Grow – Colossians 1:3-14

I will be reading from Colossians one, and our question for our kids and teens is what has God delivered us from and to?

Hmm.

Okay.

Colossians 1, verse 3.

Colossians 1:3

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you heard as you learned it from Epaphrus, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit.

And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption and forgiveness of sins.

And so reaps God's word.

If you've got that passage that Grace read for us a minute ago, please have that open in front of you.

My name is Ben, by the way, I'm the executive pastor here at City Church.

We are in the midst of a sermon series where we are going through the mission statement of City Church Dublin.

If you're not familiar with our mission statement, well, you probably will be by the end of the series that we're doing here, but it says that City Church Dublin exists to connect people to Jesus, to grow them to spiritual maturity, so that they might serve the community and go to the nations.

So we're spending four weeks.

We're looking at those four verbs, you know, connect, grow, serve, and go.

Last week Peter uh looked at what we mean when we're talking about connecting people to Jesus.

So if you missed that sermon, go back and give it a listen there.

You can find all of our sermons uh in recent history on our sermon archive on citychurchdeblin.ie, also on uh Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

You'll know you're in the right place for City Church uh sermons if it opens up with a very thought-provoking guitar riff.

All right?

So give that a listen.

But, anyways, this morning we're gonna be looking at the second one there, this idea of growing to spiritual maturity.

And that's a big topic.

That's that's a lot to think about.

I've been thinking about it this week, trying to get my head around it.

What does it mean to be spiritually mature?

What does it mean to be mature in general?

I mean, that's a that's a big topic.

I know when I was in primary school, when I was when I was just a boy back in the 1980s, uh, we we'd talk about this quite a bit, you know, what it was to be mature, or more likely what it was to be immature.

Usually someone, this is generally a girl, somebody who was in that day probably called Jessica or Kimberly or one of those, um, would have accused someone else, usually a boy, and in that case it would have been like a Kevin or a Scott or a Matt, would have accused this boy of being immature.

And this was like the worst thing that you could be uh accused of.

Only slightly worse if it was really serious, she would call him immature.

Because that is that is how you say it if it's really, really egregious.

I'm not saying that girls are more mature than boys.

I'm just saying that girls were more likely to call the boys immature, which is itself immature.

But if that's the primary school answer, the one that resonates most with me is probably the dad answer.

As I am a father to young adults, teenagers, this one is near and dear to my heart.

Being mature means taking responsibility.

Right?

Not waiting for someone else to tell you to do something, seeing that it needs to get done and doing it, not expecting that someone else is gonna do it for you.

Take responsibility.

Get it done.

Plan ahead, be prepared.

Let me know if you're gonna be home late.

Right?

This is actually, this is why I secretly printed out my sermon in hard copy, and it's stashed over there in case this iPad doesn't work.

So mature, right?

Okay.

Finally, I'll give you the answer that I enjoy a lot.

I was talking to a friend of mine a few years back, and he said this this very wise axiom here.

He says, good decisions come from wisdom.

Wisdom comes from bad decisions.

I'm sure we can all agree that's a bit reductive because I'm sure we can point to people who make bad decisions their whole life and have no hint of wisdom about them.

But I will grant that learning from our mistakes, emphasis on the learning there, is a path to gaining wisdom and maturity.

But with all due respect to my dad, all due respect to the girls that I went to primary school with, all due respect to the whole business about wisdom there.

If we're gonna get our heads around what it means to be grown to spiritual maturity, we need to see what Scripture has to say about it.

Passage that Grace read for us earlier.

Uh, let's, like I said, let's have that open in front of us, because it gives us some insights into what's in view here.

I think we're gonna see three things.

Number one, that maturity is something that we can see in one another.

Number two, that we grow to maturity as we walk the Christian walk.

And number three, that maturity is rooted in the gospel.

All right, so you know where we're going.

Let's go.

First of all, maturity is something that we can see in each other.

So let's let's have the passage open in front of us here.

We can take a look at verse 3.

It says, We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

So the Apostle Paul, who wrote this, wrote this letter to the Colossian Church, this is a group of people he's not yet met.

He's just heard about them.

So how does he how does he start off?

Well, he wants them to know that even though he's not met them, even though he's not familiar with them personally, he's been praying for them.

And when he prays, he gives thanks for what he's heard about them.

He's pretty encouraged by the reports coming out of Colossae.

This is a group of believers known for their maturity, for their growth.

And he points to three things right off the bat to tell us about this maturity.

First, he talks about faith, right?

You can see that there.

And this is not just any kind of faith.

This is not just a, you know, God as you understand him to be.

This is not faith in some mysterious higher power.

This is faith in the Lord Jesus.

This is saving faith, living faith, life-changing, active faith.

This is a faith that flows into every aspect and every area of our lives.

It's not just knowing the truth.

It's not even just believing the truth, but it's knowing, believing, and acting on the truth.

I think it was uh C.S.

Lewis who said that the gospel, if it's true, it's the most important thing.

There could not be anything more important than that.

And it makes sense when you stop and think about it.

How could anything be more important than this faith where we see that the God of the universe stepped off his throne and he lived the perfect life, he taught in word and example, and then he died, buried, and was and was and was raised again, so that so that I, so that you could be brought in.

And not just so that we could be pardoned and excused from penalty, but so that we could be raised to new life.

Verse 12 says, you know, that we be qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

What in the world could be more important than that?

I reached out this week to a friend of mine called Jeanette.

Uh Jeanette is a Christian lady, uh, lovely sister in Christ.

Some years ago she lost her leg, all right?

So I had to ask the question.

I said, uh, you know, would you walk away from Jesus?

Which in retrospect was probably not the nicest way to put it, someone who's missing a leg.

But I said, would you walk away from Jesus if it meant that you could have your leg back?

And she said, I wouldn't walk away from Jesus even if I had to lose my other leg.

She said, I'm already complete in him.

That's faith, friends.

Faith that's worth even more than having legs.

Not just a faith for Sunday morning, not just a faith for the religious areas of our lives, a faith that lays hold of us, you know, heart and mind, body and soul.

Paul says, I've heard of your, I've heard about your faith.

Thanks be to God.

Second thing that he points out is he's heard about their love.

And again, we're not talking about a shallow idea of love.

We're talking about an active love.

Just like we were talking about an active faith, we're talking about an active love.

Christ-like love that does what is best for the one who is loved, even if it costs us something.

Of course, the best example of this is in Jesus, right?

The uh the king himself, the son of God who stepped off his throne, emptied himself to the point of death to demonstrate God's love.

It's not just warm fuzzies, it's not not anything like that, but it's a love that gives unselfishly.

Jesus himself said, Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

And Paul here writes that they have this love.

Not only that, but they have this love for all the saints.

You know, the Colossian church, I have to assume, was a church like any church.

You know, there are probably people that, you know, they'd click with, they'd get on with, you know, want to spend time with.

But it's not just limited to that circle of familiarity, that circle of, you know, friendship, but they have love for all the saints, all the brothers and sisters in Christ.

Paul wasn't hearing about splits and factions, he wasn't hearing about conflict and division.

Surely those would be marks of immaturity in a church.

No, he was he was thankful for their love.

And the final thing that he talks about there is hope, right?

Hope in this sense is pointing us to a reality, a certainty, something that is definitely there.

We just don't have it yet, we just don't see it yet.

It's not just wishful hoping like we talk about in the world, you know, I hope the weather's nice.

Well, that's never gonna happen.

But uh, it's a certainty that's not yet realized.

I was in town the other day, I had some meetings in the morning, and it got to be up to noon, and I was just like, man, really feeling it.

Breakfast was a long time ago.

And I was trying to decide what do I want to do here because I'm really trying to, you know, not spend money unnecessarily, but at the same time, you know, the tummy speaks and you gotta listen.

So I was just trying to figure out do I go and get a fillet roll someplace, do I just get a snack someplace, do I do this?

But then I remembered.

I remembered that waiting for me at home, there was some leftover lasagna that Doreen made.

Doreen, give us a shout out.

Oh shit.

All right.

Zeke, give us a shout-out.

There we are.

I don't know if you've ever had uh Doreen's lasagna, but it is basically the best food in the world.

And so the idea that um, you know, this food was at home for me when I got there made the decision very easy.

I hopped on a bus and I went home and I ate that lasagna and I was happy and I didn't regret my decision in any way.

In essence, because I knew what was ahead of me, I was able to wait.

I was able to endure in hope.

Now, of course, this is a pretty low-stakes example.

But what Paul's talking about here is the hope that we as Christians have.

We're looking ahead to an eternity with them.

That's what he says there when he says, the hope laid up for you in heaven.

We look ahead to something so amazing, something even better than Doreen's lasagna.

And we think about this idea that is, this hope that is laid up in heaven for us.

This isn't a hope that's, you know, maybe gonna come together at some point.

This isn't a hope that's that's sitting out in the rain and maybe getting worn out and and breaking down on earth here.

It's held, it's preserved, it's kept for us.

Lots of the things that we tend to place our hope in in the world, you know, they're fragile or they're temporary.

Or, you know, we get hold of them and they actually don't satisfy us.

You know, whether I'm talking about, you know, my job, my bank balance, my relationships, my reputation, my health, if I'm anchoring my identity, if I'm placing my hope in these things, then at some point I am definitely going to be broken by them.

That's gonna happen.

But if I place my hope in the Lord Jesus, he will never change and he will never disappoint.

And really, that's the idea that we see in this whole first section here.

It's not about the indicators themselves.

It's not about how strong our faith is or how strong our love is or how strong our hope is.

It's about who's behind them all.

I could have amazingly strong, determined, um, you know, fervent faith that this music stand was gonna save me in eternity.

Doesn't matter how strongly I hope in this music stand, it's not gonna help me.

But as I come to the Lord Jesus, even with trembling hands, even with doubts and uncertainties, even weak and double-minded, if my faith is in him, I rest in the fact that he'll never let me go.

I can only love like him, as he works it out through me, in myself.

Um, give a shout out, Doreen.

In myself, I'm often impatient, uncaring, disinterested.

But he models his love in how he is patient and kind towards me.

And he is also working in me by his spirit to make me more loving.

You see it in verse 8 here.

He says, you know, Epaphras has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

So love that's empowered by the Holy Spirit is not just love like he gives, it is love that is as he gives, that is what he gives.

And finally, when we look at hope, I can hope and I can cling to my hope and I can hope against hope all I want.

What makes Christian hope effective is not how strongly or how fervently I hope something is gonna happen.

But it's in the object of that hope.

My hope is in him, and he'll never disappoint, even when my own hope is weak and divided.

The thing is, we were just talking about the Holy Spirit who comes to live with us.

If you're a follower of Jesus, the Holy Spirit is with you daily.

So our hope is not just this distant, far-off future thing.

Our hope is present with us here and now.

So the question for us this morning, something that we might want to think about, is what do our faith, love, and hope show us about the state of our spiritual maturity?

Where do we need to grow?

Where do we need to hand over certain areas of our lives to him that he may do his work in us?

Maybe take a moment silently and ask him to show you.

Second point.

We grow to maturity as we live out the Christian walk.

The idea of walking, we find this here in the in the passage in verse 10.

It says, you know, so as to walk as in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.

We think about a walk.

A walk is a slow way to get from A to B, right?

Step by step, slow progress towards a goal.

You know, and as believers, with we know that this is day by day, week by week, year after year.

We're walking along.

Sometimes it's sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's slow going, sometimes we stumble, sometimes we veer off course.

But we walk with him and he grows us to maturity.

So let's take a look here.

Verse 9.

Verse 9, we can see a lot based on what he prays.

He says that he prays that they that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

Now, some of the first readers of this letter would have gotten real excited about this.

Because they were looking for like the really super secret, special insider knowledge that would make them really cool, really special Christians.

But that's not what Paul's talking about here.

And we can see that as we as we continue the verse there, it says, you know, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.

So the knowledge here isn't just to puff us up and to make us feel smart.

It's so we know how to walk, how to live, how to please God.

Now, maybe, maybe you're thinking, I know what this means.

I got this.

Walk in a manner pleasing to the Lord.

This means gotta follow the rules.

All right.

We'll tick all the boxes, we will uh do our Christian duty.

And I suppose there's a sense of that here, but I think this is just as much pointing us to the posture of our hearts, right?

Like we were just talking about before, this faith and love and hope.

We live by faith, we walk in love, we wait in hope.

As we grow in maturity, these things grow, these things develop.

We grow in them.

If I'm living by faith in the Lord Jesus, I'm accepting what he says in his word.

So then I want to do the things that he calls me to do.

If I'm walking in his love, I'll be more ready to set aside my own wants in favor of someone else's needs.

If I'm waiting in hope of something infinitely more exciting and better than the momentary satisfaction I might get off of sin, then I'm far more ready to avoid temptation.

It's the posture of the heart that's pleasing to him.

The behaviors, the words, the thoughts, the mindsets, these are all outflows of that.

Now, I'm not saying just think happy Jesus thoughts and all of your struggles will go away.

I've been a follower of Jesus longer than many people in this room have been alive.

I still struggle.

I still struggle with sin.

I still struggle with temptation.

But what I am saying is two things.

First of all, when we struggle, when we're tempted, he is stronger.

No question about it.

We go to him for the strength to overcome.

And second, as we do this more, as we develop this habit, as we build this, you know, spiritual muscle memory, we learn to do it more.

We learn to do it better.

This is how we grow.

This is how we develop our maturity.

Going forward, we can see in verse 10, he talks about bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, doing the right things, yes.

But again, not as a sense of Christian duty, but out of the faith, love, and hope.

And growing in the knowledge, but again, not just for the sake of the knowledge, but that that knowledge might be applied towards how to walk.

If you know anything about it, the the idea of knowledge applied to something, that's that's another way to say wisdom.

So the process of growing to maturity, part of that is wisdom.

Then we come to verse 11.

Verse 11 sounds really cool.

It says, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might.

Now we're talking.

Give me the power.

Give me the might.

Let me do amazing things.

But keep going in the verse, and it says, For all endurance and patience with joy.

Well, that's a little different spin.

We're not talking about the power of God in the ways that the world might expect it.

We're not moving mountains, performing miracles, taking out bad guys.

I mean, obviously, if we're in the position to do mighty things in God's strength, we should do those things.

But that's not what this verse has in view.

That's not what Paul is praying for the Colossian church.

He's praying that they have the strength to endure supernaturally, to get through the trials of life.

And it occurs to me, you know, wouldn't it just be easier if Paul prayed that they could avoid these trials of life?

Wouldn't that be a little kinder, gentler way to pray for this church?

I don't want you to have to go through these things.

Why don't I pray that you avoid them?

Well, there's an inconvenient truth here, and uh the the path to growth is often through suffering.

The path to growth, the path to maturity is often through difficulty, hardship, trials.

It's in him seeing us through our suffering that we learn to trust him.

It's in seeing him get us through those trials that we recognize that those times of trusting him are worthwhile.

Paul doesn't ask that they'll be spared from suffering.

Suffering is just part of the deal here, living in this broken world.

But he asks that they'll have the strength, that they'll have God's strength to see them through.

Moving on, verse 12, we see thankfulness.

It's very easy to thank God in the good times.

I think we can all agree with that.

But it takes faith to thank God for the hard times.

The times where we ask, and he says no.

The unexpected heartbreak, the stones on the path where we're doing the Christian walk.

But really, it's as we place our faith in him that we can do this.

I believe that the Lord is for me.

I believe that these difficulties are not meant to crush me, but to grow me.

So I can give thanks even when it feels unnatural to do it.

If you've seen the original karate kid movie, great uh source of spiritual wisdom, I'm sure, but uh there's a whole sequence in there where uh you know the main character, Daniel Larusso, he's he's uh wants to learn karate and he's come to this mysterious sensei, Mr.

Miyagi.

And Mr.

Miyagi has promised to teach him karate.

But his initial training is just a lot of menial tasks, a lot of stuff that uh Daniel comes to resent, comes to feel like, you know, you're just having me do all this garbage for you here, waxing the cars and sanding the decks and painting the fence.

He does it all, but by the end of it, he's just he's just fed up with it.

And there's this dramatic scene, you know, in the middle of the film there where where you know Miyagi just shows him.

He's like, okay, do this, do this motion that I showed you how to do, and he figures out that it's actually been showing him how to do these different karate karate, I don't do karate, but but showing him how to do all these different karate moves.

And so he's been teaching him in ways that he didn't even see.

Now, of course, karate kid is not uh scripture, it's not something that uh we refer to often in our uh quest for maturity, growing to maturity.

But if a fictional sensei can take a fictional student and teach him in fictional ways uh that he wasn't even realizing were teaching him, how much more can God use the different circumstances of our lives, the different stuff that we walk through to grow us to maturity?

So let me let me review this point here.

The Christian walk, where I'm living out my faith, my hope, my love in the real world, this grows me to maturity.

This is where I'm bearing fruit in good works, increasing in knowledge that I apply to a life that pleases him, being strengthened in order that I may endure and giving thanks.

Honestly, it's a lot to take on board.

And you might be reading this going, I only'm only gonna be able to grow to maturity if I can do all of these things perfectly, if I can do it right.

But don't miss what it says in verse 12.

It says that the Father has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

That means that we aren't qualified by doing it perfectly.

If we were, pretty sure none of us would ever be qualified.

What we're seeing here is this is God's salvation, and he's just teaching us to walk in it.

Fact of the matter is, yes, we please God when we obey, we we please God when our faith and our love and our hope are pointed in the right direction and we're doing the right things.

But we also please God when after we've gone off course, after we've messed up, we've fallen, we've stumbled.

We turn away from that and we come back to Him.

So keep walking.

He's using it all to grow you.

Nothing is wasted, not the hard stuff, not the times that we don't understand.

Everything we go through in our walk is part of God's training routine for us.

We grow to maturity as we live out the Christian walk.

Final point here: maturity is rooted in the gospel.

We can see this here if we look back up to verse 5, the second half of it here.

It says, Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you as indeed in the whole world, and it is bearing fruit and increasing as it does also among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Long sentence.

But basically, the gospel, this is the good news of Jesus.

The gospel, Paul says to the Colossians that it's bearing fruit, it's doing its work among you, it's increasing among you.

Think about these ideas of bearing fruit and growing, these are, you know, agricultural terms, right?

This is this is pointing to growth.

Sometimes we might have a season of our Christian walk where we're feeling like I'm not really growing, I feel stale, I feel, you know, like I'm not making any progress here.

Well, first of all, if you're feeling this way, chances are God is growing you in ways that you don't see.

Because if we're concerned about it, it's when we're not concerned about it that we should probably be concerned.

But apart from this, the verse that we see here pushes against this very idea.

It's like Paul is saying, you know the gospel, that whole thing where Jesus, you know, rose from the dead, surely?

Well, just as sure as Jesus rose from the dead, you yourself are being grown.

The word of truth is bearing fruit and increasing among you from the day you first became a Christian.

And if we jump down to the end of the passage there, verses 13 and 14, it says, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and has transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

All of this work here, it's all in the past tense.

It's already done.

We're not fighting for our salvation here, guys.

If you are a follower of Jesus, if he is Lord of your life today, then rest assured, you have been delivered from the domain of darkness.

You have been transferred to the kingdom of Christ.

You have redemption, you have the forgiveness of sins.

None of that is at risk, none of that is in question.

Our response to this good news is just to walk his path, to take up our cross daily and follow him.

Because another way of talking about growing to spiritual maturity is to become more Christ-like, more like Jesus.

That's what disciples do.

So if this is part of the mission statement of City Church, I think the question that we need to answer this morning is how do we as a church engage in this?

How do we live this out?

How do we help people to grow to spiritual maturity?

Well, I can think of a few ways.

Maybe most obvious in this particular moment is what we're doing right now.

When we sit together under God's word, when we apply it to our lives.

Well, it's part of what we've seen in Colossians today.

Verse 10 said, We're to be increasing in the knowledge of God.

And certainly, if you're here week after week, you're gaining knowledge.

But remember, this isn't just knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

This is meant to be knowledge that we apply.

So the question I'll ask, and I ask this of myself as well, when we sit under God's word, do we walk away from it and go, huh, that's interesting?

Or do we sit under God's word and ask him how he might use it in our lives to grow us, to shape us, to bring us to maturity?

Pretty sure I won't grow very much if I'm listening to sermons that I think are meant for somebody else.

But it's not just the sermon, it's not just, you know, what's being preached on a Sunday morning, it's our whole time together.

Right?

Peter talked last week about how every element, everything that we do on a Sunday morning is all to point us to the truths of the gospel.

That God calls us into worship by his word, that we we sing together, we're united in praise, that we pray together, we direct our hearts and our focus towards God.

All of this is meant to help us grow to maturity.

And it's not just here, we were talking about community groups not that long ago.

And uh, community groups are a great way to grow to maturity as well.

They're a great way to encourage uh one another, they're a great way to engage with one another, talk through the stuff that we're talking about on a Sunday morning, to figure out how we can particularly apply it to our own lives, to encourage and be encouraged.

Community groups are a great arena for expressing love for all the saints, and for taking time midweek for fellowship, for reminding ourselves and one another of this good news.

When I was growing up, I had relatives that I'd only see, you know, maybe once or twice a year, see them at Christmas time, maybe.

And when I'd see them, they'd come up to me and they'd say, Oh my, how you've grown.

And I never really knew what to say to that, like, thanks, I guess.

You two, I don't know.

But really, my my reaction was always, have I though?

Because you don't notice.

When you're a kid growing up, you don't notice that, you know, you're two inches taller than the last time you saw, you know, Aunt Jane.

Growth is a slow process, and we don't see it in the same way.

But after six months, you can see it.

So it's the same thing when we're talking about growing to spiritual maturity.

Because we're just walking, we're just going through this life and we're we're taking the road that God has for us.

But we can see growth in each other.

We can see maturity in each other.

We can thank God for that in each other.

We can, you know, encourage each other as we're going, as we see those ways that God has grown us.

So this is just a quick little look here, but this is what this passage shows us about maturity.

The marks of maturity, the growth of maturity, the root of maturity.

And I'll say this: I've been in Elder City Church for five and a half years, 11 years, so that's half the time there.

Um, and this idea of seeing everyone grow to spiritual maturity is something that we spend a lot of time and a lot of focus on.

When we're planning Sunday services, when we're reviewing when we're praying together, when we're when we're having meetings, whatever, it's all, uh there's so much of it in there that's pointing to how to bring everyone to spiritual maturity.

And it's not just a question for all of you out there.

It's not like the rest of us don't also need to grow to spiritual maturity.

It's all of us, right?

It's elders and staff, deacons and trustees and community group leaders, city church people across the board.

May we grow to maturity together, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who's qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

If you found this helpful or want to know more about City Church Dublin, please visit our website found in the link below.