Colossians: Four Steps to Perfect Christian Harmony | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

How's everybody doing this morning?

Some people high, some people low.

I understand.

It's okay.

Maybe think about how you feel as we go through the sermon today.

There may be some relevant applications.

There's a recent art, there's an article in the recent New Yorker magazine called Why So Many People Are Going No Contact with Their Parents.

In that article, the author, Anna Russell, says that up to 27% of Americans are estranged from a member of their family, and the article focuses primarily on adult children and their parents.

That is more than one in four individuals in our country.

She writes, if you haven't experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.

And she's right.

I know a number of families in this church where there's estrangement, particularly between adult children and their parents.

And it's absolutely heartbreaking, especially if you're a parent, a parent of small children.

I mean, to even imagine one day that our children wouldn't talk to us is debilitating in a sense.

But this is a growing trend in our country, estrangement among families.

But the same thing is happening at the church at large for other reasons.

I've been reviewing a particular curriculum on faith in politics, and the the reason the curriculum was even created, one of the reasons, was because of a growing experience of rupturing within churches and families that people were seeing within the church.

So this is not just a secular problem or a national problem, but it's a problem within the church.

Now there was a similar situation going on in the church in Colossae.

This fall, we're going through the book of Colossians and we're now in chapter three.

Our best understanding is that after Paul had come through this region preaching the gospel, establishing churches, some false teachers came through afterwards.

And they were preaching a form of the gospel, but with a little bit of a twist.

And it basically said there are spiritual people and then there are spiritual people, right?

And it had to do with ascetic practices like fasting and staying away from certain things and certain people.

It was kind of playing on old stereotypes and cultural rifts.

Last week Russ looked at verse 11 in chapter 3, where Paul says, in the gospel, there is no Jew or Greek, Scythian, free or slave, because the Colossian church was being kind of ripped apart through a lot of divisions.

And Paul is jealous in this letter to address the unity and the harmony that we have in the church.

And he's communicating to us that we ought to be a people who fight for unity and harmony.

In chapter 3, verses 1 through 11 that Russ looked at last week, Paul addresses the things we should stop doing, the things that contribute to divisions in the church.

He uses the metaphor of putting on and taking off clothing.

He lists a number of things that we should stop doing to one another.

Now, in our passage this morning, verses 12 to 14, he talks about the things we should start doing or keep doing that help foster unity and harmony in the church.

He says, these are the things we are to put on in Christ.

I've titled this sermon Four Steps to Perfect Christian Harmony because I thought it would be funny if that there was a sermon on our website with that title.

Because, you know, we don't really preach those kinds of sermons.

And it's it's never that easy, but I have a four-point sermon, and it is about Christian harmony, so I think it's an appropriate title.

All right, let's jump in.

Point one, Paul reminds us, uh, and the Colossians to ground ourselves in our new identity in Christ.

He writes, put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

Now notice what Paul is doing here.

Uh, just like Russ does with us almost every week, as he is about to tell the Colossians what they should do, he reminds them who they are.

Remember, we're in the middle of chapter three.

We've just gone through 11 verses of Paul telling the Colossians, stop doing this stuff.

It's hurting you.

Now he's about to start saying, these are the things you should start doing.

But right in the middle, he says, remember who you are in Christ.

First, he calls them God's chosen ones.

This phrase was incredibly contentious.

This caused a huge controversy in the early church.

That these Gentile believers, simply by putting their faith in Jesus, were God's chosen ones.

Why?

Because this was the title of the Jews, the descendants of Abraham, those who were circumcised on the eighth day and had a connection to this one who was a friend of God.

To tell these Gentile Christians that they are God's chosen ones, told them that they were in relationship with God.

They were adopted.

God was their father.

Their relationship before God was secure.

And that leads to these the next two words that he has here.

Not only are they God's chosen the ones, but they are holy.

We talked about this a few weeks ago.

To be holy really just means to be set apart.

But when God uses this word, it's incredibly meaningful.

Right?

So you can have a bunch of things, glasses or pens or rocks.

If you take one and you put it over here to the side, it has become holy.

It's become set apart, distinct from the rest.

And this is what Paul is saying to the Colossians you have been set apart by God.

You have a special place in God's heart.

And he has placed you there.

And that special place leads to the final word or identity he puts over them.

They are beloved.

They are chosen.

They are holy, and they are beloved.

In my opinion, this may be the most important identity marker he places on the Colossians because it answers the question of God's heart inclination towards them and towards us.

God is not, you know, uh frustrated or angry or beguiled to love the Colossians or to love us.

He loves them freely.

At our last men's gathering earlier this month, Seth Milliken shared the story with the men in the church, the story of him and his wife Kara, their story of adoption.

They had wanted to adopt for a very long time, and I've heard lots of stories of adoption.

I've walked through adoption with at least one family in particular, and it's never easy.

It's a difficult process.

But hearing Seth's story, it was excruciating.

It took years.

It was a roller coaster of hopes, being devastated again and again.

And these ups and downs actually threatened to rip Seth and Kara apart from the inside.

And what's amazing is what was ripping them apart was this love they had for a child they had never met.

They didn't even know who it was yet.

But then came the day when they got the call and they had a baby.

And the day they brought Hachi home was one of the most wonderful days in their life.

And hearing his story, seeing him weep standing here before the men of the church, it was an incredible picture of God's love for us in adoption.

This little baby Hachi had never done anything to endear himself to Seth and Kara.

And yet they loved him deeply, and they they celebrated on the day they brought him home.

Now, how much more is the love of our God who placed his love on us and actually did rip himself apart from the inside to adopt us.

It is a love like no other.

The love, the real love, the beautiful love of Seth and Carapales in comparison to the love God has for you if you are in Christ.

It is a beautiful thing.

As I have grown in my understanding of my own identity as God's beloved son, I've come to see that one of the things I need to confess the most, right?

We just had a confession of sin earlier in our service.

One of the things I confess the most is my inability or lack of desire to accept God's full love for me.

Now that may sound weird.

If that sounds weird to you, you're not alone, but I encourage you to think about that.

What I've realized is that most of the sins I commit, most of the sins I commit by failing to act, flow out of my disbelief and my doubt that God loves me.

If I doubt God loves me, I run to empty cisterns looking for validation and fulfillment.

If I doubt that God's love, God loves me, I will fail to act out of fear.

A failure or failure of other people.

Alright, point two.

Paul tells us that we are to clothe ourselves with these five Jesus virtues.

Let's look at 12 and 13 again.

He says, put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another.

Now, what do you see?

What's a common theme you see running through all of these words?

I would argue that they all have a quality of a diminishment of self and the exaltation of others.

Compassion, what is compassion?

It literally means to suffer with.

Compassion is the willingness to come along someone else in a time of suffering and enter into that suffering with them.

I heard someone this week describe compassion as the willingness to take part in the consciousness of another.

It is the willingness to walk in their shoes, choosing to see the world through their eyes.

Compassion is the difference between offering someone a platitude in a moment of suffering, and then offering them yourself as you sit with them in a dark time.

Humility.

Humility is the willingness to check yourself for the benefit of the other.

You may be in an argument or engaged in a problem with someone else, and you believe or you know you have the right answer.

You may be in a dispute or an argument with someone else, and you know that it is your right to win this case or to win this argument.

But humility asks us to pause and to say and to ask, what is to the benefit of the other in this situation?

The heart of humility is a twofold confession.

First, we confess that we are not God.

And second, we confess that the person we are interacting with is an image bearer of God.

Do all the honor and glory due to an image bearer, just as we are.

Third, Paul talks about patience.

These are all qualities that help nurture a flourishing community with harmony.

Now, what is patience?

I love the old school word for patience.

Do you remember what it is?

Long suffering.

Isn't that a better word?

Don't be patient.

Suffer long.

Patience, it comes from the same word root as compassion, right?

Passion means to suffer.

That's why we talk about Jesus' passion being his death on the cross.

Patience is the literal, comes from the literal Latin root for suffer.

So listen to what Paul means by that.

For community to flourish, it implies that sometimes being with someone is suffering.

I sort of meant that as a joke.

You can laugh at that.

I mean, think about that.

For community to flourish, you have to be, and I have to be, around people that we consider it suffering to be around.

Sometimes today we we get this idea that, well, our community should be people who think like us and look like us and agree with us and kind of affirm my choices.

That's the great benefit of the internet, right?

If no one around me agrees with what I say, I can find those five other people on the internet.

But that's not community.

Community is having patience.

Being with people who drive you crazy, make you angry and annoyed.

I mean, think about it, this is what causes and offers community.

The underlying message of this passage is that for community to flourish, every one of us is called to a humble posture, to be willing to bear with others as those who are also beloved of God.

That's a question we can ask ourselves.

I mean, this person is a Christian.

God loves them.

I don't know how, I don't know why, but he does.

And he calls me to do the same.

One of the critiques of that article I referenced earlier from The New Yorker is this kind of therapeutic tendency that is growing in our culture that says, you know, we should really just cut off or expunge difficult relationships.

Now, there are circumstances in which circumstances are such that we do need to cut off a human being for abusive relationships or something like that.

But that is by far the exception.

Especially within the community of faith, Paul tells us that we enter the community thinking less of ourselves, more of others, willing to suffer for the sake of our community.

All right, point three.

When others fail us, forgive.

Paul continues, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

What's beautiful about this passage, if, you know, it's e this is just three verses, right?

We can read through them super quick and kind of just go skim over the top.

But if you really slow down and you see what Paul is saying and see his thought process, it's in it's really beautiful and refreshing.

Because what Paul is addressing here is what we all already know, and that that's that we fail at this stuff.

Right?

Humility, meekness, compassion.

There's nothing uniquely Christian about those things.

Any guru, any belief system, any culture can can list those virtues on the wall.

But here's the question: what do I do when you fail me?

Because you will.

And what do you do when I fail you?

Because I will.

The answer, in brief, is that we forgive.

Now, forgiveness is one of those topics that I don't know if for all time, but I feel like today forgiveness is one of these things that we get all tangled up in.

There's a lot of kind of confusion and misconception.

So let me just address a couple of those.

Forgiving someone does not mean that we pretend like nothing happened.

It doesn't mean that there will be no consequences, either communally or legally.

A wife can forgive her husband for physical abuse, but he may still go to jail.

Right?

We may forgive someone who has harmed us, but it doesn't mean we're going to respond or act or continue to act with them like that thing didn't happen.

More and more today we're seeing stories coming out about abuses within churches and ministries.

We've heard about the Catholic Church and their child abuse scandals.

We've also heard of other denominations where there's infidelity or abuse of power, lots of things, those are coming out.

And there's a variety of reasons why churches and ministries and individuals tend to cover over those things and not talk about them.

But one of the reasons that is often brought up is we thought we could deal with this in-house as a community, that if we just forgave one another, then everything would be fine.

But it but it tends to overlook this reality that forgiveness doesn't mean that there are no consequences.

Sometimes women are counseled by the leaders of their church to simply forgive their abusive husbands because he seems to be repentant right now.

And if that is truly the case, if a husband wrongs a wife or a wife wrongs a husband, and then that is called out to the leadership of the church, and there's true repentance and true forgiveness, that is reconciliation, and that is glorious, and we should absolutely celebrate it and fight for it.

But when we have a wrong view of forgiveness, patterns of abuse can continue for years and decades.

Simply because someone says that they're repentant in the moment doesn't mean that they are long term, and we need to see the fruit of repentance and make sure that there are consequences for wrongs that are happening.

Forgiveness means, this is what forgiveness actually means.

It means giving up the right to retribution for an offense.

So if I wrong you, I owe you a debt.

And for me to repay that debt puts things back in their rightful balance, that's called justice.

And that's what we are, we are to fight for justice.

But sometimes justice isn't available to us, but forgiveness is the canceling of that debt.

I say to you, you don't have to repay me for that debt that you owe me.

And of course, when we talk about the canceling of debts, we think of the gospel, right?

This is the story of the gospel that we owed God a sin debt that was we could never repay.

And so we deserved the wrath of God for all eternity.

And yet God came towards us, forgiving us for our sins through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

And when we put our faith in Christ, we are forgiven because he has paid our debt and it has been forgiven of us.

And it's right here that the power of forgiveness comes to us.

We don't well it up in ourselves, we don't do our duty.

We look and we gaze upon the forgiveness we have been given in Christ.

When we struggle to forgive, and we do, forgiveness is one of the most difficult things that we as people and as Christians are called to do.

But if you're struggling to forgive, Jesus says, don't look at the one you need to forgive.

Look at me.

Look at me on the cross.

Look at what I have given you.

And when your heart is changed and renewed and filled with the love and gratitude of the forgiveness we have received, then you have the power to go to forgive another.

When we need help with forgiveness, Jesus was nice enough to give us a parable about it.

In Matthew 18, it's called the Parable of the Unforgiving Servants.

And I encourage you to go there if that's something you are struggling with today.

The last thing I want to say on the subject of forgiveness is that often forgiveness is not a one and done, especially for things that are kind of deep hurts and deep wrongs.

You may have been wronged by someone in the past and you have truly forgiven them, but you may find yourself months, years later, with anger, resentment, and that desire for justice to well up in you again.

And sometimes we can be kind of really surprised and ashamed.

But that that's very normal.

And so Jesus says, yes, those things have been dragged up in your heart again.

It's time for us to walk through the process of forgiveness again.

So it is not, it's not it's often not a one and done, but something that we will come back to again and again.

All right, final point, point four.

When all else fails, love.

Paul writes in verse 14: Above all else, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Paul closes this brief section fighting for harmony within the local church with this phrase, above all else.

You see what he's saying?

This is a catch-all.

When he mentions love, he's not tagging it on the end of a list of virtues or attributes or commands.

He is saying, love includes everything we've been talking about.

Like a many faceted diamond.

Love is the diamond, and all of these other things are part of it.

And this is why Jesus can sum up the whole Old Testament with two brief commands: love God and love your neighbor.

And love in this sense is not necessarily a warm feeling of affection for another, though that is a definition, a correct definition of love.

But rather, love as DC Talk taught us is a verb.

Any DC Talk fans out there?

Man, okay.

Love as Jesus taught and modeled for us.

The basic definition is to die to self for the good of another.

Zoe, our oldest, uh, just moved to college.

We took her there a couple weekends ago.

She's in Savannah at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

We are so proud of her.

According to Instagram, she's living her best life.

She has a great group of friends.

She's loving her classes.

Um, we're so, so proud of her.

Just this last week, Tuesday night, I went to bed early.

I don't think I had slept well the night before.

Uh I think I was asleep by or before 9.30, and I was so happy.

Uh just looking forward to a good night's sleep.

At 11:30, I was awakened by my phone buzzing on the bedside table, and so I uh grab the phone, blearily, stumble out of bed, try to leave the room so I don't wake Stacey.

It's Zoe.

And I answer the phone thinking, you know, what is this emergency that my daughter is calling me in the middle of the night?

You know, fear welling up.

Um well, it was a computer question.

Um, Dad, computer's not working.

Do you know how to fix this?

Uh okay, got it.

Um and we talk about it briefly.

Um as we're going, she says, Oh, do you want to say hi to everybody?

And I start to shake my said no, but it's too late.

She's like moving the phone around the room, and it's full of her new friends and buddies I've never met, and there I am, like with my hair sticking up, and um she says, Somebody thinks your beard is cool.

I'm like, oh.

Um ultimately I was not able to help her with the computer question.

And as we were getting ready to hang up, uh, I felt this anger stir in my stomach.

It was a righteous anger, I think.

Um, and it started to come up, and it was, you know, past my heart and it was coming up into my throat.

And I was about to say in a mean, grumpy voice, because it's the middle of the night, Zoe, don't ever call me after 11 unless someone is dead or dying.

And who's kidding?

Who am I kidding?

Don't call me after nine.

Right.

Um, but as it was coming up and I was getting ready to speak, I had this thought, I really miss my daughter.

I'm sad that she's gone.

Am I willing to give up a few hours of sleep?

Because uh, have no doubt, it will it took me three hours to get back to sleep, and that's normal for someone my age.

Um yeah.

Yeah, I love my daughter.

I miss her, and I am willing to give up my sleep for her.

That was love.

Self-sacrifice for her benefit.

Now, I I tell a funny mundane story because more often than not, way more often than not, love comes in the small, mundane moments of life.

And community is held together by those small moments when we're tempted to bitterness or contempt or selfishness.

Jesus tells us to love one another, to die to ourselves in this moment for the benefit of another.

But the beautiful beautiful thing about love is that it covers a multitude of sins.

That's what Peter writes to us.

Love can cover my teenage daughter calling me at 11:30 at night and interrupting my night of sleep, but it can also cover betrayal, murder, infidelity, and all of sin.

That's what we learn in the gospel.

That's when we look what we learn when we look at the Lord who loves us and gave himself for us.

And that's why Paul writes here in our passage that love binds everything together in perfect harmony.

See, when we experience that welcoming, humble, forgiving, hospitable love in Jesus, we want to make our home there, don't we?

And when others come into our community, and in our community, they experience that welcoming, humble, forgiving, hospitable love, that they want to make their home here.

That's the mission that the Lord has given us as his church.

To fight for unity, to fight for harmony through humility, compassion, and forgiveness, through love.

Because that is the heart of God, the beloved.

And as the world around us is coming apart of the scenes, these family estrangements are growing into trend, to simply cut off the people in our lives.

That's what the world looks like when sin reigns.

But when Jesus reigns, he gives us the power and the heart to love and to forgive, and to have a flourishing community.

Beloved, that is what the Lord is calling us to.

We fail day in and day out, but he meets us in our failure, and he forms our community to his glory and to our good.

Let's pray.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Thank you, Lord, for this good word.

We pray that you would um plant it deep within our hearts, that it would bear much fruit in this place, that we would benefit from a flourishing community, and that others would come in and experience it as well.

We pray this with thanksgiving in Jesus' name.

Amen.