Good Discipleship Produces Emotional Maturity

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again, my friends. It is good to see you. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church.

 We are in the middle of a series in St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians. I started that last week. We're gonna finish chapter 1 this week and we'll be in it for the next, I think, two more weeks before we get into August.

And in the Letter to the Colossians, we hear about the good news about what Jesus is doing in these Colossian Christians from Epaphras, who is the church planter that Paul sent to bring the gospel to these Christians. And as Epaphras is giving his church planting report, St. Paul finds out that a problem has arisen amongst the Colossians. There is a threat that comes from teachers who have come in, who are introducing external badges of Judaism as tools that can help people grow in their relationship with God, in their knowledge of God, in their holiness.

Things like circumcision, Sabbath keeping, food laws, etc. These badges of Judaism are now introduced as the things that might help one grow deeper in their knowledge of God. So what St. Paul is doing, as he's re-centering the church's vision on who Jesus is and his preeminence in the plan of God.

And today's passage is about how God has done everything that is necessary for you and I to grow in Christ. And so we are then called to grow and then to bring others into that growth as well. The idea of growing reminds me of something.

How many of you kids here play a sport or do some hobby or activity that you work really hard at? What are they? [Kids answer…]

Yes. So in our household right now, baseball is the big thing. And I have been coaching this and learning lots of life lessons as a t-ball and coach pitch coach.

 And there was a kid on one of our teams who would always, it's hard to do this in a chossable, but I'm gonna try, he would always stand like this and sort of chop at the ball like this, kind of up to down, right? Like chopping wood almost. And I had the hardest time figuring out how do I help him stop chopping. And then at one point it just came to me, it was one of those like late-night thoughts where you're like, oh I haven't been thinking about that, but here it is.

He's not bending his knees. And so once I realized all he's got to do is bend his knees, get a little balance, it all of a sudden improved instantly. Once I had him bend his knees, by the end of the season he had actually gotten a hit.

I was so proud of him. That little mechanical thing that needed to be changed and taken down was the thing that needed to be fixed before he could become a better player. And so one of the things that I want to draw us to in Colossians is, St. Paul is calling us back to the basics in this letter.

Back to the fundamentals of the faith. Who is Jesus? We need to come back to the sovereignty of Jesus, the work of Jesus, the centrality of Jesus, in order to grow in Christ as we invite others into this journey of the goodness of the life of Christ with us. So as we look at our passage this morning in Colossians 1, let me pray for us.

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”

What God has done

Well, first what I want to look at in Colossians chapter 1 is, and why it's foundational, is what God has done in Christ. Paul is still in the introduction to his letter.

It's a long introduction. It goes all the way from verse 1 to verse 23. He's just given this beautiful hymn that we didn't read today.

 It's a Christ hymn that people probably sung. And essentially what it says is that Jesus became man and he gave himself as a loving sacrifice on behalf of sinful humanity in order to create for himself a people, to the praise of God's glory. And the creation of a people is part of this broader cosmic plan to bring the entire universe into new order and harmony in God's plan.

What was being accomplished in Jesus, who's the Son of God, is then continuing to be accomplished through his body, which is the church. And the argument then is against those who would add things like circumcision or dietary laws as necessary elements to bringing about that plan of cosmic renewal and transformation. It's Jesus, Jesus only.

Jesus is central here and understanding who Jesus is is critical and what his work was for us. We started in verse 21 today where he says, and you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his physical body through death. Estrangement is something that isn't just something that we end up in a state of being, it's this progressive movement into the realm of evil.

And it happens as thoughts and actions work heuristically on one another. I think bad things, I do bad things, I think worse things, I do worse things. There's this progressive movement into the realm of evil where bondage takes place to the kingdom of darkness.

And the miracle here, as Paul envisions it, is that God can break through the hardness of this calcified sin, the unjust structures that we've created, the falsehoods that we've made the foundations of our life, and he can break through that in Christ and create us who we were made to be. One church father, I think it was Irenaeus, says the glory of God is a human fully alive. That's what it is.

And so I love the way that this idea is, God breaks through the calcified sin to create us who we were made to be. So we serve the God of justice though, and it says in the Bible that this God will by no means clear the guilty. So how is it that any of us who have years of reinforced sinful patterns and behaviors ever can be cleared of the injustice that we've brought about? How can God restore cracked icons who are meant to display his image to the world? No one wakes up one day and says, I really hope I get to cause harm to somebody someday, right? Or I really hope that I get to lie today.

I hope that I get to spread falsehoods today and lie to people. No one wakes up wanting to do that. Bondage to sin is far more insidious than obvious evil or things like breaking some of the Ten Commandments, right? The insidiousness of the bondage can come from things like defense mechanisms that we've developed to protect ourselves, and because of the dysfunctional ways we might have been parented.

These can be blame-shifting tendencies that we might have developed because we want to avoid any feelings of sadness or disappointment or humiliation. It can be ways that we've cursed others because we have a warped perception of how the world is. But here's the thing.

In the cross, in the work of Jesus, we see this collision of human sin and a holy God in Christ's crucified body. And in his body, sin is condemned. No longer has any power.

And then in the resurrection, we find this miracle where we find victory over sin and death. So not only is sin condemned, it's actually defeated. And so therein, in the work of Jesus, lies the possibility of rescue from bondage, from sin, from cursing, so that we can be reconciled to God.

This is what God has done. And the aim of the cross is to create a holy people where God's image is restored, where he's made known. And what's done in principle is then going to be done in practice.

God's made all things possible in Christ, and now we have to do the hard work of naming brokenness accurately. And that's really hard work. Jesus wants us to heal.

He's not sitting there going, man, I wish they just, you know, like, I don't even know what perceptions we might have of Jesus. But Jesus wants us to be free. He wants us to be healed.

And I read this somewhere. Someone helpfully said, what is not named cannot be healed. What is not named cannot be healed.

And on a simple level, if I had that kid on the baseball team, you go back to thinking about him, if I had seen the problem with this kid's swing, and I had figured it out, but in my heart, I was like, oh, no, if I tell him, he might be embarrassed. Or if I tell him, he's going to think that I'm mean, that I might not tell him the simple thing that he needs to improve his swing. He'd never grow.

And so in fact, to withhold the truth from this kid, because of my own anxieties, might at the very least be lying to him. And also, it's kind of slightly cruel, because it's intentional. It's subtle, right? It's not so obvious.

 It's a very subtle kind of cruelty. But imagine this is true now with situations that are more weighty than just how to do a swing in baseball, right? Because it shows up in lots of ways. And the different situations we run into in life bring these things up.

If we're afraid to name addictions as addictions, overreactions as overreactions, what scenarios or words spoken to us or people make our bodies become dysregulated somehow? If we don't notice those things, then we can't name it, and we can't walk with Jesus in the healing process. To name those things is to start a process of healing with Jesus. The very thing that he longs for.

So what was done in principle on the cross is now being worked out in practice in the body of Christ, the church.

Suffering and the Mystery of Salvation Revealed

So we move from the introduction now into verse 24. St. Paul moves into this section on pastoral concerns, and he says this really interesting thing about the suffering that he's been going through.

He says, I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. Now in Paul's day, as it was true in the scriptures of Paul's day, the Old Testament, there was this interplay of corporate and individual. So we have something beginning in the person of Jesus that continues through his corporate body, the church.

Paul's not saying that Christ's death is somehow insufficient, that he needs to somehow make up for those sufferings, that Jesus didn't suffer enough. That's not what he's saying. What I think he's doing is connecting the fact that when Jesus suffered, it was to the end that God's plan, the mystery hidden before all ages, was being made known.

And so, and it's the mystery of God creating a people to serve under Jesus as Lord, to bring about new creation. The suffering had its end as the revealing of the mystery. And so the suffering in the body of Christ that occurs because the pursuit of holiness within the church is part of that work of Jesus to reveal the mystery that was hidden that needs to be made known, this mystery of salvation.

So he's undergoing suffering to bring the church to maturity. That's essentially what he's saying. We could also say it this way, he is living out the vocation of the church.

As an example, to bring about new creation where people are in bondage to the present evil age. And to understand that, we have to understand something else about early Judaism. They saw the world as occurring in two ages, the present evil age and the age to come.

And we tend to think, in our mindset, well here's one and then comes the other. But they didn't think about it that way. It's not chronological.

What the early Christians thought of here with the two ages is that they overlapped and intersected somehow. And that what Christ brought about in his death on the cross and resurrection was the coming of the new age in the midst of this present evil age. And so suffering then becomes the birth pangs of seeing the mystery revealed, the mystery of the new age, where Christ is ultimately going to be over all and in all and through all.

So we should not seek to suffer as a martyr. Don't hear me say that. Seeking to suffer as a martyr or to be a martyr is the root of all kinds of evil.

But the reality is, as you follow Jesus, you will encounter suffering. All of us will. For some people it is going to get to the level of religious persecution, like our friends in the Democratic Republic of Congo, friends in India.

We should be standing with our brothers and sisters, praying for them as they're persecuted for their faith. It may not be religious persecution. All of us will undergo a level of suffering.

Various physical, mental health crises, sicknesses, loss of friends, job losses, battles with temptation, avoiding escapist behaviors, doing what's right in the face of feeling really anxious about it, risking relationships when you're naming harm honestly, to show genuine kindness when it's costly, and it would feel much easier to hold on to contempt for the other person or even for ourselves, to listen to somebody share the harm that we've caused them without judgment, with curiosity and kindness rather than being defensive. These are all ways of truth-telling that will potentially cause suffering, or at least angst, or at least fear. They're risky.

We're going to undergo various aspects of suffering and being restored as icons of Christ, but the faithfulness in the process is what needs to happen. And these sufferings, according to St. Paul, those are the birth pangs of the mystery that is being revealed.

Tireless labor for maturity

So God has removed all the obstacles for us knowing him, and he's given the task to the church of continuing Christ's work in the world to make that mystery of God's love known even in our trials. And finally, the third thing here, Paul models for us how we're supposed to labor tirelessly for our own maturity and for the maturity of other people in Christ. And so he does do this in his own strength, but he recognizes that this is what the Spirit is doing in him, and so he has to work with the Spirit to accomplish this. It's hard work.

He says, for this I toil and I struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me. This is Paul's passion, to help people grow, mature in Christ. And the reality is we can't strive for the maturity of others if we ourselves sit in immaturity, right? We can only give to others what we possess in ourselves.

Somebody said that. That's not a quote from me. I just didn't write it down, so I don't know who said it.

Somebody did. We can't give to others what we don't possess ourselves, right? If you're not growing in maturity, you can't have this passion to help others grow. You've got to start with yourself.

I was listening to this parenting book where they named the ways that the parent-child relationship can be harmed or ruptured. There's a lot of ways, by the way. And when I heard those things in this book, my immediate thought was, oh man, I wonder how many of these things I've done to my child, right? It's natural to think that way.

It's actually not helpful to think that way, though. What we need to start with is we need to start with naming our own places of harm, thinking of our own stories. It could be parents, could be teachers, could be friends or relatives.

As you think of those places in your own story, that's where the work begins. And if we can learn to have compassion on the younger self, and instead of calling that younger self needy, or gullible, or weak, or any other curse that had been named over us, whatever it is, that's when we start to see ourselves as God sees us. And at that point, we can have capacity to begin to parent in a way that allows the child to be uniquely themselves.

So when I think about that as an analogy, it's really helpful to think about that for St. Paul. So much of the work of the Christian life is the hard work of noticing where we're not okay. But with hope.

And why do I talk about this so much? Because if you've heard me preach before, you're like, man, you talk about this a lot. But so much of discipleship out there, discipleship material, is aimed at memorizing Bible verses, getting your theology right, knowing your Bible. And I'm really tired of seeing people memorize the Bible, but being super emotionally immature.

I mean, it's the reality of it, right? And so I want you to have good theology. You know, I can give you books. I got a PhD in Syriac.

I want you to do hard work in theology, and I want you to do hard work on your internal life in ordering these things. You can't be a follower of Jesus and maturing in your knowledge of theology and scripture without also doing the hard work of pointing out in yourself, where am I not okay? Where do I want God to heal me? Where do I, where am I broken? So, often when people's hearts are wounded, they ignore it. And they might only listen to positive messages.

And they don't challenge them. They might attend churches that preach simple platitudes. Or they only engage in shallow relationships with people that never call them to change anything.

And it's much harder to admit where we're sad, where we've felt humiliated, where we've held on to contempt for somebody, or even for ourself, where we've been cursed and started to believe it. But remember that Jesus reigns over all. He's in all.

He is through all. He is going to be over all things, right? We taste it now. We taste a bit of the New Age in this present evil age.

He made you. He loves you. He wants you to be reconciled with God and to be part of this new creation work that he has done in the cross and in the resurrection.

And so we can press into what is really hard because that's when things start to get good. And I don't mean good in the sense of temporal niceness. I mean newly created goodness.

The ways that God intended them to be. And that is the authentic and it's the compelling work that shows outsiders what God can do with very ordinary people. And that is a life and a story that's compelling.

Conclusion

So as we think about St. Paul's encouragement from Colossians 1 to these Christians, remember that God has done everything necessary for you and I to grow in Christ, to grow in our knowledge of the love of God. And so we're called to help others grow as well. The things that were against us no longer have a hold on us.

They have no authority over us because of the work of Christ. We are not bound to them. We don't need to be.

And as we walk with Jesus, he is present with us as a friend and he is over all things as Lord. And so the suffering that we go through continues his ministry of making known the mystery of God's plan of drawing people to himself. And we are called together to work tirelessly at this work of maturity in ourselves and in others with the strength that the Holy Spirit provides.

Let me pray for us. Almighty God, whose Son took upon himself the afflictions of your people, regard with your tender compassion those suffering from anxiety, depression, mental illness, and other suffering. Bear their sorrows and their cares.

Supply all their needs. Help them to put their whole trust and confidence in you. And restore them to strength of mind and cheerfulness of spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.