who listen and as we listen, we find our hearts growing more stable. The second thing about stability and steadfastness that is indicated by this passage is that it is not measured by the spectacular. It is not measured by the spectacular. The very nature of stability is the opposite of spectacular. I wonder if you've ever thought of this. One of the three temptations which Jesus faced in the desert was the temptation to do the spectacular thing. The devil showed him a picture or took him and said to the top pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and told him to jump off the temple knowing that he could command angels, of course, to rescue him. In other words, the devil tempted Jesus to do something spectacular. Interesting enough that corresponds to Eve's second temptation when she saw the beauty of the fruit. She was enamored with the spectacular nature of it. The Bible teaches us again and again, friends, that we all are enamored with the spectacular. The showy, the beautiful, and we find ourselves actually thinking steadiness is boring and steadfastness is rather ho-hum. But haven't we seen in the last few weeks this great theme from the book of Colossians, chapter 3, verse 3, that we are hidden with Christ, not spectacular with Jesus, but hidden with Jesus. Paul is in a hidden place, a prison in Rome, writing to a hidden out of the way, less prominent city. The only city he wrote to, as I said before, that he never visited Colossian. Paul was a great strategist of his day, a great missionary strategist. He did go to Rome. He did go to Ephesus. He did go to the London's in the St. Paulus of his day. But he did it without self-promotion, without trying to keep up appearances. He did it, we might say, anti-heroically. He didn't seek to make himself the center of attention. He did so avoiding the spectacular. He did so by being obediently obscure or obscurely obedient. So you see there you have it, stability and steadfastness come from hearing the truth. And the measure of our orthocardia, our straightheartedness, is not the spectacular, but the stable. And it has happened, verse 22 says, in the body of the flesh of his son, speaking, of course, of Jesus. Now what is the significance of inputting it that way? Do you remember what we've said about the ancient Greek world, the ancient classical world? Where was the spectacular? Where was the note worthy? Where was what was highly regarded? It wasn't the flesh. It wasn't the physical body. It was the mind. It was the spirit. It was beauty. It was poetry. It was the platonic ideal. And Paul says no. Good and evil cut through the middle of every person's life, flesh and blood. And it is on the cross that the body, the physical body of Jesus, becomes a foolish scandal to the Greek mind. For the word of the cross is falling to them. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1. For since the world did not come to know God through its wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. You are no fool. And I hope I am no fool. But you must understand that in a certain sense to really live under, there's a preposition under this message. And in, there's a preposition. It's power. You must be willing to be the servants of this message and not the other way around. And you must be willing therefore to look foolish. For it is a foolish message in the world. I, 40 years ago, Marshall McCluen wrote a book called The Medium Is The Message by which he meant that the message is important. But as important as the message is, the messenger is just as important. That the messenger communicates something about the nature of the message. Well, how does the apostle Paul communicate himself as a messenger? He says, I'm an apostle. Well, there he's claiming the and his authority is from Christ as it was. But here in verse 23, and many other places in his writings, instead of choosing the word apostle to describe himself, he chooses instead the word minister. And the word minister is really the word servant. The Greek word there is deaconus. It's where we get the word deacon. And the idea is that Paul is deliberately seeing himself as a servant of the message of the gospel. And he is saying that Paul, Paul is saying that God works through those who see themselves as servants, not spectacular leaders, those who are hidden in Christ, not prominently displayed before man. So, for example, in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, he says, what then is a Paulus? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believe as the Lord assigned to each. I planted a Apollo watered, but God gave the growth, so neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. Do you see what Paul is saying? He is a servant, not only of Christ, which of course he is, but of the message of Christ. He deliberately places himself under the message in order to better deliver it. In 2 Corinthians chapter 4, perhaps one of my most favorite chapters in the whole of the New Testament, he says this, we don't have time for much, but just listen to a couple of verses. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants for Christ's sake. What's our message? Look at me? No. The message is, look at him. In fact, then the next sentence, he says this, for God who said let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. If you want to see the glory of God, look at the face of Jesus Christ. Don't look at the servant. In fact, to the degree that you look at the face of the servant and look for the spectacular, to that degree you are diminishing the glory of God in the face of Christ. And that is why this church must be a church filled with people who understand themselves in terms of diaconos, service, giving our lives away to others because we have put ourselves under the message of the gospel. Leave here this morning as a person renewed by that message that Jesus Christ died not only for your sins, but in order to reconcile the whole world to himself. Bear that message in your living. Call attention to him. Make much of the spectacularness of Jesus. Paul says also in 2 Corinthians 4, but we have this treasure, that's the gospel and its message, we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. And he's referring to cheap old jars there that were not valuable at all. And in fact, without safes or strong boxes in people's homes, do you know where they would hide their family heirlooms? They'd hide them in cheap jars on the mantle in full sight, knowing that that would be the last place people, thieves would ever look for the treasure in that family. Jesus has hidden himself in you, you to use Paul's language are hidden in Christ. Now go live that way. As a hidden servant, live under orthodoxy, right thinking, live under orthodoxy, right behavior, living, live under orthochardia, right heartedness because you live under the right person and under the right message, the only person and the only message who are spectacular, the good news is that you're not spectacular, but that he is.