How should we relate to outsiders?

Okay.

All right, if you have uh your Bible with you, turn to uh Colossians chapter 4, verses 5 to 6.

Colossians 4:5–6

I'm a little hesitant because last time I preached, I told you to extinguish your phones.

Well, that was a mistake because you needed your Bible phone and Bible app and all that stuff.

So don't extinguish your phone, but make sure it's on silent and all those things.

So uh I had some time to sit on our question.

Over the next two weeks, we're gonna finish our series on questions.

And uh I had some time to sit with our question this week over the past two weeks, and it's uh it's an important question, it's a convicting question.

I think it's a timely question, and the question is how are we as Christians to relate to those outside of Christ?

And I want to begin with a quote from Eugene Peterson.

He says, It has taken me a long time, with considerable help from wise Christians, both dead and alive, to come to this understanding of the church.

A colony of heaven in the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already inaugurated kingdom of God.

And I love that phrase.

A colony of heaven in the country of death is what God has called us to be as we have time here in the world.

So let me invite you to stand if you're able, and uh, we'll read a short couple of verses that talk about what that looks like for us in the world.

We're reading Colossians chapter 4, verses 5 to 6.

Colossians 4:5–6

Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.

The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.

Let me pray and ask him to bless us as we dig in a little bit more deeply to this passage.

Now this was a convicting study for me and uh maybe a convicting uh sermon for people in here.

So we pray that you would be pleased to do a work in our midst to bring us in line with the mission you've called us to, and that we would be a colony of heaven in the midst of a culture and country of death.

God bless us.

And be with us, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.

Please have a seat.

Insiders and outsiders.

We use the term often to highlight perceived value of one group over another.

Uh it's smacks of elitism, it's smacks of importance.

If you become an insider, then you know that you're significant.

So we have Hollywood insiders, Wall Street Insiders, Madison Avenue insiders, White House insiders, insiders and outsiders.

Now we culturally we have uh romanticized the idea of being outsiders.

You know, you are part of the avant-garde or something, and you don't walk, you walk to the beat of a different drum, those kind of things.

But usually outsider is used pejoratively by insiders.

And Colossians 4 uh uses the word outsider, and that's what we're talking about some this morning.

How do we interact with outsiders?

And the word outsider here simply refers to those outside of the church, outside of Christ.

And it's the Greek word exo, from which we get words like exoskeleton, which is a skeleton on the outside of an insect's body.

They have an exoskeleton.

That's what it means.

It's it's not a pejorative word, it's not a slur or judgment, it's it's simply a reality.

He's referring to people who are not, who don't believe in Christ, who are outside of Christ, who are outside of the church, and as a result, they are really strangers to the Christian community.

That is, they're sinners in need of grace.

What's fascinating is everybody in the church are sinners in need of grace, who have received grace.

And so if you're in the church, it's not that you're better than, you're not like a Hollywood or a Wall Street insider.

You're someone who has received grace.

God set his affection on you and rescued you apart from anything you've done.

So it's not, this is not about good people, the insiders, and bad people, the outsiders.

It's something different.

And our question this morning is how should Christians who are inside in Christ, in the church, interact with those who are outside, the outsiders that he's talking about here.

The thing about Christians is that uh we don't want that situation to remain insiders and outsiders.

We want everybody to be an insider.

Everybody to come in because we know what it's like on the outside.

We know.

And so we call and invite people to come inside.

Uh, years ago when Rebecca and I lived in Clemson, South Carolina, it's it's in the South, and so that means when there's a snowstorm, everything shuts down.

It's it is a mandatory holiday enforced by the weather.

And so this is a huge snowstorm.

We had snow everywhere.

Uh we were holed up in our house, we had power.

It was it was it was a nice little beautiful winter wonderland outside, which we usually didn't have.

And then uh in the midst of the snow coming down, there was a an older older couple, and their car ran off the road down a little embankment just on the other side of the road where we lived.

And uh they weren't going to be going anywhere, and there was no one who was going to become going to come and help them because the roads were frozen over, they weren't going anywhere.

And so my lovely wife went outside and invited them to come from the cold into our house.

And they said no.

They were gonna stay in their car.

And uh she said, it's gonna get really cold out here, and she said, Well, we're just gonna stay in our car.

And so they stayed in their car and it got colder.

And eventually Rebecca went outside again and asked, uh, she brought them some hot chocolate this time to keep them warm.

So hot chocolate in the car to keep them warm and invited them to come in.

And they still wouldn't come in, even though it was getting colder.

And we found out later that the reason they wouldn't come in is they saw our house, they lived in something that was not as nice as where we were living, and they decided they did not feel worthy, or whatever the word would be, to go into our house.

And we would say our house is very modest, but they didn't feel like they could go in because of who they were.

And so finally it was getting colder and colder.

I think at one point we one of them came inside and called a tow truck, which still wasn't there.

So we eventually went out and said, You gotta come in.

It's just getting too cold and it's beginning to get dark, you gotta come in.

And so they finally came in.

And it took a while, but they had to get really uncomfortable before they would come in.

We wanted them to come in because every time we went outside, we knew exactly what it was like outside.

We wanted them to come inside.

Christians want outsiders to become insiders.

And this passage is assuming a couple of things.

One is that you're going, as a Christian, if you're a Christian, you're going to have interactions with people who are outside of Christ, who have a very different view of the world than you have, and it's saying you should not avoid them.

And then number two, what he's saying, is that we are to care about outsiders, people who are not in.

That we tell them the truth and we care for them.

But we have a problem.

We have a problem.

And it was highlighted for me in a story I read this week.

Is it was a pastor telling the story about his life.

And he said, I didn't see the sin until I saw the effect it began to have on my wife.

She was once vivacious, childlike, radiant.

She be, and but he found that she was beginning to joke less impulsively and laugh less freely.

She grew quiet, more serious, more concerned, like she was carrying a burden.

And he said, My beautiful lily drooped before me.

And then he said, as any husband would, I inquired one day what had caused the change.

And he said, I soon unearthed the source I hadn't expected.

It was him.

He said, My general cynicism toward people, like weeds in my lawn, did not just stay with me.

My suspicions about the world and other people were becoming hers.

It was having an impact.

And so he, you know, like a lot of us did during COVID, he began spending more time online.

He was exposed to a lot of cynicism and suspicion.

And he said, those kinds of things he began to realize in his life and in his church that he was, it was making him a traitor to his faith, a danger to his family, and it was making him toxic to his church family.

And then he went on.

He said, without being taught, we easily see most of our biggest problems as out there with outsiders.

Their sin against me or the whoever, and not my sin against a holy God troubled me most.

And when this is our focus, he says, that we are quick to speak and slow to listen, quick to write off and quick to bear with, uh, and slow to bear with, quick to suspect and slow to forgive.

And I could feel that when I was reading that.

And maybe you can feel that too.

We have we have inherited a culture that is uh in our cultural moment and tone where the the call of Jesus to his people to see and interact and love people is perhaps more muffled than at any time from the varied voices that we're surrounded with every day.

It it is there's these varied voices point us uh to deal with people in a particular way.

And you know what it's like.

You just heard something on the internet, on your favorite news source, whatever it is, that makes you angry.

It made me angry.

So the first thing you do is when you go out of the door and you go somewhere, is if you have friends, you you vent about what makes you angry.

Or if you meet somebody who actually holds that view, you crack your knuckles, and it's like, oh, here we go.

Here we go.

Because by proxy, there's somebody in front of you who holds that view, and I can deal with the problems of the world by dealing with this person at this moment.

We do that.

Rebecca's saying, well, I'm saying I do it.

Uh and so he didn't say that.

She's too nice to say that.

Um and so what what we we have to ask the question from whom do we take our cues?

God's people take our views from a God who humbled himself and became obedient to death for our sakes, who healed the sick, who raised the dead, forgives sinners, and loves the unlovable.

And he demonstrated his own love for us in this.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us, is what scripture says.

And here in the church of Christ, because of Jesus, he says, here there is no Jew nor Greek, slave, or free, male nor female.

We are one in Christ.

But this same God, the same who became flesh, he bids us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

And Jesus asked his apostles on one occasion, he said, If you love only those who love you, what good is that?

So he's calling us to something deeper.

The spirit of the age is divisive, the spirit of Christ is redemptive.

There's a call from Jesus to love those on the outside.

Of course they have different politics.

Of course they have a different religion.

Of course they have a different view and they have different values, of course.

There's a guy who gives direction, though, to say, instead of seeing them with their values, I want you to see them a different way.

He says, remember you're talking to a person, a person who will live forever, a person made in God's image, a person who will one day stand before God and be judged.

But we pray for, so we pray for these people.

We love them, we serve them, and we who receive grace, show grace to other people.

Jesus says, be salt, not pepper spray, when we talk about the world.

Two things that are encouraging and guide us from this passage.

One is I was really encouraged when I was reading this.

I told you I was sitting with this for two weeks, and I was really convicted.

And I felt like I'm I'm the only one in the history of the world, and our culture is the only one in the history of the world who struggles with this.

But then I was reminded, oh, wait, Paul is writing to the Colossians, who are people like us.

And they felt the push and pull of God's truth against a culture that had very different views from who they were.

And uh he calls them to live as a colony of heaven in a culture and a country of death.

And this is the second part.

He's already told them uh the gospel of grace.

Before he gets to this, he's not saying do this in your own strength.

He's saying, go back to the gospel that I just talked about in chapter two, that transforms you, so that the grace you have received is the grace that transforms you in the grace that you give.

So back in Colossians chapter 2, verses 13 and 14, we read this And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive, together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of death that stood against us with its legal demands.

Colossians 2:13

This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

So he's saying that Jesus took away our sin.

Remember when we were reading in the uh confession earlier, the assurance of pardon from Micah.

And it says that our sins have been thrown into the heart of the sea.

It's been thrown away where we're never gonna find it.

Because that's the image.

And I thought, no, I think you can find things when they're found in the water.

We have like, you know, we have all kinds of technology and things.

So you could find something, it's not gonna go away forever, but back then you would lose, you would lose it forever.

And so I Googled something, and this is what AI told me, so it can't be wrong.

Um I Googled, what is the most notorious thing that's ever been lost in the ocean, never to be found?

A fun question.

So there was apparently a Portuguese ship that was that sank on the coast of Sumatra back in like 1511.

That's a long time ago.

And the cargo, by estimate today, is worth$2.6 billion.

Nobody has ever found that, though people have been looking for a long time.

So when he's saying it's thrown into the heart of the sea, the image is it's never gonna be found.

And so that means that the sin that you can't seem to forget that God refuses to remember.

He's not gonna hold it against you.

He's the one who's thrown it into the sea, never to be seen again.

He's the one in Christ.

Speaking of the sea, um we just we sang Amazing Grace earlier, and it was written by a man named John Newton.

And John Newton was a he's a captain of a ship, but not just any ship.

John Newton was the captain of a slaving ship.

And what's fascinating about his story is when you read his story, you you realize he was actually a slave himself.

He was enslaved, and then somebody rescued him.

And it was after that he became, went on board a ship and eventually a slaving ship, and eventually became the captain of a slaving ship, and then eventually he became a Christian and put away that entire lifestyle.

And what that meant for him is that when he looked at other people, other broken people, he couldn't ever say, well, that person's broken more than I am.

Because he always had this record of sin in his own life that he could see, and he knew I cannot judge anyone else as beneath me.

All I have is the grace of God.

And this is what he wrote.

And I think we have a quote from John Newton.

Whoever whoever has tasted of the love of Christ and has known by his own experience the need and the worth of redemption is enabled.

Yeah, he is constrained to love his fellow creatures.

He loves them at first sight.

That's a great quote.

He loves them at first sight because he recognizes the grace of God for him.

A believer's reflex should be immediate warmth, friendship, tenderness.

A person who has received grace views other people through that lens.

We love other people and show them the same grace.

Eugene Peterson.

A colony of heaven in the country of death.

So there's a call here to be that kind of people as we live our lives out in the world.

And again, I look around the room, some of you are fantastic at doing that.

Loving people, reaching out to other people, which is great.

And then there are others of us who need to learn from you.

So if you think I'm preaching a sermon to you, no, I'm I'm sitting right there and looking up here and I'm listening to myself talk as I go through these things.

So, what does he tell us in this passage?

Well, the first thing he says is, walk in wisdom towards outsiders.

Now, wisdom doesn't simply mean that you make good decisions financially.

That's fantastic, you know, worldly wisdom, how you handle money and everything else.

And we all have guiding principles that affect our outlook on life and what we pursue in life, but that's not really what he's talking about here.

When the Bible talks about wisdom, what it's referring to biblically is God's wisdom that's revealed in Scripture.

So this is in Proverbs chapter 9, verse 10.

Proverbs 9:10

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

So what he's saying is that God's word and will become our guiding principle for how we live, how we move, how we interact with other people.

His word becomes our number one priority and overrules what anyone else says and directs my actions and my complete outlook on life.

And so that means that what the Bible says is how I'm viewing the world.

So what does the Bible say about God, who is my guiding principle?

Exodus chapter 34, verses 6 and 7.

Exodus 34:6

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

Yet he does not leave this guilty unpunished, but does punish sin.

What about Jesus?

I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

So God's character, his word, his presence, his grace is behind what Paul is telling us here.

We interact with uh with outsiders from the standpoint of what God says in his word.

Second, he says, making the best use of time.

Colossians 4, 5, walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best use of time.

Now, for what that means for you is your life matters.

Your life here and now it matters.

The time that you have on this earth matters.

The time that God is giving you here matters.

Your life is not a cosmic anomaly.

You have purpose that is God given.

And if you're here still and you've not been released to go home to heaven, your life matters and you have a purpose here and now, here and now.

The word time here, several commentators suggest, should be taken to mean like opportunity.

Meaning not you look for that one time with that one person on the bus.

No, it's it's meaning the time that you have.

Who do you spend the most time with?

That's your opportunity.

That is your sphere of influence, your point of contact, your life and your words matter in those moments.

So making best use of the time.

He says, Let your speech always be gracious.

Now, when we think of gracious, we think of probably personality type, somebody who is very polite.

But Paul is talking about an attitude of grace that cleanses our hearts and minds, changes our words and actions, and makes us makes our relationships life giving and healing.

So how does this happen?

Well, we read.

We sang Amazing Grace earlier.

A person amazed and grateful that they have experienced the grace of God in salvation becomes tenderhearted as a result.

A person who is loved, who trusts the God of grace as a result becomes compassionate and understanding, not pushy, belligerent, or defensive, but full of grace and joy and hope.

He is saying, let your words be words filled with God's grace.

Let your heart be filled with God's grace, so that it will direct how you answer everybody.

And then he says, seasoned with salt.

Now, in my household, we tend to think of salt as making popcorn better because it does.

It adds savor, but the International Bible Encyclopedia explains that salt was an absolute necessity of life in the Near East.

Now we saw this just within the past week.

Rebecca has a good friend that she uh knows from the gym, and as they were doing their workouts in a kind of a class setting, the woman got dizzy and asked Rebecca to help her out to her golf cart.

So when she got out to the golf cart, she took a little salt tablet to help her because she was becoming dehydrated.

So when this passage says your words seasoned with salt, he's not saying you have salty language, you sailor.

No, what he's saying is, what he said, what he's telling us is that our words are to be life-giving for other people.

Make your words life-giving.

Let your words speak life to people.

Conversations be gracious, salt, with salt being used in a positive way.

And then the last thing he says is so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.

Now, one commentator said, what he means is that you don't have your talking points that you always want to talk about.

You know, your stock harangue that we all have, I have mine.

It usually involves something with Disney World.

And uh, but in terms of what we say to people, we love people enough to listen and meet them where they are.

You put the other person's questions and needs before your typical talking points.

So how does this look?

How does all putting this all together, how does it all look in your day uh everyday life?

Well, again, I was sat with this, I read a good bit, and I came across this story from a pastor who, when he was 18 years old, really fell in love with the guitar.

And so when he went off to college, and this is probably back in the 70s or so, when he went off to college, he went to a music school, declared himself as a music major, and guitar was his instrument, and he wanted to become really great at the guitar, and so he wanted to talk to all the people that uh were great guitarists, and he came across this one, a classical guitarist named Christopher Parkining.

Have any of you ever heard of him?

I actually Googled him, and uh he's a real dude.

He's a brilliant classical guitarist, and so this pastor bought a C D on a whim and listened to it, and he said, This is the best guitarist I have ever heard in my life.

So he actually did something unusual back then.

He he tracked down Christopher Parkining's uh address, sent him a letter uh about uh, and see if he could have a conversation with him.

And so in December of that year, when he was on break from touring, Christopher Pikening said Parkening said, Let's have a conversation.

So they talked on the phone, and in the conversation, Parkining said things like this If God wants it to happen, it'll happen.

Now, the pastor at the time was not a Christian.

And so he's hearing Christopher Parkining drop these little nuggets of truth.

If God wants it to happen, it'll happen.

You can trust God in the midst of this.

And so after the conversation, Parkening asked this young man if he could send him a copy of his testimony of how he came to faith, and if he could send him a copy of a sermon by John MacArthur on how to live the Christian life and coming to faith in Jesus.

And so it arrived by cassette, because that was the days of cassette.

And uh he his conversation story is that at age 30, this is parking, at age 30, he became a world-renowned guitarist and said, I'm done.

I'm gonna retire early.

So he went and was like trout fishing, just having the time of his life.

He'd made enough money, he'd been successful.

And then he heard a sermon by John MacArthur, the one that he sent to this young man.

And because of that sermon, he decided, I need to give my life to Christ.

This is parking.

I need to give my life to Christ, and I need to go back into music and make that a career and do it for very different reasons, not to get wealthy so I can retire, but to be a witness for Christ, to glorify God in everything that I do.

And that's what he went to do.

And so the young man who received the seat, the uh cassette tapes, he listened to this and he said it he was intrigued.

It began, the idea of doing something for a higher purpose began to settle into him.

And he said he wasn't converted listening to either of those two things, but within a month he became a Christian.

And this is what this pastor kind of summed it up, talking about Christopher Parkining.

He said, What happened on that phone call?

He said, Christopher Parkining did what Colossians 4 is talking about.

He seasoned his conversation with salt.

He answered a particular person according to his question in a particular way that he could hear.

And that's what God's calling us to do, is to do that.

Eugene Peterson.

It's taken me a long time, but with considerable help from wise Christians, both dead and alive, to come to this understanding of the church, a colony of heaven and the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already inaugurated kingdom of God.

God is calling outsiders to become insiders.

We're proof of that.

And he's calling us to be a part of what he's doing, of calling people who are outsiders on the inside.

That's what we want.

We want everybody to be an insider.

And it doesn't look necessarily like uh going on a street and handing out tracks or anything else.

It just means loving the people around you well.

And again, looking around the room, some of you do that really well.

Let me close with a story.

A couple of years ago, I met a couple of uh Australian missionaries, and the place in Australia where they serve is a the population is about 4% Christian, and then 96% everything else that you can possibly imagine.

And they were talking about uh a woman that was in their circles who was from like new age, like deeply into the new age, she and her husband both, and something happened that this woman wasn't prepared for.

Her husband died at a young age and left her with the shop that they ran, left her with children, and just and left her an early widow.

And the church stepped in and loved her.

They helped her, they came alongside her during this time, they helped her as she sold the business, they helped her as she restarted her life, they met her in the midst of this.

And this woman was on the way to becoming a Christian.

This is what she said.

The new age didn't do anything for me.

I'm staying here.

So this woman in dust and ashes, experiencing the grace of God through his people in a way that is like salt and light to bring life into the midst of darkness and life into the midst of a dying world.

He's called us to be that.

I want to be that.

And uh thank you for listening to my monologue up here as I talk to myself for about 30 minutes.

Let me pray for us.

I read through the gospels, Lord Jesus, and I see the people that you encountered.

And they were all sites of people, all sorts of people.

They were Gentiles and Jews, old and young, sick and healthy, powerful and destitute, and you love them all as people.

I want to love people that way.

So I pray that you would do a work in my heart, that I would love people as you have loved me, that the grace I have received would be the grace that I extend, and the words of life you have given to me would be the words of life that I extend to other people.

That my words would be seasoned with salt and life-giving.

And I know as I look around, as I've looked around this room, that there are people who want that same thing.

And there are things that hold us back.

So we pray that you would remove all of the obstacles to us in our minds and our situations and our fears to being used by you in a powerful way in the world around us.

We pray that you would silence the angry voices that muffle the voice of our Savior.

That our wisdom would not be the wisdom of the world, but it would be the wisdom that is based on your word.

You bless us as you have been doing and continue to grow our little church, bring people to us to minister to, that we can love and point to the gospel of grace.

And we ask it all in Jesus' name.

Amen.