Staying on the Path of Knowing God

TranscriptioN

Good morning again, everybody. It is good to see you. Good to be with you. Those of you who are new and visiting, we're glad that you're here as well. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, which is an Anglican term meaning senior pastor of a mission. And so I am glad that you are here.

I hope you'll stay afterwards so we can hang out, have some coffee and snacks together. This Sunday, I'm going to begin a series in the book of Colossians, which our lectionary, our Sunday Bible reading schedule, has us in the book of Colossians from now through August 3rd. So we'll spend some time together in this epistle, this letter that St. Paul has written. 

I hope over the next few weeks in your own time that you spend a little bit of time reading it on your own as well as you get to know this letter. St. Paul wrote this to a group of churches in Colossae. But it's interesting, this group of churches, he personally didn't actually evangelize.

So he was the apostolic overseer for this mission, but he was not the one who did the work of evangelizing these communities. Instead, this work of church planting, evangelizing, setting up governing structures over these churches, was done mainly by his representative Epaphras, who then is going to come back and give Paul a church planting report, basically. And Paul's letter is in response to that church planting report.

Colossae, and go ahead and flip to the next slide, Colossae on this map is part of a larger area called Phrygia Asiana on the western side of, well, Turkey today. And at one point Phrygia had been its own kingdom. And then eventually it becomes part of the kingdom of Pergamum.

And then the king of Pergamum is an ally to the Romans, and he dies in 133 BCE. But he doesn't have any heir, and since he's allied with Rome, he just bequeaths his whole kingdom to the Roman Empire. So about 133, all this area is now under Rome, despite what kingdom it was part of originally.

There's even a reference to this Sephirot in Obadiah. We know that Jews had gone there by the 6th, 5th century BCE. So we know that there are Jews and Gentiles that are inhabiting this city by the time of Jesus, by the time that Paul is there, and by the time that his servant, sorry, not Paul, but Epaphras goes to evangelize the area.

And it seems like sometime after evangelizing this place of Colossae, some false teachers had come in teaching this group some kind of Jewish heresy. It wasn't just, there were lots of streams of Judaism in this day. This particular one they were teaching was more mystical in its character.

From what we can piece together, they were teaching a type of Jewish mysticism that was creating multiple classes of spirituality amongst the church. And so this word is going to come up in the letter. You can write it down, kids, if you've got your little pen and paper.

Ascesis. Ascesis. That's very important. Get that tattooed on your heart, on your arm. Ascesis. So that word is really important in this letter.

In this context, it's creating a class of spiritual elites. That's the problem that they're going to come across. The word ascesis isn't bad.

It just talks about how you train. How do you train for something? And how do you train in the spiritual life? Because presumably there is the possibility of growth in the spiritual life. What are the spiritual rhythms and habits, practices that one takes up for spiritual growth and why? Asceticism is not necessarily bad in and of itself.

We should all cultivate an ascetical theology. Now you all know what that means. So when somebody says, what's ascetical theology? Kids, how would you describe ascesis or ascetical? What do you think? Anybody got an idea? Hmm. 

All right. Adults, you want to help them? In the back. I was going to say giving up a lot of working stuff and concentrating on the spiritual aspect.

Yeah, it can be that. Yep. I was thinking even simpler.

So in the morning, sometimes our son likes to lift weights. That's training, right? Sometimes one goes on a run. This is working out.

This is physical ascesis. So what we're talking about here is spiritual ascesis. How do we train in the spiritual life for growing with God? Yes.

So that is an example of it. But at its base is the idea of how do you train in the spiritual life? And the problem is this group that is coming in has a really rigorous ascetical training program. And it's based on the Jewish law.

 And sometimes it seems like it's rigor for the sake of rigor. And ultimately, here's where it gets in the mystical theology. It sees angels as intermediary levels before you get to God.

And so the point of the ascetic rigor is to surpass the different levels of the angels. This is kind of the error that St. Paul is addressing that has infiltrated the Colossians. We don't know all the specifics of the error, but this is kind of what we can piece together based on the letter itself and based on some other forms of early Jewish mysticism that we know of.

In our passage today, we begin a letter. It's a normal letter in the sense that it is addressed to an actual people. He's not just writing a theological treatise.

And what he begins with, and you can flip the slide back to the normal, yeah, there you go. So, St. Paul begins this letter with gratitude, thanksgiving, thankfulness, for what he hears from his friend Epaphras about this church planting report, how the gospel is taking root and growing in this community. And then he has a prayer for them.

Life for the Colossians is similar to our own, in that the life that we live is filled with all kinds of stumbling blocks, pitfalls, and detours that threaten to take us off course in our journey of following Christ. This is why ascesis training is really important, because all sorts of things threaten our daily life to make us veer off track. So St. Paul's letter is speaking to the Colossians, but actually because it's been gathered into this corpus of Pauline letters, and it's been considered scripture by the church.

It doesn't just speak to the Colossians. It speaks to you and I today. And so this letter, the beginning of it is inviting us into a substantive kind of gratitude as we are growing together in the knowledge of God, the God who loves us, and the God who makes all things new in Christ.

These are going to be major themes in the book. So he thinks of this church with gratitude for what God has done, and he says in his prayers that he always thanks God for God's work in them. He does that because, again, he's heard this church planting report from Epaphras.

I would imagine that Epaphras is telling him not just the impact, but stories of individuals whose lives are being changed in Colossae because of the work of Christ, and the love that they have for one another, and how they're learning to obey Christ together. So Paul's response to that is gratefulness and gratitude. And I can't help but resonate with Paul when I read that, because I think back to five years ago, I didn't know a lot of you, and none of you really knew each other five years ago, right? And this church didn't exist.

And so some of you didn't live in the area yet. So I love taking now and then just a step back, and to kind of bask in the goodness of what God is doing in you individually and corporately. I'd encourage you to take up that practice, because it's so good to see how God has knit together this community and love.

So I resonate very deeply with St. Paul's gratitude in this. There's a joy in the gospel that is a joy in new creation. He says in verse 6, Just as it, meaning the gospel, 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.

 And now some of these verbs about bearing fruit and multiplying, those are hearkening back to the blessing that God had given man and woman in creation, the increasing, multiplying, filling the earth. The gospel here is about new creation in one sense in the Colossian church, but it's really about what God is doing in the world. It's a new creation type of work.

The gospel brings new creation, and the body of Christ then is to be this outpost of God's kingdom in the world, this outpost of new creation where we see what's broken being restored, where the violence of the empire is condemned by restored peace among the saints, where injustice gets condemned by things being made right, where cruelty is condemned through love, where falsehoods are condemned through truth-telling, and where those who are cast aside are being made truly human again in the body of Christ. And so we should be a people of gratitude for the work of the gospel that we see, both in ourselves and in the people around us in the church. In our prayers of the people, I'll often invite us at some point to offer our prayers, supplications, or thanksgivings.

And I truly mean that. Like, we want to offer our prayers and asks before the Lord, but we also want to give him our thanksgivings, which requires us meditating on things to be thankful for throughout the week. I really want us to do both.

It's a paradigm that we set throughout the week in our daily prayers as well. We ought to name hard realities. We ought to name grief.

And we should grieve the things that are lamentable, but also to give thanks for the glimmers of redemption that we see and the glimmers of resurrection where we find them. Because we follow a Lord who redeems suffering, who liberates our trials from the darkness of just meaningless despair. And I love the way one song says it, where we will hear our anguish stories sung as victory songs of grace.

Right? And I don't want to minimize suffering at all, but instead I want to think of suffering as something to be honored, as the holy place where God is deeply at work bringing about new creation in Christ. So in the first paragraph, St. Paul talks about how the gospel is taking root in them as it is everywhere in the world. And then in the second part of this paragraph, he says that since the day that he has heard of Paffer's church planting report, that's my words. 

They didn't have church planting report language back then. Just in case you're wondering, it's not in the Greek. That's me.

So here's his church planting report and the good news of what's happening there. And he continues to lift up this church in his times of prayer constantly. He prays that they would be filled with a knowledge of God's will and to be made strong by God's glorious power. 

So you have this interweaving of knowledge of God and power of God in the Christian life. And there's this interesting argument in the letter that feels a little circular. I want to see if you can hear it.

When it comes to knowing God, he says, being filled with the knowledge of God's will to lead lives worthy of the Lord, being fruitful in every good work and multiplying in the knowledge of God. So it sounds like what he's saying is that you have to know what pleases God to live out God's desire. And then when you live out God's desire, then you come to know God, which sounds like you got to know God to know God. 

It sounds really circular, right? Except that in relationships, this actually isn't circular. So we can think about it in human terms. And I think that's a helpful way to think about what this might mean.

Let's take another hypothetical couple, Jerry and Melanie. I don't know anybody by that name. So this isn't a real couple.

But Jerry knows that Melanie likes to have a spacious living room to walk into when she gets home from work. This is her desire that he knows. When his children have left the toys all over the room, then he has the children make sure to pick them up before Melanie gets home. 

He walks in accordance with her desire. Melanie arrives home and feels mental space to sit down, to play with the kids, to talk to them, even to talk to her husband, Jerry. And as a result of walking in her desire and through this conversation, the husband then comes to know his wife more deeply.

So he has to know her to know her more deeply. It's not a perfect example. The opposite is also true.

 If you don't walk in these desires, you miss the opportunity to know this person more deeply. We can think of this in human terms to help us understand what's going on with what he's talking about with our relationship with the Lord. I think it's really helpful when we think about this in terms of the spiritual life and our special word asceticism, how we train.

We're learning the knowledge of God as we begin to learn about God by the things like being in church community, reading scripture in prayer, repentance, fasting, some of these things that Peg had mentioned earlier, doing God's commandments, cultivating stillness so that we learn to seek the presence of God. It's in doing those things that we learn the desires of God. And as we walk in the desires of God, then we begin to learn more of what pleases God.

And as we learn what pleases God and walk in those things, then we begin to bear good fruit, which kind of goes back to what we preached on last week. And then those good fruits are the virtues that we read about in scripture, like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. And that's not exhaustive, but you get the point.

If you want to reap those things, you have to sow in the desires of God and in the will of God to harvest those virtues. They don't just come regardless of how you live your life. And if somebody then is formed in virtue and in deeper relationship with God, they start to grow in the knowledge of who God is, regardless of life circumstances around them.

It's not behavior modification. We're not setting up like a do good and you'll be better, like God gave you Jesus to be better. That's not what we're saying.

It's not just behavior modification. It's this inner disposition of the stillness of the heart to join in God's divine life of new creation in the midst of a world that's quite disturbing and often is set to throw us off track to not know him and the goodness of his divine life. And so St. Paul prays in verse 11 for them to be strengthened.

So the knowledge and then the strengthening, to be strengthened by his glorious power, which then, again, interweaves and intertwines knowledge and power when it comes to our relationship with God. That's not to say that there is an empty triumphalism that we want to have or just optimism. I don't know if I've said this before, but optimism is not a Christian virtue.

So you keep that one in the back of your hat. It's really important. Instead, growing in our relationship with God is this deep grounding in experientially knowing God's love, who he's called us and made us to be, so that we can't be shaken and uprooted when testing comes through really harmful and difficult people or really harmful and difficult circumstances.

So we've looked at the first two portions of this intro paragraph. Finally, in the last portion, we see this beautiful summary of the basis of the Christian life. God has rescued us from the power of darkness.

And he's transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. This language of redemption brings us back to the Old Testament, the book of Exodus, where God has rescued a people out of the kingdom of darkness under Pharaoh's leadership, out of slavery to Pharaoh to become a people to live under his rule and reign as king. And the language of redemption is the language of liberation from captivity.

And I find that language so helpful when we talk about salvation. There are different ways that salvation is framed in Scripture. And there's some who probably hyper focus on some legal type of exchange between Jesus's righteousness and our sin on the cross.

It's not untrue, necessarily. It's also definitely not the main thrust of the New Testament. I think people do that out of a longing to be certain about their future destiny.

But, but overemphasizing that doesn't do much for cultivating a life with God right now. It doesn't answer the hard questions of how do I see God's kingdom come in this really difficult situation I'm in right now. Instead, becoming free from our captivity to the kingdom of darkness is one of the main thrusts of the New Testament.

And I find it pastorally way more edifying. And it's here in Colossians. When God began at your baptism, he is continuing to bring to fruition through your life in the church and through your knowledge of him as you grow deeper in that knowledge of him.

And that's an experiential kind of knowledge. As we notice our trigger points, the people that activate us, the strong reactions that we have to people or certain specific circumstances, as we notice our avoidant behaviors and addictions, the places where we feel emotional upheaval, we begin to notice those places where there still might be bondage in some aspect to the kingdom of darkness. And that's where I would really recommend getting a spiritual director or a licensed therapist.

They can be really helpful tour guides as you're navigating the space of where does the bondage exist. It can be really helpful. And so we should write those places down.

And as you do that, begin to pray into those places and ask the Lord where they've come from and how he might free you from those by his spirit. Because that is the very thing God longs to do, to liberate us from those things that we've become enslaved to. In other words, in the church, in Christ, all of us are becoming fully alive.

In Christ, in the church, we're becoming humans fully alive. So the letter to the Colossians is a letter for us. There are so many ways that we're tempted to despair.

There are so many ways that we're tempted to be pulled off track and distracted from our relationship with Jesus. When things around us are really hard, when things didn't turn out as we'd expected. Today's passage is an invitation for us to regularly give thanks to the Lord for the work of the gospel.

Notice the work of the gospel in you and in other people. Make it a habit. Make that part of your ascetical rigor to notice the goodness of the gospel in somebody else and in yourself.

And so this is also an invitation to continue to grow in the knowledge of the grace of God, to be empowered by God when testing comes, because it's going to. And then to do the hard work of naming the places of bondage to the kingdom of darkness, so that Christ can rule and reign over all things and liberate us from the places of captivity. Let's be a people of substantive gratitude as we grow in the knowledge of God, the God who loves us and the God who makes all things new in Christ. 

Let me pray for us. Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants, and that we may receive what we ask. Teach us by your Holy Spirit to ask only those things that are pleasing to you, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you in the same spirit lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.