A Worthy Walk

Every generation has had to of Christians have had to face some form of heresy.

So as Christians today, if you see me wobble, it's the hip.

When you think about Christians, what we're facing today in terms of our culture wars, or in terms of what we're trying to do in our culture, it's not unusual.

In the second century, there was a guy running around named Montanus who thought he was the Holy Spirit.

And so they had to deal with him.

Then the next century, they had a guy named Arianus who didn't believe that Christ was eternal.

He said Christ was a created being.

And so they had to deal with him.

And so we started getting some of the creeds that we now have, the Nicene Creed and some of the doctrines.

Then there was Pelagian who was teaching that there's no such thing as original sin, and that we become sinners when we sin.

And yet Scripture is very clear that that's not how it happens.

We sin because we're sinners.

We were born.

We're sons of Adam.

And so we are born in sin, and that is why we have a proclivity towards sinning.

And then we have surprisingly a new theology of health and wealth, where Christians are supposed to be rich, God wants you healthy, He wants you wealthy, you're supposed to have perfect hair and white teeth, and that's how God blesses you.

And then you get to the 21st century where we are today.

And we have uh multiple things that we're dealing with in terms of the culture, but one of them is uh a heresy called syncretism.

And syncretism is sort of the golden chorale of theology.

Have you been to Golden Corral?

Fine fine dining, all right?

Uh how many of you go with Ziploc bags in your purse?

Uh yeah.

A little take home, a little treat for take home.

Um the um golden corral theology of syncretism is Jesus plus.

And so what you do at the Golden Corral is you take a little bit of this, and you take a little bit of that, and you take a little bit of this, and you take a little bit of that.

And now, you know, we've gone through three generations of or three iterations where people's faith is, first of all, back in BC, the Greeks believed in fate.

Everything was already predetermined by the stars, predetermined by the gods.

You go to the oracle of Delphi, and you know, this is a priestess, and she's getting high on vapors from the earth, and she tells you something, but it's all determined by fate.

Then you move into a next generation, well, the next era of Christianity, where things are determined by faith.

You have faith in God, we have scripture, we have the Holy Spirit.

Our culture in America has now moved into a third world order or a third generation, which is feelings.

And now truth is determined by feelings.

You no longer are worried about fate, you no longer are worried about your faith.

You are in touch with your feelings.

And that's what syncretism does.

Syncretism, you get in touch with your feelings, and then you go through the buffet line of theology, and you say, I'll have a little bit of this, and I'll have a little bit of that.

Oh, that looks like Brussels sprouts.

We'll move on.

You know, and then we move on to the dessert, and we do things that pump up our feelings and help us.

And so Paul was dealing with two heresies that were very, very similar to what we're dealing with today.

And I'm gonna read for you the first couple, if you're with me, turn to Colossians 2.

But in Colossians 1, Paul makes the statement.

He says that his vision for the Colossian church is that they would be able to walk in a manner that's worthy of their calling.

So he lays out in the very first chapter, here's what I want to do, here's what my prayer is for you, here's what I'm struggling with you for, is I want you to walk out your Christian faith in a manner that's worthy of Christ, in a manner that's worthy of Christ's calling you.

And then in chapter two, he kind of lays out what that looks like, but in the meantime, he's fighting two heresies.

So let's read uh chapter two, portion, uh a portion of chapter two.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have on your behalf.

And for those who are at Laodicea, Laodicea, another church you may have heard of in Revelation.

Um, if you go to Starbucks, um, you either get a hot coffee or an iced coffee.

You don't get a lukewarm coffee.

If you get a lukewarm coffee, you ask for it back.

You take it back and get something hot.

Um, Laodicea is the church in Revelation that Christ spits out of his mouth because they're lukewarm.

I wish you were hot, I wish you were cold, but since you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth.

Laodicea was 10 miles down the road.

It'd be like um Colossian, the Colossae Church had sort of, the city of Colossae, which is in Turkey, had sort of declined.

They were a church of former glory.

I grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Flint, Michigan is a city of former glory.

Um GM used to be Boomtown.

Uh we always used to say that when GM got a cold, Flint got the flu, um, because there are so many industries that were uh dependent on General Motors.

It'd be like uh say hypothetically if uh a big factory came to uh Blacklick or New Albany or Johnstown, and and and that area started booming and property values started going and buildings started going up, and everybody started moving out to like Black Lick or New Albany, that's hypothetically.

Um and and Columbus started to cave in a little bit.

So Columbus would be the Colossae.

They they weren't what they used to be, but there was a church there, and Paul was writing to them.

Everybody had moved to Laodicea.

And so he says to them, I'm struggling for you, and for all those who have not personally seen my face, Paul had never been to Colossae, like he'd been to other churches, that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love and attaining to all the wealth that comes from full assurance of understanding, resulting in true knowledge.

Remember that knowledge of God's mystery, that is Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

I say this in order that no one may delude you with persuasive argument, for even though I am absent in the body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith, verse 8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.

So Paul had two heresies that he was dealing with there.

One was Gnosticism, and you'll see that this is similar to what we're facing a little bit today.

The first one is Gnosticism, it's spelled G-N-O, and that's where we get, if you take the G and drop the G and put K, K N O, it's where we get the word no or where we get the word knowledge from.

Gnosis or Gnosis is knowledge or knowing.

And so here's what I was dealing with with Paul.

A group had come in, these Christians had established their faith in Christ, and they said, that's great, but you need something Jesus plus.

We have a secret wisdom, we have a secret knowledge, we have true knowledge that will get you into the afterlife.

So the Gnostics, first of all, were very into spirituality.

They were not non-spiritual, they were they loved spirituality.

Um my wife and I had a chance to go to the Grand Canyon a couple years ago.

And on our way down from the Grand Canyon to Phoenix, we stopped off in uh Sedona, Arizona, a very spiritual town.

They've got all kinds of rocks, all kinds of crystals, all kinds of dream catchers, all kinds of tarot card readers, all kinds of poem readers.

They are really into spirituality.

Not so much Jesus, but they're really into spirituality, and that's what the Gnostics would be.

They're very spiritual people.

They believed that the body was irrelevant, so you could do anything you wanted.

So sexual immorality wasn't a problem because there was no such thing as sexual immorality because your body didn't matter.

Our goal was to get out of the body.

This is just a shell, and we'll go to heaven, and we don't have to worry about what happens in the body.

Also, everybody is unique and special.

Everybody's unique and special.

So Gnosticism was a way for you to express your uniqueness, your specialness.

You had a special spirituality, you had a special word from the Lord, you had a special knowledge, you had a special mystery, you had a special wisdom.

And you'll see those words in Paul's letter to the Colossians because he's taking on head-on the Gnostics.

And you see that in our world today.

People are special.

They have their own special spirituality, they have their own special word.

What's true for you is true for you, and what's true for me is true for me.

You have Jesus, good for you.

I don't have Jesus, good for me.

It doesn't matter because eventually we're all going to end up the same place.

We're all special, we're all unique.

My feelings tell me what's right, and your feelings tell you what's your right.

Why can't we all just get along?

And so what you see is that a little bit of 21st century Gnosticism starts to creep in.

Well, along comes a second group to colossae, and these are the Judaizers.

Whenever you see Iser after a name, it's usually not good.

If someone's a moral person, that's okay, but if they're a moralizer, they've got some things they want to share with you.

Uh, Judaizers were people who were part of the Jewish faith.

They said, You got Jesus, good for you.

Well, Jesus happened to be a Jew.

So we've got 617 rules that you need to follow.

And if you read the rest of Colossians chapter 2, you'll find out that Paul takes on circumcision, he takes on Sabbath, he takes on new moon festivals, he takes on all the traditions of the Jewish faith and says, listen, you don't need Jesus plus Judaism, you just need Jesus.

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

And so the summary of Colossians could be sort of like Jesus made it all, Jesus paid it all, and Jesus is all.

The only thing you need to worry about is Jesus.

And it's not about spirituality and it's not about religion, it's about a relationship.

It's about a relationship with the living God who sent his living son to die for you.

He made you, he paid for you, he's inside of you.

And all you need is a relationship with him.

We're talking about kingdom truth, not special wisdom.

Not the thing with special wisdom was that nobody could verify it because it was special, right?

It was it was unique to that person.

And so um Paul comes along and says, listen, we need to clear things up.

It's Paul believed very clearly that belief impacts behavior.

There's a movie out right now.

My wife went to see it with one of her girlfriends.

It's called Um Inside Out 2.

I don't know if you've seen Inside Out 2.

Riley's a little girl, she's got all kinds of characters in her head representing sadness, depression, anger, joy.

A new character shows up in Inside Out 2, and the character is anxiety.

And the way that anxiety causes Riley, the little girl character, to go nuts with anxiety is that she starts to supplant a different belief system.

So she convinces Riley to believe what was true, she puts a new truth in, a new truth in.

And so now, you know, your parents don't love you.

You know, and she starts to create doubt, which leads to anxiety in the character of Riley.

And that's exactly what these people are doing.

They're saying, Jesus isn't enough, you need our knowledge.

Jesus isn't enough, you need our rules.

And what Paul is saying, Jesus is enough.

Jesus is enough.

Jesus made it all, Jesus paid it all, and Jesus is all.

So you'll find words throughout the book of Colossians like understanding, knowledge, true knowledge, spirit, true wisdom, spiritual wisdom.

Paul loves metaphors.

Paul is the master of metaphors.

He uses the body, right?

He tells you that the elbow doesn't need the earlobe.

And you know, you can't say that to each other because we're all part of the body of Christ.

Christ is the neck, Christ is the head.

Um he he goes and uses the body quite a bit.

He also uses um athletics.

I don't think Paul was particularly athletic.

If you study Paul, he was probably a short little guy, not very athletic.

I think he was one of those kind of nerdy scholar guys, probably university president.

Um but he loved, he loved to watch athletics.

And he was trained not only in the Hebrew educational system, but the Greek.

So you'll find things like um, I buffet my body so I won't be disqualified, I'll get the crown, we need to run the race set before us.

Um we talk about I wrestle not with flesh and blood.

Paul was very much into the athletic part of the Greek culture.

He also used uh farming, he also used um adoption.

That was a big metaphor for him.

But in Colossians 2, 6 and 7, Paul kind of goes on a trail, and not only does he use metaphors, he mixes them all up.

He's got four or five metaphors in two sentences, and what I want to do is share with you seven words today that you can take away and see what Paul's vision is for the Colossian church.

When he says, I want you to walk in a manner worthy of Christ, he doesn't just leave them at that and say, Well, good luck.

He says, This is what a worthy walk looks like.

This is what it's gonna look like.

So he he takes off and he starts mixing his metaphors.

Um, you'll know the seven words because they all end in I T Y.

I'm gonna have a lot of words up here, but the words you need to remember all end in ITY.

So the first metaphor is walk.

And and the word for walk is parapateo, and the word parapateo starts with P-E-R-I, and it's where we get our word perimeter.

So it means the big walk of your life, the walk of your whole faith, but it also means the little steps you take in your walk.

Galatians says, since we walk by the Spirit, big walk, let us take each and every step according to the Spirit.

So he's saying, I want your big walk to be according to the Spirit, I want your small walk, each step, and the word for this is the totality of your life.

I want the totality of your life, your career.

He goes on, talks about jobs, he talks about marriage, he talks about the relationship between parents and children.

He hits on every area of your life.

I would also say that this also encompasses the idea of your past, your present, and your future.

Christ has it all.

He was there before you were born, he's here now, and he'll be around after you pass.

And while you can't alter your past, you can bring your past to the altar.

And Christ can be Lord of your past.

He knows what has gone on before, and he can redeem it.

And 1 Corinthians says he wants to take your mess and turn it into a ministry.

He'll take what you did before, and the encouragement that you have gotten through the Spirit, through you, you can now encourage another who's going through the same thing.

So whatever mess you had, he wants to turn it into a ministry, but he wants to, you have to give him the totality of your life.

So he says, walk, but then he goes and says, be rooted, which is an odd thing to say to somebody you just told to walk.

Walk, but be rooted.

Um those would seem to go against each other.

So we've gone from transportation now to agriculture.

And the idea of rooted is that you will be in the world, you will be rooted in the world.

The great theologian Bob Dylan said, You gotta serve somebody.

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.

That was on Bob Dylan's one Christian album.

Um slow train of coming.

Um you will either be in the world and it will be conforming you, squeezing you into its own mold, or you will be in the word and you will be slowly transformed into the image of Christ.

One of those two things will be true about you.

So what are you into?

What do you ground yourself in every day?

Where is your grounding?

And the word here is identity.

The typical or the consummate definition of insecurity is to have your identity wrapped around anything that can be taken away from you.

If your identity is in a job, it can be taken from you.

If your identity is as a husband or wife, it can be taken from you.

As a mother or father, it can be taken from you.

Your socioeconomic status, it can be taken from you.

If your identity is in anything that can be taken from you, that is the very definition of insecurity.

So what can't be taken from you?

Your identity is a child of God.

You are the son of God, you are the daughter of God, you are joint heirs with Jesus.

And we used to sing that song many years ago.

Mark, you might know that.

Uh, as we traveled this side, I'm so part, I'm part of the family of God.

That is your identity.

That is where you need to be rooted and grounded in, is your identity as a child of God, and that cannot be taken from you, and then you'll be secure in your identity.

The next word that Paul uses is built up.

Now we've gone from agriculture, now we're going to architecture.

And the idea of built up is just what you think it means.

It means to grow.

You have laid a foundation, but now you need to build up the building.

And what we want to talk about here, so we have the idea of grow, but the word here is maturity.

There are two types of people that exist in the church.

I hate it when people label that, right?

I don't like labels, but there's two types of people.

Um those who agree with me and others.

Um, but there are people who grow old in their faith, and there are people who grow up in their faith.

And there are some men who are 42 years old and they're still dealing with what they are dealing with when they were 22.

And it's like, you know, you're a father now.

You've got kids who are looking at you.

It's time for you to step in and be the spiritual leader in your family.

And in Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews says, you know, you ought to be teachers by now.

But you still need milk given to you.

You're still being spoon-fed, the baby things.

You know, you Matthew's good, great, John's good, great, James is good.

But maybe it's time to break the gold leaf on Micah and Hosea and Habakkuk, right?

The Italian prophet, Malachi, um Malachi.

Um, you know, maybe it's time to discover that last book of the Bible, right?

Not maps, Revelation.

Um it's time, he says, that you should be eating meat, but you're still drinking milk.

And you need to grow up and not just grow old in the faith.

And so Paul is saying, it's time to grow up, church.

The next word is established.

Now we've gone from agriculture to architecture.

This is an engineering term, and really the word here means useful.

It's actually a term that has to do with a bridge that's solid enough that somebody can actually walk across it.

You are, as a matter of fact, in the verse just before uh chapter verse 6, it says, I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith.

That's actually the word, that's actually what the word means is stability.

You are actually useful.

Second Peter, in the first chapter of 2 Peter, Peter lists a whole bunch of things.

He says, add to your faith knowledge, your knowledge, self-control, your self-control, wisdom, wisdom.

He then he adds kindness, and then he says, add to all this brotherly love.

And he lists the whole list, and then he says, For if these things are in you and increasing, it will render you neither useless nor unfruitful.

If Satan can't keep you from coming to Christ, he will try to make you useless.

He will make you ineffectual, he will make you unfruitful.

If he can't stop you and your wife from coming to Christ, he'll go after your kids.

If the family knows Christ, he'll make you useless at work.

He'll keep you shut up at work.

I mean, I want to, you know, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

Well, but not at work.

Not in my neighborhood, right?

Not with my extended family.

So, yeah, you're going to heaven, but you're not taking anybody with you.

That's Satan's plan.

If he can't get you, his plan is to get you to be useless and unfruitful.

And and Paul is saying, you know, I want you to be so stable of a bridge that people can actually use you for something.

You're useful to the kingdom.

It's not just about a fire insurance policy for you not to go to hell.

Then he gets to Colossians 1, where he says, walk in a manner worthy.

So the word is worthy.

And the word here.

Is a sense that it corresponds.

This is a time, this is a this is a business term.

We're talking about trading.

And if you would put some gold and you'd put a weight, and the weight needed to correspond, then weight needed to be true on the scale.

So if it said it was one kilogram, it really needed to be one kilogram and not false.

You weren't putting your finger on the scale, the cheat.

What was going on?

So it's your walk actually corresponds with your talk.

A lot of people know how to talk the walk.

We're good at talking the walk.

We have all of our Christianese words, we have all the terminality, blessed.

Are you blessed?

I don't even know what that means, blessed.

Um, but we have all kinds of Christianese.

We talk our walk, but can you actually walk your talk?

And so is a sense the word here is integrity.

Integrity.

What comes out of my lips is balanced by my life.

Think of it as a plane.

If you fly somewhere, do you want the right wing or the left wing?

You know, most of us want both.

Right?

So think of the right wing, your right wing, my left.

If the right wing is your lips, and the left wing is your life, and they're both on the plane.

If they're both on the plane, then your witness will fly.

Then Paul uses, finally, another metaphor, and this one's in Ephesians.

Ephesus was the other main city in Turkey, Asia Minor at the time.

And uh, so Ephesus and Colossians are very similar.

If you study one, you should study the other.

But he uses the famous one, this you may have studied this in a Bible study before, but it's the armor of God.

The armor of God.

So the first thing he says is we have a helmet, the helmet of salvation, and it protects your mind, your brain, but literally your mind.

If you come to Christ, if you know Christ as your Savior, you know that it literally transforms every way in which you see the world.

You think differently, you see differently, you see things differently.

You realize that maybe a former way of living is no longer allowed in your new way of life.

The helmet of salvation literally protects you and covers your mind.

Salvation transforms your mind.

One of my favorite speakers is a guy named Canon J.

John from England, and he was saved out of a Greek Orthodox religious family.

And his parents, after he got saved, thought he joined a cult.

And they said, You've been brainwashed.

And he was 17 and he had suicidal thoughts before he came to Christ.

And he said, Mom, if you knew what was in my brain, you would want it to be washed.

His brain was literally washed by the Holy Spirit, and now you see things and you think things differently.

The helmet of salvation.

The next one that Paul talks about, I'm only going to do a few, is the breastplate.

And that protects the heart.

The breastplate of right living, the breastplate of righteousness, covered the heart.

In Western culture, we think of the breastplate or the heart as the seat of our emotions.

We get that from Hallmark, we get that from Valentine's Day.

You know, the heart is where you broke my heart.

All these things were the seat of emotions.

But actually, the heart was the center of the will.

It was the center of decision making.

It's where you could have where you found you had the heart to do something, is really what kind of where that comes from.

And so the breastplate of right and moral living protects that ability to make good and right decisions.

The problem is, how do you know what's right?

How do you know what's good?

How do you know what's true?

Well, Paul has a solution for that.

He calls it the belt of truth.

The belt of truth literally is the belt of the soldier would wear around his waist, and what would buckle into that is the breastplate of righteousness.

There were clips, and so the breastplate of righteousness can't be slogging around like this because it wouldn't protect your ability to make decisions.

How do you know what's right?

It's connected to the belt of truth.

How do you know what's good and pure and lovely?

It's connected to the belt of truth.

It's not slogging along, connected to your feelings.

Your feelings and the belt of truth covers in biblical times, in heap to the Hebrew, the center of their emotions was the kidneys and the liver, not the heart.

So if you want to guard your emotions, if you want to control your emotions, if you don't want your faith to be a roller coaster ride of feelings, how do you rein them in?

The belt of truth.

You wrap truth around your feelings.

You wrap truth around your emotions.

You find out what is good and right and true, regardless of how you feel about it.

Your feelings aren't really the point when it comes to deciding what is true.

And the word here that I would put, kind of go across all of this, the word here for truth is the um the IT word of authority.

What is the authority in your life?

Who tells you what to do?

You?

Are you the God of your life?

I mean mine.

Is it my emotions?

Be true to yourself.

Which self are you going to be true to?

The one on Friday night?

The one on Sunday morning?

The one on Monday night?

Which self are you going to be true to?

I've got lots of selves.

You know, I told Lena she's been married to five men, all of them me.

Right?

Because the 22 John isn't the 62 John.

Right?

What do you mean to be true to yourself?

So who's the authority in your life?

Then lastly, I would say the last phrase in verse 7 says this: overflowing with gratitude.

The word gratitude is a Latin word.

It means Eucharist, or I should say the Latin word Eucharist means thankfulness or thanksgiving.

Eucharist, if you may have heard this term before, is what churches that have a perhaps a higher liturgy.

It's what we call the Lord's Supper or communion, the bread and the wine.

We call that the Eucharist, celebrating the Eucharist.

It's a celebration of Thanksgiving.

The Greek word for what we use, and we use communion.

Here at one church, you probably celebrate communion, and we use the grape juice and the cracker or something.

The Greek word for uh communion is koinania, and that is really a gathering of God's people.

In the formal churches like the Orthodox Church, they call it the divine liturgy, and that literally means the people's work.

So why do I tell you all that?

Because for Paul, the idea of Eucharist, the idea of celebrating, it was a corporate experience.

We were celebrating it as a body.

I think Paul's vision for one church, for the Colossians church, is the same as perhaps Greg and the leadership here for one church.

Because in order for you to have the totality of your life surrendered to God, in order for you to take each and every step according to the Holy Spirit, in order for your identity to be rooted in Christ, for you to be mature and grow up and not just grow old, for you to be stable and to do it with integrity, you need the seventh word, which is community.

It needs to be done in the body of Christ.

And that's really one church.

If all of this is done with integrity, it's one voice and one church.

And then you have one and you have community church.

You have one church.

So it's right there in Colossians 2, 6, and 7.

That's the vision.

So how do you walk in a manner worthy of Christ?

You give him everything, your identity is wrapped in Christ, you grow up, you're stable, you're useful, you're serving.

Not to be a doormat, but you're actually a bridge that people can trust.

You're trustworthy, you can be walked on.

You have integrity and you're thriving and serving and being useful, not only to the kingdom, but to the community.