Gospel Growth

Good morning, Church.

Our reading is from Colossians 1, 1 through 8.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.

Grace to you and peace for from God our Father.

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 upon you in heaven.

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

This is the word of God.

You may be seated.

Thanks, Paulina.

I think that's the quickest um post post-delivery new baby reading we've ever had.

Uh and also uh raise your hand if you didn't hear the scripture at all because you're just looking at that baby.

Yeah.

Uh thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church.

Let's pray and then we'll move into uh Genesis for today.

Just kidding.

It's not Genesis anymore.

Holy Father, we thank you for this time to gather together as your people, people that you have made by the power of your gospel.

Lord, we pray that we would come to know your grace in truth as we move through this letter.

Lord, I ask that you would make the gospel the foundational reality of our lives as we move through this.

That if it's become worn out for us, that we would see it afresh, that if we've never seen it before, you might take the scales off of our eyes that we might see it.

Lord, I pray for this time, this summer spent in Colossians, that it might be a transformative time for our church and for the lives of the members of our church, that we might see your gospel afresh.

The good news of Jesus Christ.

Lord, attend this time that we might see it.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So since the beginning of 2020, which was this year that lasted like six years, we've been moving in the same pattern of uh teaching uh during our preaching schedule.

So we've been doing Genesis in the fall, and we've been, excuse me, we've been doing Genesis in the first part of the year, like winter into spring, and then we've been doing Mark in the fall, and each summer we've done a different epistle.

So during the summer of 2020, we did the letter of James.

In the summer of 2021, we did Ephesians, and this summer we are moving through Colossians.

So we're having a change of genre now.

We've been in Genesis for how long do you think?

Very long.

I don't know if that felt very long to anybody else.

I think just me.

Judging by the feedback I'm getting, I think I'm the only one that remembers we've been in Genesis.

But we've uh been in Genesis for a while now.

I think over 50 sermons we've done in Genesis so far, uh up to chapter 33.

And that's a historical narrative.

So we're moving through and interpreting stories.

You can see that these events actually took place in time and space, in the very same history that we share.

And then God inspired Moses to write them down so that we could receive the proper interpretation and understanding of the way that God has worked in the world.

And so we move through those as tracing a story, a story that flows up to something that we are actually a part of today, as that same story continues on.

And now we're switching from looking at a narrative to a letter, an epistle.

And so a letter is very different.

It is uh not tracking a story, although sometimes there are stories in letters.

Instead, it's written from a particular man named Paul to a particular group of people who live in a small city called Colossae, the Colossians.

And when we're looking at a letter and we're trying to understand a letter, we're interpreting it differently because we're given much more direct doctrine and direct instruction in a letter.

So we're going to take our time through this throughout the whole summer, and we're going to see what it is that Paul has in store for the Colossians, what his hope is for them.

So if we're interpreting a letter, a good place to start is who is the letter from and who is the letter to.

So that's where we'll start.

And that's also where Colossians starts, hopefully.

Colossians 1:1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother.

Colossians 1:1

So this letter is written by Paul along with his partner in ministry, Timothy.

Now it is likely written at the same time that he wrote the letter to the Ephesians, and that he wrote uh this small letter in Scripture called Philemon, which is him advocating on behalf of this uh runaway slave named Onesimus.

These letters were written while he was in prison.

And so Paul is imprisoned while he's writing this letter, and he's writing to this church called this church where he's never been called uh, or the to a city with a church in it where he's never been called Colossae.

Now, engaging with Paul is one of the most thrilling things I think you can do in your life.

Paul is probably the second most influential person in world history, second only to Jesus, in terms of his impact on the world and the way that he in particular has framed our understanding of reality.

It's almost unthinkable.

He what I'm saying is he is already in your way of thinking.

And many of the intuitions that you already carry in your mind are informed by Paul simply by being a person who lives downstream of his life in the world.

He is like a bomb that goes off at the foundations of our culture and ripples throughout.

So much of the morality that we receive, of the uh intuitions of what marriage is, of what taking care of the poor means, of what a sacrificial life means, even of the honoring of the weakest and caring for the most vulnerable among us.

These are not moral intuitions that have existed in any cultures before Paul makes them expand.

To us, it seems so inevitable.

It seems so obvious that we would value something, even something like hope.

Do you remember when Barack Obama ran for president?

And the whole campaign was hope.

You know, that was the foundation of the whole campaign, is just that word.

And to us in our culture, that's so intuitively good.

He didn't have to say hope and then add an asterisk and say, it's a good thing, you know, we should focus on the future because the future could be better than the present actually is.

We needed no asterisk.

We understood what was implied by it.

Now, we understood what was implied by that because of the writings of Paul.

Hope is not a virtue.

If you read, uh if you read like an ancient Greek, uh hope is not a virtue that was valued.

And yet, with Paul, it's just intuitive for us.

He's thrilling.

Uh he should be read and studied among the greats.

He was a contemporary with Seneca.

And Seneca is having a bit of a moment lately because tech bros are now Stoics.

I don't know if you knew that.

But uh Stoicism is like having this resurgence, this real moment.

I think as our culture has become more and more dissolved and there's less good moral footing anywhere, people are really reaching and grasping for something to hold on to.

And Stoicism has offered a helpful uh personal sort of ballastone, I think, for people, um, particularly tech bros.

And the uh uh one of the great stoic writers was Seneca, and Paul and Seneca were contemporaries.

They likely they're both at their times like high-profile public intellectuals.

So you listen to who you're who we're reading when we're reading Paul.

We're reading somebody who is as comfortable with Seneca, who's a statesman, and the high-profile intellectual of his time, as comfortable debating Seneca in the public square as he is hanging out with a runaway slave and advocating for him personally.

This is the type of man that we're that we're reading and that we're dealing with when we deal with Paul, and that the center of Paul's story is his encounter with Christ.

He was raised up uh under one of the most famous rabbis of his time at one of the best schools in a very learned city, uh likely from a family of wealth.

He was a Roman citizen.

And he was a zealous Pharisee, even to the point of persecuting the church as it was growing in its infancy.

And so he would travel around actually murdering Christians.

And then he has this encounter with Christ.

He has what we call a Damascus Road experience, not sure where that saying comes from.

And he and during this, he has this encounter with Christ where he is transformed and he realizes Christ is Lord.

And that message becomes the center of his life, that Christ is Lord, that the Messiah who was long awaited for is Christ, and he was crucified, and he rose, and now he sits and reigns at the right hand of the Father.

And this message that he was sent to proclaim all over the Roman Empire, he does with such a zeal that he becomes the greatest of the apostles, the most effective of all the apostles.

That's who's writing our letter.

We're dealing with someone wonderful to engage with.

Verse 2 says, This is to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

So what's Colossae?

What's that city like?

It's a it's a mid-sized city.

Some commentators have said this is the least important city that any epistle is written to.

Which there's a lot of cities that had no epistles, so you know.

It was once a very important city.

It's uh in Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey.

It's on the banks of this river called Lycus, and it was once a really uh important city about 300 or 400 years before Paul was writing to them.

They were famous for this red wool.

They were a textile city.

They had this red wool that they were famous for called Colossian wool.

It's kind of like how our city is famous for omelets all over the world.

Now, the culture of Colossae is hard to know.

It's it's one of the cities that hasn't been excavated archaeologically, and so we can't speak too particularly about what it was like, but we can gather from what we know about the other ancient cities that were around it, what the makeup was and what the people were like who lived there.

Now, particularly in the religious assessment, they would have been a typical uh ancient Roman city, which would have had some honoring of particularly the old ancient Greek gods that would have been a part of them.

Some of them would have continued to honor those gods.

Others would have participated in the mystery religions of the day, which were, um I think if they if they happened now, they would just be like self-help seminars at like the conference room at a Hilton, and you would pay, and then you'd get pumped up, and then you'd pay some more to learn the better secrets.

Um, that's what the mystery religions were like.

And all over the Roman Empire as well, we know from Acts 15 that there were synagogues in every city throughout the Roman Empire.

So there was a Jewish presence throughout the whole Roman Empire.

And this was also at a time when many Gentiles would convert to Judaism because their culture was a lot like ours, in that there was a real dissolving of moral absolutes.

And many of the mystery religions and many of the uh Greek gods would uh sort of create a world where there was no real moral standard.

And so just like tech bros are rushing in to buy their latest Seneca and Marcus Raelia's book, Marcus Raelius' book, um the uh uh ancient Near Eastern folks would be uh going into synagogues to find that same sort of morality.

Now, what we see with the church in Colossae is that many of the converted Christians are having this intuition that they should just complete the whole task.

And now that they've converted to Christianity, they should go the rest of the way and seal the deal and finally convert to Judaism as well.

Now, Paul will be speaking directly to this misunderstanding of Christianity and this misunderstanding of the sufficiency, the absolute sufficiency of Christ to bring us to God.

That becomes a theme of this letter.

Ultimately, this letter is a plea to a very young church to mature in Christ.

That's what this letter is.

And the way that we mature in Christ, the way that as a church, the way that a young church matures in Christ is by understanding the grace that the Lord has shown to us in the gospel.

That's it.

There's no other tool, there's no other tactic or trick.

In fact, when you try and add in other tactics and tricks to this method, then you'll realize that you've dissolved it and you've lost it.

Because what Paul will show over and over again is Christ is absolutely sufficient.

Christ as our Lord completely accomplishes our salvation.

He has done the work.

And so now our lives will live in an absolute orientation towards Christ as Lord.

So let's see how he begins this letter to this young church pleading for them to mature in Christ.

Colossians 1, 3 through 5.

He 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.

See, this is part of the difficulty of epistles.

I just read that, and we all heard it, but we really need to slow down.

Because all of those words are things that we just think, yeah, that sounds lovely.

I know what that means.

Okay, let's slow down.

You know, I took an art class in college, not making art, looking at art.

Art other people made.

And one of the things that the professor said was that we don't have eyes that can see art anymore.

And so we need to train our eyes to slow down and gaze at a painting and ask questions of it and let them wander over it and be brought into some parts of it and then move out and take in the thing as a whole.

It takes time to engage with a painting like that.

So when we're working with a masterwork from someone like Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, this summer we're going to have to retrain our eyes a bit to slow their gaze.

So let's move through this.

Let's move through this first passage a bit more slowly.

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.

Now remember, this is a church that Paul has never visited.

He doesn't know any of these people personally.

And yet, consistently in his prayers, the way that he opens is he's letting them know, although we've never met, I thank God for you consistently in my prayers.

And not just God vaguely.

He says, I thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He's being particular, already drawing their fellowship, although they've never met, into the context of what Christ has accomplished for both of them.

And because they both stand under that umbrella, they have this fellowship where he can write, including them, our Lord Jesus Christ.

So he would pray, Lord, thank you for the Colossians.

Thank you for this church in Colossae.

We praise you.

And what was the impetus for this prayer?

Well, it it's a classic Pauline faith, hope, and love.

First, it he started praying since he heard of their faith in Christ Jesus.

Our faith, part of the challenge of our faith is it's unimaginably particular.

This isn't, he's not saying I pray for you because I've heard that you have faith in some higher power.

No, he's saying your faith in Christ Jesus.

It's that particular.

This is what we share.

This is the unity of our faith that we share together, that it is in Christ Jesus.

And so this is not that he's just heard of like a newly developing book club who got their hands on the Gospel of Mark and they're interested in reading it.

Or this isn't, you know, some folks gathered on a porch or a stoa.

That's why they're called Stoics.

They're porch folk.

Stoop Kid was another available name, but it didn't stick.

So Stoics is what stuck.

He's not just hearing of folks that are interested in these ideas.

He's writing to them because he's heard of their faith.

They trust in Christ.

So he thanks God for them that that's taken place.

And then this faith in Christ, listen how the sentence develops, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints.

So he is not just heard that they have this faith that's just a cognitive ascent, like they could be sent a scantron test and tick believe under Jesus.

Jesus is Lord, true or false?

True.

Scan it through into heaven.

No, their belief manifested in a real love for the saints in the body.

You know, there's it's kind of in vogue right now to carry a particular cynicism towards the church and towards our fellow Christians.

There's, I think, something of a I don't know what it is.

I don't know.

I think sometimes as Christians we just try and have it all.

But look at what their faith was marked by.

Love for other Christians in particular.

And how could it not be?

Because they see how we have been brought together and made a body.

We've been brought together and made a body by what Christ has done for us, by this hope that Christ has given us.

And that means we've been adopted into his family.

And that means all others that are adopted into his family, that we are brothers and sisters with them.

They are our family.

And what is it that maintains a family's unity?

It's love.

Love is what allows a family to cohere over time and remain a family.

Love does that.

And so they are brought into this family under Christ.

And how is it that they cohere together?

It's love that allows them to do that.

And so we ought to be marked by that.

These are, in a sense, marks of a true church.

And Paul prays for them and thanks God for them because he sees these marks of a true church.

They have faith in Christ, they love one another, and it's driven by something.

So where does this where does this faith and love come from?

Now, Paul uses this in a pretty unique way here because he usually talks about faith, hope, and love growing together out of an understanding of the gospel.

But here he makes hope foundational for faith.

And love.

So it is their hope that drives them towards faith and love.

Let's read the phrase.

It says, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Now it's likely that this is the way that Epaphras led his ministry in Colossae.

That this was a group of people who were experiencing the particular hopelessness that paganism requires, where you're actually taught to disregard the future because there's nothing for you there.

In fact, the inevitability of the future is death and decay.

That's always the truth outside of a story with resurrection in it.

In the future, there's death and decay.

But Epaphras, as he went to Colossae to minister, he likely led with this reality that in Christ we have hope.

And that hope is stored up for us in heaven.

Do you know what that means?

It's unshakable.

It's a certain hope.

It's absolute.

It's guaranteed that the future with Christ will be glorious and wonderful with him.

There are good things to look forward to.

And because they grasp that there are good things to look forward to, they participated in good things in their lives now, with an expectation that they will in some way last.

And so this hope that they have becomes foundational for their faith in Christ.

I'm going to hold fast to Christ and for their love for one another.

Let's participate in the kingdom that were promised now.

So Paul prayed, he gives thanks for the faith, hope, and love of this young church.

So what are the markers of a church?

You know, who knows the amount of mail that Paul got or people coming in, and they're like, hey, we've got this great church going on in uh, you know, just the suburb of Ephesus.

And uh it's a bunch of people gathered together, and man, I'll tell you what, they have studied the scriptures better than any other group of people that I've that I've ever heard before.

And Paul's listening and he's waiting for it.

And um, you know, they're they're pretty shrewd with each other, and they've been able to keep things pretty pure amongst themselves uh by keeping you know bad people out and and letting in only the good people, and Paul's listening for it.

And then and he's like, So, Paul, what do you think?

I know you've, you know, you've you write some epistles, and we'd love to have one of those for this Ephesian suburb.

What do you think?

You send us one.

And Paul's like, I I didn't hear a church there.

I didn't hear anything about about their faith in Christ and how that's transformed them.

I didn't hear anything of their love for one another, or that there are people that are defined by hope.

So I'm gonna write to Colossians, you know, the wool place.

And then he writes to Colossians.

I don't think that actually happened, but it's a helpful thought experiment.

Faith, hope, and love.

These are the marks of a church.

These are the marks of a church.

Oh man, we've got to remember these old truths.

Now let's see how does this happen?

Where does a faith, hope, and love come from that takes a people from just being random people to being a church?

Colossians uh one, second half of verse five and six.

Of this you have heard before, of this, the faith, hope, and love that he said, 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.

Okay.

Where does it come from?

It comes from the gospel.

What is the gospel?

It's like a coin that has been passed around so much that it's lost its embossment and we forgot what it meant and what it stood for.

It's a word that we become so comfortable with that we're almost afraid of using it and applying it too directly to the issues of our lives.

Perhaps if we preach too free of a grace, we won't be able to, with the energy we need, engage in the culture war as we ought.

If we preach too free of a grace, we'll get distracted and we won't be able to create the uh type of ordered and structured church life that will actually make us the counterculture that we need to be.

The gospel is something so central, so absolute, so necessary, that if we forget it, then we cease being a church.

If we forget it, then there is no source of faith, hope, and love within us.

It is the only thing that can generate this.

And Paul is writing this letter to say the gospel is what made you a people.

And it is the way that you have become a people before the Lord, and it is the way that you will remain a people before the Lord, and by understanding the gospel, you will mature and bear fruit and multiply.

There is nothing else that we can place at the center of our worship other than the gospel of Jesus Christ, which can sustain being there.

There's nothing else that we can place there.

Nothing else.

So let's move through this verse.

Because there's a lot of description of what the gospel is.

Now, most plainly, the I just realized I'm preaching from the wrong document.

I don't have any of my speaking notes in here.

I shouldn't have said anything, we wouldn't have noticed.

I guess those speaking notes aren't very helpful.

All right, so we're re-acquaint, we're re-acquainting with the gospel.

Now, the gospel is the message about Christ, who he is, what he has done, and what that means for us.

This is what the gospel is.

It's the story about Jesus.

So let's move through this verse and see if we can start to re-remember what this worn-out coin represented.

He begins with, Of this you have heard.

The gospel is something that you hear.

Something that you hear.

Now that's simple to do.

Now, something that you hear is news, and the gospel itself means good news.

And so it's something that you hear.

Now, now it's presented here.

We must understand it as news.

The word itself means good news, and what that means is it's something that's presented to you, that you hear from somebody else.

And that's precisely what took place for this church as Epaphrist shared it with them.

The gospel he describes as in the word of the truth, the gospel.

So the gospel is the word of the truth.

Well, notice Paul does not present the gospel as an invitation.

This isn't a, you know, we aren't in a mystery religion at the Hilton, where we're being offered this great opportunity for, I don't know, a timeshare or something.

Whatever they did in mystery religions.

I think they were mostly timeshares, by the way.

And if you take this opportunity, you could experience this thing in life, but if you walk away from it, well, it doesn't really affect you.

You know, it has holds no bearing on you.

This isn't an offer in that regard.

It is the word of the truth.

What does a life look like when it denies the word of the truth?

It wanders around in constant chaos and disaster.

You know, uh imagine trying to design a life like you would design an airplane, and you don't know that gravity pulls things to the earth at 9.8 meters per second, and you you design it out of accord with the rules of reality.

It won't fly.

The gospel is the word of the truth.

Now, I want to just kind of plant this here.

What does it mean that Jesus Christ, his death, resurrection, ascension?

What does it mean that that story is the word of the truth?

I just want to sort of plant that seed for the rest of our time in Colossians.

What could that mean?

It's not a fundamental law, right?

It's not like each action receives an equal and opposite reaction.

That feels like a word of the truth, doesn't it?

So, but Paul says the gospel is the word of the truth.

Don't you see?

In order to grasp this, our minds are going to have to change.

Our minds will have to transform in the way that we view the whole world, we'll have to shift in order for us to grasp what does this mean that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the word of the truth.

All right, let's keep moving.

Bears fruit globally.

Okay, so which has come to you as indeed in the whole world, it is bearing fruit and increasing.

Okay, so the gospel is, he switches this organic metaphor for the gospel, and he shows that it's it's something like a tree that's been planted, and it bears fruit, and then it increases.

Because you know what trees do?

And then if you start to get the biblical symbolism of what a tree is, a tree is something that stands up against time.

Because what it does is instead of devolving, it grows over time, and then it multiplies itself out so that it bears fruit, and then that fruit it grows up, and you know what?

It looks like uh it looks like the tree that bore the fruit.

And so it multiplies itself throughout time as it's growing and becoming more and more of a structure in the world.

It says the gospel's like that.

It's like this type of thing which has come into the world and it can't stop multiplying itself.

It's like once you've once the gospel has taken root somewhere, then it just grows up and it multiplies, and it takes root other places.

Do you see how he's describing the gospel as this type of thing that has this internal power, this internal energy?

You know, like what is it, where does the tree come from?

You know what I mean?

Like in the seed is all the all the energy that is needed for the tree to grow, you know, in good soil, which helps.

And that's planted and it and it just grows from this pattern that's inside the seed.

And he's saying the gospel is that type of a pattern, which when it comes into your life, it it shapes your life after itself, and then it multiplies your life out into the world, into this same gospel pattern.

And he's seeing it it's bearing fruit all over the world.

It's like it's unleashed, it can't be stopped.

It's like it's viral.

But if if we had a positive word for viral, do we?

No, we don't, right?

We don't.

Sorry, we don't.

It bears fruit locally as well.

As it also does among you.

It bears fruit all over the world as it also does among you.

Listen to how he's describing the experience of the of the Colossians.

He's saying, Have you seen how you've grasped the gospel and then you've become this people, and it's bearing fruit in your life in faith and hope and love that's spreading among the people of Colossae.

That same thing is happening all over the world.

You, little church, where I've never been, are a picture of this glory that's manifesting all over the world.

In fact, to Paul, they are part of the evidence for what he's claiming here, that the gospel goes forth and multiplies, it bears fruit and multiplies globally all over the world.

And he's saying, I know that can happen.

I know that this is true and what's happening because I can point to you, Colossians.

It's happening in you.

And who are you?

It's another part of the world, not a great city, and yet when the gospel takes root here, oh, people will know your name forever.

And what is it that causes the gospel to bear fruit and increase among us?

It is since they heard, since the day they heard and understood the grace of God in truth.

What is the strategy for how the gospel goes forward?

It is by hearing and understanding the grace of God in truth.

When that happens, you and it clicks.

You hear the gospel, and then one day you grasp it.

My sins have been paid for.

I am redeemed.

His righteousness is given to me.

I come before the Lord free of all my sin.

I am justified and secured in his presence.

He'll be a father to me and will provide all that I need.

I'm safe with him, I am cared for.

He is working to transform me so that these characteristics that look like his son Jesus will then manifest in me and multiply in me.

When the gospel begins to take root like that, you hear it, you understand the grace of God and truth, then it bears fruit and it multiplies.

It can't not.

That is the very pattern of it.

You know, when when a seed grows into a tree, when it takes root, when it hits that good soil, it can't not be a tree.

It's not like it grows up into a sapling and it's like, I really need to find myself now.

What type of tree will I grow up to be?

No, it has no such thing.

It's in the seed.

And the gospel is the seed.

And when it takes root in us, that's what grows up.

That's what we become.

It's the very pattern of the gospel, which is shown to us.

It is the word of the truth.

Now, how does it work?

Of course, it's by the power of the Holy Spirit, which makes this gospel growth take place within us and among us and out into the whole world.

It's by the power of the Spirit.

But how does the Spirit work to do that?

Does he possess our minds such that we think none of our own thoughts and we are, you know, sort of like taken up into some thoughtless transcendent space or something, uh, which we might find by like doing mushrooms with Joe Rogan or something like that.

And we, and then there we are finally able to transcend this uh world that we're in.

And that's the way the spirit works.

We know it was spiritual because it was so strange.

No.

Look at how ordinary.

It will shock you how ordinary you might think, oh my gosh, I've been missing it the whole time.

And it's been right in front of my face.

But look how absolutely ordinary it is since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

The Spirit doesn't hijack our minds.

The Spirit allows these truths to be possessed by our minds, so that we might hold them and understand them as our own.

So, look, if your life seems to be fruitless and you experience none of the goodness of the gospel, well, perhaps you don't get it.

Perhaps you don't get the gospel.

Because when you hear it and you understand the grace of God and truth, it bears fruit and it multiplies.

So, where do you return to for your growth?

You return to the gospel of Christ.

It is the word of the truth.

Now, how does this happen?

Look at what this language is.

This is this is re-creation language that Paul is using here.

Because where do we see this call to be fruitful and multiply?

It's right in Genesis 1.

It's right after he makes, it's to basically all the animals, but right after he makes Adam and Eve, he blesses them and he tells them to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth.

Be fruitful, multiply amongst yourselves, and then spread into the whole world.

This was God's interest from the very beginning.

And how did he accomplish that initial creation?

Do you do you remember what he used to do that initial creation?

Anybody remember?

Even before the dirt.

Words.

Words.

He used the word of the truth to make this creation that would be fruitful and multiply.

Don't you see that the gospel is doing this same project, the project that God had done from the very beginning.

He is using his word of the truth.

Once he did it from nothing.

From nothing he used his word and he created all that there is.

Now he does it from death.

And from the death that we are trapped in, the word of the truth, the gospel, brings this virus of life, which we grasp by understanding what Christ has done for us and seeing at the depths of his absolute grace towards us, by what he did when he went to the cross.

How do we receive something like that?

Well, for the Colossians, it was the simple, the final verse says just as you learned it from Epaphras, 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.

Faithful minister of Christ for them, a fellow servant with Paul, and he makes his way back to Colossae and he shares this good news.

God is no longer counting our sins against us.

There is a man who claimed to be God, and he died and was resurrected three days later.

He sits on the throne of creation now.

He is our Lord.

Christ is our Lord.

The God that we've been trying to get to, He has sought us.

The one who we've been rebelling against has found us.

And so these futures that we thought were headed towards nothing, in our lives which had no bearing, which were just flailing around, they find their center in this man, Christ.

They would say something like, How could you know a transcendent God, the God of all things?

Don't you understand it is impossible for the small mind of a man to know a transcendence like that?

And then Epaphrist would say something like, Don't you see that God desired to be known so completely, he made himself a man?

What type of a man?

Someone you could reach through and push through?

A man like you or me.

Yes, but what does what does this have to do with us?

What consider where your life is headed?

You know that it is headed towards death and ultimately meaninglessness.

This God took that death so that you would never experience it.

He became a man just like you, and then he died just like we would die.

And then he killed death when he did it.

So we are freed.

And he says, I've heard stories about gods before, about demigods at least.

I mean, look, don't we read the Odyssey every uh year before uh uh uh Odysseus Christmas, which is something that they had back then?

And they uh uh didn't he go down into Hades and rescue People, we've heard of gods going down, heroes going down into death before, is this story really so new?

And Epaphras says, You didn't hear me.

I didn't say he rescued people from death.

I said he killed death.

Death is dead.

There are no stories that you can tell after this one.

This is the final one.

That is why it is all centered on Christ, Him as Lord.

He has rescued you.

And you can receive it freely, just by faith.

You can rest in Him, know Him intimately.

He will give you His spirit.

And someone begins to get it.

And they realize what this rescue has meant and the depth of love that God has shown them, and all of a sudden they are gracious towards those in their home.

And then their home starts to understand it and realize that they're living in a different world than they had been living in.

And then the homes that they interact at begin to understand the same thing, and it bears fruit and it multiplies, and suddenly they realize we were once not a people.

We were just happened to be a part of the same city, and you would go to your mystery religion, and you would go to worship the Greeks, and you would go to try and make more money from the wool industry, and you would just be a slave, and you would be a slave trader, and yet here we all are a family now?

Don't you see?

Because of what Christ has done.

Let us make this the center of our lives.

This is the impact of the reality of what the gospel means.

And how when does it start to work?

When you hear and understand the grace of God in truth.

You cannot focus on the grace of God too much.

This is when it starts to happen.

When we become a people.

So Paul begins his prayer for this church to grow in maturity by thanking God that they have seen his grace and truth.

They've begun to become a people.

We would see his grace and truth.

We would begin more and more, as we understand it more and more, to become a people.

One of the ways that we proclaim this is through taking communion together as we all come to the same table.

In First Corinthians, oh I I didn't see if there are any questions, but I'm kind of running late.

So I would you get you have a question?

In Roman culture, how common was the phrase word gospel?

Was there competing good news around the area?

If so, what was the competing good news?

First century tech bros calling stoicism the good news.

Nice, I like it.

Um yeah, so gospel was a very common word.

It was a word that would have been used for the announcement of the birth of a new emperor.

It would be used uh to announce the victory over a war, but it really this is uh it's about uh the the announcement of good news, and particularly the announcement of a king, is the gospel.

And so by using this word at the beginning of the imperial age in Rome, where they're they're just getting used to, okay, we we we have one emperor now who's like royalty.

He's like royalty, who's he's exactly like royalty, who's a who's a god, you know, who's worth worshiping.

He covers the whole of our existence is is bathed in his authority.

And so they would proclaim someone like that with the gospel.

So Paul is saying in the same, he's taking the same language of gospel and he's applying it to God and and raising the stakes to eternal, glorious, cosmic stakes.

And he's saying, you know how you think of uh uh Augustus as the king of the greatest king you could possibly imagine?

This is the announcement of the king of the universe.

That he he died and was being made fun of for being called king of the Jews, murdered by the Romans, and then he rose three days later, and I'm telling you, he is king of the Romans.

That's what gospel means.

So, yeah, he's he's taking this phrase and he's he's raising the stakes to this cosmic level.

Wonderful question.

So this is something that we proclaim.

We proclaim this today by taking communion together, all of us coming to the same table to receive the same spiritual food, to proclaim the same gospel that the Colossians proclaimed today, and our same hope that rests in it.

First Corinthians eleven, starting verse twenty-three, it says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Holy Father, I pray that you would attend this time of communion.

Lord, that we might proclaim this same gospel by participating in it, that we might proclaim it to one another and be built up in faith as we look at one another, celebrating the same good news.

That Lord, you have come, you have rescued us.

We pray that it would take root in our hearts, that would knit us together in love, that would bear fruit and multiply throughout our city and out even into the whole world, as it continues to do, just as it did for the Colossians, it continues to do to this day.

Lord, I pray that we would see ourselves as a part of this story, that it would frame our lives completely, and we would learn what it means that the gospel is the word of the truth.

What it means that Christ is Lord over all.

Lord, we pray that by your Spirit you would attend that hope.

In Jesus' name, amen.