Overflowing with Thankfulness, Colossians 2:6-15 (Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 30, 2017)

Transcription

1 Overflowing with Thankfulness, Colossians 2:6-15 (Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 30, 2017) 6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. 8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. 9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. PRAY We are studying the book of Colossians on Sunday mornings this summer. This is an epistle, or a letter, the apostle Paul wrote to a group of first century Christians in the ancient city of Colossae, in what is now the country of Turkey, and we are looking at verses 6-15 this morning and this is how we will approach the text: we ll look at what Paul says about being empty. Second, we ll look at what he says about being full. Third, we ll look at how that fullness leads to thanksgiving. First, emptiness. Let s read verse 8 (this is the only imperative, the only command, that Paul address to the church at Colossae, so it drew my attention and I thought it would be a good doorway into examining the text as a whole) Paul says, See to it [there s the command] that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. We are reading out of the ESV, the version of the Bible we study on Sunday mornings, and the way it translates verse eight is to say that Paul is warning about two things: philosophy and empty deceit. But I think it s better to think of it as Paul warning about one thing: an empty and deceptive philosophy. He writes to these Christians and says, Watch out! Don t get caught up in a worldly, deceitful, and most of all empty philosophy. Don t get ensnared by it, don t be led astray by it. Now there is a lot of debate among the scholars as to exactly what the empty and deceitful philosophy was some say it was some kind of angel worship. Others talk about proto- Gnosticism. However, I think Paul is talking about a particular misuse of the law of Moses from the Old Testament. Not that Paul would ever say the law itself was empty or deceitful. It s not, the law is a perfect reflection of God s character. But you can misuse the law you can use the law to beat up other people, as we see the Pharisees doing often in the New Testament. You can ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 1

2 use the law to feel good about yourself by redefining it in such a way so that you can keep it and think that God is pleased with you. This understanding makes the most sense to me because Paul talks negatively about circumcision in verse 11, a practice mandated by the law of Moses. He writes about legal demands being canceled in verse 14. And down in verse 16 he talks about the Sabbath, a big sticking point for those teachers who misused the law in Paul s day. However, we don t know for sure what Paul was writing about and, you know, it really doesn t matter because it is abundantly clear that this philosophy, whatever it was, was empty and did not accord with Christ. Paul says, Watch out for and don t under any circumstances get entangled in empty philosophies of living that do not accord with Christ. That s really all you need to know to understand this part of Colossians 2. If any one word sums up the human condition it is the word empty. We are born into this world feeling empty. All of us do. No one is immune, no one can escape. And it starts from when we are tiny, just little toddlers. We ve all been around children who have for one reason or another continually acted up. They run around in the house or they are too loud or they hit their sister, and mom or dad gets mad at them, raises their voice, disciplines them, and then the child comes back an hour later and does the same exact thing. And the parent is exasperated: Why? Why does he keep doing this after we punish him? Because the child wants the attention. All the experts will tell you: negative attention is better than no attention. The kids feel empty so they act out to get mom or dad to try to fill them up. Then we get older and it s not that we no longer feel empty, but we find more socially acceptable ways of trying to deal with it. One way is through what we call falling in love. Here s the thing about a young couple falling in love: while it s great, it s wonderful, when it happens to you, it s not really love. It can grow into true, biblical love but it never starts out that way. Instead, what most people call love is the excitement at meeting someone who is into you. You feel empty, then you meet someone, and it s as if you re being filled by their affection and attention. You don t really love the other person (though you might one day), but you love the experience of being in love. The struggle with emptiness never stops. No matter how long you live and no matter how successful or wealthy or popular you become, you always deal with the emptiness. A year or two ago I read an article in the New York Times about Jodie Foster. Now, if anyone has had a successful career as an actress, it s Jodie Foster. She s won two Academy Awards, nominated for two others. But in the article the interviewer pointed out that the theme of a lot of her work is failure, and asked her if that was deliberate. She answered, Failure is a big one for me people in spiritual crisis, in a moment in life of total self-hatred. Then the interviewer asked if she often thought of herself as a failure. She replied, Oh yeah, oh my... yeah. If Mother Teresa is propelled to do good works because she believes in God, I am propelled to do good works because of how bad I feel about myself. It s the first place I go. Oh, what did I do wrong? You can t get over the emptiness and you can t run away from it. As best I can tell our world offers us two solutions for the problem of emptiness. The first solution is to deny the problem. The world says, Yes, you feel empty but you shouldn t. You ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 2

3 shouldn t feel empty because you re wonderful. You re special. You just need to believe in yourself and everything will be fine. There s no problem with you you just need to work on your self-esteem. As best I can tell this particular answer to the problem of emptiness is the theme of all the Disney channel pre-teen television shows. Their message is believe in yourself, because you are special. My kids used to watch this Disney show called A.N.T. Farm, and the lyrics to theme song went like this: You can dream it, you can be it, if you believe it, you can feel it. Cause I am, you are, we are exceptional. Everyone is exceptional, so no one should feel empty. Everyone is awesome. That s what the world says. But that is an empty and deceptive philosophy, and to prove it to you I ll quote another Disney production, my favorite Disney production of all-time, maybe the best one of all-time, The Incredibles. Remember that movie? In it you have a family of superheroes: Mr. Incredible is super-strong, Mrs. Incredible is Elastigirl, she s unbelievably flexible and stretchable, their little boy is faster than a speeding bullet, and the daughter can create force-fields. Their nemesis is someone named Syndrome. Syndrome is just a regular guy, but he s invented these gadgets that, when he wears them, gives him the ability to do superhero-type things. And do you remember his evil plan? He was going to sell his gadgets to the world so that everyone can be a superhero. The climax of the movie comes when he captures all the Incredibles in his evil lair and tells them his plan and then he says, When everyone s super [and he gives a maniacal, evil mastermind laugh], no one will be. See if you re feeling down and empty, and someone comes up to you and says, Hey, you re awesome. You shouldn t feel down about yourself. You are exceptional, you d feel a little better about yourself. But if you then watch that person go and in the next hour tell a hundred other people the exact same thing, you won t feel exceptional anymore. It will knock the shine off of it. And that s what our world, with the self-esteem talk, does to us. If everyone is exceptional, no one is. You re just average all over again. And I ve never met anyone who was really hurting and depressed who was helped by the message of, You just need to believe in yourself. You just need some more self-esteem. You can t deny the emptiness. The second solution goes like this: our world says, You feel empty? Then you need to eat. You need to feed on something. Now, I don t mean literally eating some food (although that is the way a lot of people cope with the emptiness, and I m not above stress-eating myself). Rather, this kind of eating means taking something into your life to make you feel better about yourself. Go shopping, buy something, splurge, go on a trip, get some plastic surgery, or take a pill and then you won t feel empty anymore. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but feeding off them will never fill the emptiness. I listened to a sermon the other day where the pastor quoted from a blog written by Freddie deboer, who teaches and Brooklyn College in New York. Although he doesn t use the word, deboer writes in one post about this phenomenon of feeding to feel better about yourself. We ve got a self-help culture that constantly counsels that everyone is a ray of brilliant and unique light that alone can shine the way through a dark world. We ve got an increasingly woke ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 3

4 world of marketing and goods that sells its products by selling you to yourself. (A gym I pass by sometimes used to have a sign that said, 'Join the Body Acceptance Movement!', neglecting the fact that if we all accepted our bodies there would be no such thing as a gym.) We ve got a medical industry busily developing all manner of powerful drugs to manage' all of this anxiety and insecurity and feelings of inadequacy. We ve got our social media tools to craft and perfect and share an idealized visions of ourselves, curated and managed to the millimeter, so that we can present exactly what we want to present, to put our best foot forward with digital precision. And none of it works. We feed off stuff and can even try to feed off of people. I don t know the new head football coach at Ole Miss, I don t think I ve ever met him. Some of you probably do know him and I want you to know he needs our prayers. Not about wins and losses or investigations, but because he is now in a position where so many thousands of people want to get close to him. They want to feed off him because they think, If I know him, if people know I know him, if I can get on the sidelines with him, then I ll know I m somebody and I won t feel empty anymore. All people who have authority and influence need us to pray for them like this. But that won t work either. What is the answer? C.S. Lewis put it like this: Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longing which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world... Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. We must look beyond our world and to another if we will ever be satisfied. Second, what Paul says about being full. Verses 9-10: For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. Friends, you were made in such a way so that nothing on earth can fill you up. You were made, as St. Augustine said, with a God-sized hole in your heart. You may not have known your heart was that big. It takes a pretty big heart to have a God-sized hole in it, but that s what you have, and that s why all the stuff you ve been feeding on over the last twenty or thirty or ninety years hasn t filled it. Only God can fill the emptiness. Perhaps the most famous miracles in the gospels in the New Testament are the feeding miracles there s one where Jesus feeds five thousand with five loaves and two fish and another where Jesus feeds four thousand with seven loaves of bread and a few fish. But the result of both miracles is the same we read in Matthew 14 and then in Matthew 15 the same thing: And they all ate and were satisfied. See, Jesus miracles are not just naked displays of power they are also parables. And in these miracles Jesus is saying, If you come to me and feed on me, then and only then will you be satisfied. Then and only then will you feel full. ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 4

5 Some of you have been waiting your whole life for some certain person to say to you, I m proud of you. I love you. I think you are wonderful. Well done. Some of you have been waiting a long time for that, you ve worked like crazy to win their approval and you haven t, and it hurts. It stinks when someone you admire won t affirm you. However, you can rest assured that even if that person had given you the approval you wanted it wouldn t be enough because you were not made to be satisfied by anything except the approval of God alone. But if you go to God through Jesus Christ, you ll get what your heart most wants the accolades of God. The promise of the gospel is that you ll hear God say to you, I m proud of you. I love you. I think you re wonderful. And one day you will hear him say, Well done my good and faithful servant. Enter into your eternal reward. That s what your hearts want! Nothing else will satisfy. How do you feed on Jesus? Two ways we see from the text: first, something had to happen for you so that you could be filled, and that something is a radical sacrifice. Colossians 2:13-15 is one of the best summaries of the gospel in all the Bible. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Colossians 2: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in your place as your substitute for your sins. That means that the record you ve accumulated, the rap sheet you ve put together over the course of your life for the bad and selfish and thoughtless things you know you ve done, has been erased. Jesus bore the punishment you deserve so the slate is wiped clean. That s the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. But how precisely did Jesus pay for our sins? What really happened to him on the cross? In Matthew 27:46 we read that when he was about to die on the cross Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That s telling Jesus didn t scream, My hands, my hands, there are nails in them they hurt! He didn t scream, My feet, my feet! He cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That means that the pain Jesus endured on the cross was not primarily physical, but spiritual. For all eternity, Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity had been full. Full of love as the Father, the first person of the Trinity, poured his love into Jesus, and Jesus in return poured his love into the Father. But on the cross, the Father turned his face away from Jesus. He cut off his love, and poured out his wrath on sin. And for the first and only time in eternity, Jesus was forsaken he was empty. Jesus had to take our place on the cross if we were going to be saved and to do that he had to be empty. In Philippians 2:5-8 Paul says: Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 5

6 of death, even death on a cross. Friends, no one has ever sacrificed for you like Jesus Christ did on the cross. Jesus had to empty himself so that you could be full. Second, something has to happen to you if you re going to be filled, and that something is a radical transformation. The Bible says that we all have a problem with our hearts. When we as modern American think of the heart we think of it as the seat of all our emotions. But in the Bible the word heart means the control center of your whole life. It s not only the seat of the emotions, but it also includes your mind and will. And our hearts are made of stone. They are naturally rebellious against anything that has to do with God. Our hearts want nothing to do with him, yet we all still need to be filled. So what do we do? We make idols. We make idols and we beg them to fill us up, even when we know they can t do it. In the book of Isaiah chapter 44 we read how a man goes into a forest and cuts down a tree, and with part of the tree he builds a fire and warms himself. With the rest of the tree he fashions an idol and bows down to it and says, Save me; you are my god. We read that and think, How dumb! How could anyone think a god you make out of a piece of wood could possibly do you any good? But every time we seek to be filled by anything other than the God of the Bible that s exactly what we re doing. Taking good things in our lives (our jobs, our money, sex, success, sports, our families) and turning them into idols by demanding that they fill us. And that saddest thing is so long as our hearts are hard as stone we won t be able to stop. But when we approach God through Jesus Christ, when we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he has by his life and death reconciled us to God, something changes in our hearts. God comes in and through his Holy Spirit he changes you from the inside out. The Bible calls this the circumcision of the heart. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. Colossians 2: This doesn t mean that once your heart has been changed you ll never seek to be filled by idols ever again. No, that struggle continues until you die. But it does mean that now you can see with the eyes of faith that come from your new heart that only Jesus will satisfy. And by the way the test for whether this circumcision has happened to you is whether or not you can see how nothing on earth can ever fill you and that only Jesus can. There s a hymn that goes like this: Forbid it Lord, that I should boast Save in the cross of Christ my God! All the vain things that charm me most I sacrifice them to his blood. The vain things that charm me count as nothing to me compared to being filled with Jesus. Can you say that? It s only possible with the radical transformation that comes with the circumcision made without hands. And once this happens to you, once your heart is changed like this and once you see how Jesus Christ has sacrificed for you, there can be only one result. ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 6

7 Third, how the fullness leads to thanksgiving. Colossians 2:6-7: 6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. The only possible response to having your heart changed and seeing Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loving you so much that he would empty himself so that you can be filled is thanksgiving. Our world tells us that your circumstances determine your level of thanksgiving. If things are going good for you, then you should be thankful. We tell our kids that all the time don t we? We say to them, You don t know how good you ve got it you should appreciate all that you have. You should be thankful. But if that s how we raise our children we are doing them a tremendous disservice. We are teaching them that if things don t go well for them in life then they don t have to be thankful or, even worse, they can t because thankfulness is dependent on circumstances. But the glorious thing about Christianity is that it shows us that circumstances have nothing to do with thanksgiving. If your heart has been circumcised and Jesus is filling you, then let the world do what it may you can give thanks. Your satisfaction cannot be shaken by anything that happens to you or around you. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:18 Give thanks in all circumstances. And friends, thankful people are joyful people. Do you want to be joyful? You can never be joyful by trying to be joyful. But you can be joyful by first being thankful. One of my favorite illustrations of this from the Bible is the story of Hannah, from 1 Samuel 1. Hannah is married to a good man named Elkanah, but Hannah can t have children. She s barren. And worse, even though Elkanah loved Hannah and was a good man by the standards of his day, he was nevertheless a polygamist. He was also married to Peninnah. And Peninnah cranked out new baby every spring like clockwork. She was a baby-making machine. And in that day and age, if you were a wife and you could not produce children for your husband, society viewed you as basically worthless. Understandably Hannah was heartbroken over all this. But one day she goes and she prays to the Lord of hosts at the tabernacle in Shiloh. And this is what she prays: O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head. 1 Samuel 1:11. What happens to her? We do not read that God promises her a son. We do not read that she immediately gets pregnant. Instead, we read that after she prayed, she went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad. 1 Samuel 1:18. What had changed about Hannah? Not her circumstances. She was still childless, she was still covered by the shame of her society, she was still in a polygamist marriage. Nothing in her circumstances changed. But something else had changed: her heart. The Lord met her in her prayer and filled her empty heart, and she walked away satisfied. ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 7

8 Friends, we know so much more than Hannah did about the Lord of Hosts. Hannah just knew in some vague way that God identified with his people. She knew God cared about his people enough to have his presence dwell in their midst in the tabernacle at Shiloh. She knew God cared about his people enough to give them His law and prophets. But we know so much more. We know Jesus Christ, and we know that in Him God emptied himself so that we can be full. God s love is personalized for us in Jesus. We know in a way Hannah never could that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, that neither height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I know some of you feel empty this morning, and if you don t just give it a week or two. It s part of the human condition. But I don t care how desperate your circumstances are God can fill you up. God can satisfy, and you can be thankful and full of joy. I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide and I will fill it. Psalm 81:10. Meditate on Jesus and what he s done for you and you will be filled, and know he will because Jesus emptied himself for you. PRAY ã 2017 J.D. Shaw 8