Christ First: Paul's Colossian Letter

Distraction rules the day.  People can hardly drive in a straight line or complete a simple conversation without being interrupted by distractions.  This lack of focus ultimately comes from a divided and confused soul fueled by minds obsessed with desire.  Such minds are easily filled with "hollow and deceptive" ideas, just like those which endagered the Colossian believers in the first century.  In his letter to that group of believers, Paul gives the best and only remedy: Christ first.

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Paul grounds the Colossians in hope.  Faith "springs up" (1:5) from this hope almost automatically.  This faith takes the disciple to love.  The hope of the follower of Jesus is that "in everything he might have supremacy."  (1:18)  Christ first in everything, not just "in my heart," but in everything that has been made and is being remade.  (1:15-20)  This is the heart of the gospel which brings about faith.  (1:3-6)  Such faith brings about a "life worthy of the Lord" (1:10) which ends in "the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light", that is, "love in the Spirit."  (1:12,7)  Any hope or faith not ending in this love is not full and true.

The Colossians have not always known the truth that Christ is first in all things.  They were told through Paul's associates.  They were enemies alienated from God, but brought around to trust Him by the message of Christ's sacrificial work for them (1:21-22)  Now they are among those who know God's mystery: "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  (1:27)  Above all else, Paul says, "We proclaim him," so that the Colossians would come to know God, who they did not know at all, and "be encouraged in heart and united in love" with all believers.  (2:2)

Even as they are escaping an unrighteous ignorance of God shown by their "evil behavior," now the Colossians face a new challenge.  Self-righteousness based on "human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ" has found its way among them.  (2:8)  These teachings have "the appearance of wisdom, . . .  but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence."  (2:23)  Paul gives them a better way.

The instruction in the way of Christ begins with the heart and mind being set on "things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God."  (3:1)  With Christ first in the heart, a new life grows and old ways are put aside.  This is evidenced in their gatherings "as God's chosen people," as well as in their homes as wives, husbands, children, servants, and masters relate to each other.  Such  gatherings and homes are characterized by prayer and in careful conversations "full of grace" (4:5) with those outside the gatherings of Christ.  What begins in the heart ends with "whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus."  (3:17)

Such instruction is not abstract, but plays out in the details and drama of each person's life.  For Paul, his fellow workers and those who minister to these churches were his life.  He names them and expresses deep love for them as "dear brothers" and a "comfort to him."  (4:7,11)  "Christ in you" is not intangible, but plays out in each life in relationships and situations lived with love or without it.  This makes the gospel into a history rather than a mere myth.

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Christ is still our foremost hope, our certain faith, and our deepest love.  This gospel shown through Christ's sacrifice for us has brought us to trust Jesus.  Self-righteousness remains a constant distraction from him into making it on our own.  As Christ becomes first in our mind and hearts, we find our way to a life full of words and deeds like our Master.  This new life is lived in our day-to-day situations with the people we know and meet and nowhere else.  And so, just as Paul signs this letter at the end "in his own hand," each of us will sign our lives with or without Christ first "in our own hands."

Leftover Love for My Family

LEFTOVER LOVE

Why does my family receive the leftovers of my love and attention?  Why am I so tempted to devote more of my love, respect, and attention to those outside my house?  These are questions that my family has been asking for a while.

First, the question applies to not only my teen-age kids, but to myself.  One of my first questions when dealing with problems in my kids is the question, "Where did that come from?"  I have to do some careful self-examination avoiding the pitfalls of self-pity and self-justification.  Am I teaching my children that our life as a family is secondary to my work, my friends, or my church positions?  Self-pity says, "I am a rotten father.  I'll never get this right."  Self-justification says, "I'm doing my best.  What more can be expected?"  Both avoid the questions, "What can be done?  What would the Lord have of me?"

As I examine my tendencies to spend time away from home, to hurry my family from on event to another, or to make my family picture-perfect, I find that my attention and my desire is focused on pleasing and impressing people outside my family and home.  Why?  I believe that home and family is only one step away from our own hearts.  My marriage and my kids reflect what sort of person I am far more than my job, my friends, and my church positions.  As with my own heart and private world, I find myself more concerned with my family looking good rather than being good.  As long as everyone else thinks my family is okay, we're okay.  Never mind that we can barely stand being around each other.

If I settle for appearances over reality, that's not good.  If I mistake appearances for reality, that's dangerous and destructive.  The reason real changes in my family are so difficult and time-consuming comes from several factors:

• I do not want to change myself, really.
• I do not know how to change myself.
• I really don't want my family to change much, just in a few ways that will make life easier for myself.
• I do not know how to go about changing my family.

Change and growth seem elusive at best.  Most of the time I want to be struck by lightning or bit by a radioactive spider for change instead of doing any training or effort.  I might wish my family was different, like I wish I was a concert pianist, but wishing only breeds trying and trying is merely an effort expected to fail.  Two things are needed to break out of this situation: encouragement and endurance.

CHANGE BEGINS WITH TRUE HOPE

Hope needs to be set on what is true, otherwise it yields disappointment or even despair.  Jesus was big on truth.  He was always saying, "I tell you the truth" because he knew we needed truth to live by, truth to hope in.  The truth about family is that it is a reflection of the Trinity.  Jesus final word on God is that he  is his Father and our Father.  God's will and desire is bent on redeeming family relationships because, at their best, they give a dim picture of the oneness found in the Trinity.  If I work on my family life, I am deeply involved in the work of God, shining out his image.

Jesus's commands also reflect this.  Part of the greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Who is our neighbor?  Simply, one who is "nigh" or near.  It may be that one of the big problems of the priest and Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan was that they were overly concerned with people who were not "nigh" to them.  They were is a hurry to get "there" rather than love the person who was near at them moment. Sometimes that person is a stranger we may not like very much.  More often the ones who are near to me are my wife and kids.

All this talk about Jesus's commands often breeds guilt in my heart because I am used to seeing them used as clubs to beat people rather than hope to lift people. I am as guilty as anyone else. On the contrary, "everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope." (Romans 15:4) It is not Jesus who overburdens us with commands that we cannot keep, but ourselves. Loving family is not something I must or should do, but something that I get to do by God's grace. Jesus's commands are always pictures of what I can be like as I walk alongside him bearing the easy yoke.

So this is the encouragement. I am confident that God wants my family to be a center of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. This is his will. He never intended that such a life would be done without him. Jesus does not command what he will not have done by God's grace. His commands provide the picture of a life immersed in the Holy Spirit, a life drawing upon God's kingdom resources, a life dead to dead-end desires. Love is the best word to describe such a life. Family is where such love resides most of the time.

Endurance comes from knowing that when I pick up the burdens in my life, God will be at the other end, doing most of the lifting. Endurance comes from knowing that God will not lift what I I do not lift. My main work of lifting is the work of trusting. My effort begins as I trust God to work in my life. As I understand God's desire to make my family a place where love, joy, and peace reign, I can align my work with his. He takes my small efforts and gives them powerful results I could not have anticipated.

FAMILY MEANS TOGETHER

So what does that all mean? For my family, we do a lot of things together. As a result we do less things in general, since we feel we need and want to do many of them together. One of the most important things we do together is devote ourselves to God. Without such time with him, we cannot go on very long. Such devotion is made up of Bible/devotional readings, sharing work and conversation, eating normal and special meals together, and praying for each other and with each other. God continually meets us as we expectantly come to meet him.

Where are you to begin? Begin where you are. Make that one corner, room, house, office as like Heaven as you can. Begin? Begin with the paper on the walls, make that beautiful; with the air, keep it fresh; with the very drains, make them sweet; with the furniture, see that it be honest. Abolish whatsoever worketh abomination--in food, in drink, in luxury, in books, in art; whatsoever maketh a lie--in conversation, in social intercourse, in correspondence, in domestic life. This done, you have arranged for a Heaven, but you have not got it. Heaven lies within, in kindness, in humbleness, in unselfishness, in faith, in love, in service. To get these in, get Christ in. Teach all in the house about Christ--what He did, and what He said, and how He lived, and how He died, and how He dwells in them, and how He makes all one. Teach it not as a doctrine, but as a discovery, as your own discovery. Live your own discovery. (The City Without a Church, Henry Drummond)

Such a life will transcend the walls of our homes and the intimacy of our families. As we find ourselves trustworthy and able to work with what is small and close, we will find ourselves asked to work more with what is more distant and "big," but, I suspect, never to the exclusion of what is close and small. From the Bible as well as my own life I know that what is "big" and "important" to people in general is never big and important to God. The biggest changes start in the smallest corners and with unlikely people at the heart of them.

Lord, you know my heart. You know how I long to impress other people and how I think that by impressing others I will find the approval I seek. It is not true. Teach me how godliness with contentment is a great gain for myself and my family. Let me know the truth in the words, "Follow me, and I will make you a fisher of people." Just like you, Jesus. Amen.

How the Kingdom of God Comes: With Waiting

Mark 1.1-1.8

Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.  -Simone Weil

If we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.  (Romans 8:25)

For some of my kid's birthdays and Christmases we have had special presents or occasions planned.  The surprise that they felt was planned carefully by Dawn and myself for quite a while before the event happened.  When everything was ready, the surprise unfolded.  Foretold scripture makes me think of that planning for a surprise.  No doubt it says a lot about God's foreknowledge, but fulfilled scripture also shows what God has been planning for a long time and the meaning behind human history.  History is a story full of preparation for the coming of Jesus.

Such preparation was not left to the written word alone, but was fulfilled in the coming of John.  Fulfillment comes when the words come off the page and live and breath in the lives of people and the events of history.  The voice of one calling in the desert comes alive in John.  He immersed people in the waters of the Jordan as a preparation.  For what?  Immersion in the Holy Spirit.  John anticipated the one who would open the door to a new reality where people could be soaked and floating along in the currents of God's Holy Spirit through the words and work of the Messiah.  God just could not wait to bring us such a gift, a surprise that he had always planned on: being one with me.

Scriptural fulfillment is a big picture of what God wants to do with me everyday.  He has wonderful plans in store for me and each person.  He longs to bring them about in my life.  My part is to wait.  Wait with eagerness, with anticipation, with joy.  In the waiting there will be preparation.  In the preparation, personal change.  Those changes will lead to the power to live fully with him and abundantly in a new life.

Lord, it is a good thing you sent one more powerful than I to take me through this life.  With him the yoke of living becomes easy and light.  His presence reaches into the deepest places of my soul, out into the reality of this world, and up into the highest heaven which I cannot even imagine.  I am embraced, held, and carried along daily by your hand.  Fulfill your plans in me and through me, Father.  I hope in you.  Amen.

The Gift Is Not Like the Trespass

Romans 5: How Faith, Hope, and Love Relate to Being Good


In answer to the question "Who is well-off?," Paul answers in chapter 3, "The one who is justified freely by God's grace." (v.24)  This is in direct contrast to the one who seeks to justify himself and seeks to obtain goodness on his own.  Such a blessedness from God frees me from boasting and worrying about how I am doing compared with others before God.  Instead I am free to be good because it is a gift that God gives by the blood of Jesus, which reconciles me to God.  That is, it places me before him in the relationship as son; it brings me into the home of the Trinity as family.  I am justified and made right by the work and invitation of Jesus.

In chapter 4, Paul explains that any boasting based on being a Jew is excluded because Abraham is the father of all who trust is God, whether Jew or Gentile.  Everyone is blessed through Abraham's trust in God.  His faith does not belong to the covenant of circumcision, but precedes and transcends it.  Circumcision comes from faith; faith does not come from circumcision.  Who is well-off?  Who is good?  Anyone who will trust in God and embrace the door he has opened into his home through Jesus.

Now Paul explains how I am justified or made good.  He moves into the question "Who is good?"  Paul describes goodness with three words: faith, hope, and love.  Faith gives me access to God's grace.  By trusting him, I obtain his favor and his ability to do what I cannot do on my own.  Such trusting brings hope.  I find that I am confident about my present and future life because I trust in God and his grants his grace.  Even suffering brings hope because through trusting God in suffering, I find perseverance and then a real change in my character.

I have experienced this change in an experiment in which I explored the power of the gospel.  Is it really enough?  Can it really satisfy my deepest longings and set me free from my most addicting habits and sins?  To this I found it to be remarkably able.  I let go of the remedies in which I had been seeking and trying to fix myself and manage my own goodness.  I surrendered to God and did what he asked and found that even though it seemed at first "the long way around," he addressed the root of my problem - my trust and love of him - and changed my character - the center of my own personal "kingdom" - into something else.  Such inward and outward change has brought me hope, so that I seek to grow daily into the likeness of Christ.

Such hope can only disappoint me if I am not continually bathed in love.  Faith (trust) is fleeting if I do not know who I trust in and what he is like.  Hope disappoints me if I the reason for my confidence is not based in the trust of a loving God.  Without love, changes in character quickly become a source of empty self-righteousness and boasting, which lead to bitterness, envy, and death.  Only love keeps hope from becoming senseless positivism.

Paul explains the great love of God: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (v.8)  God does all the work before there is any promise of our accepting and enjoying it.  The feast is laid out before he knows if we will come at all.  Actually, it is laid out as we actively rebel and attack him.  He plans for our arrival home even as we are abandoning him for our own desires and interests.  This is the love that God has.  When we were his enemies, he already had the treaty written out and waiting for our commitment.

To understand God's love, I must also understand myself.  To minimize or excuse my own rebellion against God, my own lack of concern, my own desire to have my own way, my own rejection of his love is to misunderstand how much God loves me and empty the cross of all its power.  Without sin, the cross is superfluous, even foolishness.  If I am "not that bad," then God is not that smart, or even enjoys cruelty for the sake of cruelty.  I must embrace my origin as sinner and never let that go in order to see God's love for what it is.

So Paul explains simply that from the time of Adam, "sin was in the world."  His evidence for this is that even though people "did not sin by breaking a command" before Moses, "death reigned."  The outcome of sin is death, so even without a command to break, the outcome of sin was still obvious among all people - death.

God's remedy is not a simple reversal of the problem.  "The gift is not like the trespass." (v.15)  I do not have to "make up" for each and every sin that I have made in the pattern of my predecessor Adam.  His one sin is the father of all sin - a lack of faith.  All sin is not trusting or loving God.  I do not have to climb back up out of the pit I have dug through my lack of trust and separation from God one step at a time.  Instead, "the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification."  (v.16)  I am made into a son by Christ's one act of grace rather than having to "make up" for all my acts of disobedience and mistrust.

In this way, the gift is like the trespass.  Adam's sin is the model and picture and precursor to all sin.  It is faithlessness, no more and no less.  Christ's work is the work of ultimate faith.  It is the complete opposite to Adam's betrayal.  "Just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."  (v.19)

What a picture of God's grace!  Who is good?  The one who trusts in God's love, receives God's love in his own heart, and finds hope in the changes that love brings to his life.  Such goodness is not earned by a simple reversal of doing good for all the bad I have done.  Instead, it is embraced by trusting that Jesus' work on the cross has indeed made me good enough to bring home to God and live in his presence and be changed completely from the inside out.

Lord, I am so grateful that your gift is not like the road I have taken away from you.  You have brought me back to you with one sweep of your mighty, loving arms through Jesus obedience to the cross.  The way is before me and there is much work to do, but none of it will bring me home to you.  I am already there, already in your presence daily because of Jesus.  My work will only make me more at home with you, more like Jesus.  That is what it is all for.  My praise to you!  You have made an everlasting way to you that I can walk for all eternity even though I started out as your enemy.  Amen.

Looking for Hope

But now, Lord, what do I look for?

My hope is in you. (Ps. 39:7)

Such a simple phrase. I had almost overlooked it. In the midst of this psalm bemoaning the pain and shortness of life on earth, this verse sits quietly in the middle of it all. Yet the question it asks points out my deepest desires.

What do I look for? Each moment of the day, I am looking for something. It seems too often its my shoes or my kids or some results for my boss. But even in the quieter moments where nobody demands anything from me, I am looking for something. My will is bent on it. My feelings and thoughts speak of it at times. It rides alongside me often quiet, but not invisible if I look.

What do I look for? Whatever it is, it is my hope. Sometimes it seems to be a million different things, but really they all point in one direction, roughly. Hope reveals itself most intensely in despair. When life turns against me, what do I look for?

Each moment I need to ask, "Now, Lord, what do I look for?" Hope forms my search and frames my efforts. Hope stays in front of me. So can I say my hope is in you? Don't I find myself looking for other things far more often? The perfect body, the most faithful friendship, the ideal product, the best price? What does this say about my hope? Aren't these earthly things, destined to perish with use?

I see that looking for these things is not bad if you are behind them. Hope leads me through this world and all its things. They are not dirty. But they are easily taken to be idols, serving the god of my stomach. No, when I say my hope is in you, I am reminded of what I should look for and how I should look for it. The world and its wonders and even its pains are doorways into your grace and goodness, if my hope is in you.

Lord, you are wise to tell me to seek your Kingdom. I need to look for you as I go here and there and do this and that, seeing you in the midst of my life as the one thing that makes my life worth living at all. Hope is what gives life is value, and nothing has value away from you. Let me look for you each moment in each day. Then I will know where my hope is. Amen.