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Oct 01, 2023

Colossians Intro

Passage: Colossians 1:1-14

Preacher: Jess Achenbach

Series: Colossians

Keywords: colossians, paul, intro

Summary:

Colossians Intro

Detail:

Colossians Introduction

“Alive in Christ”

Prayer

I have the privilege of introducing the next series or rather the next book that we will be going over.  With Pastor John coming back at the end of next month we looked for a smaller book that we could cover in 9 weeks.  So we picked Colossians because it has only 4 chapters.  Now having reread it several times in preparation for the message I feel like we could camp in this book for months. The section I am going to cover is in Chapter 1:1-14 so please feel free to follow along in your own bible or you can look at the screen.  One of the benefits of using your own bible is that sometimes if it is in a different version that I am using you can get different insight into the passage.  I will be using the NIV this morning.

 

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

2 To God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

 

3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people— 5 the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel 6 that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace. 7 You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, 8 and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.

9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12 and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you[f] to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

I am going to break this section into two parts. The first part will be verses 1-8 and it is here where I want to ask 6 questions that hopefully will give us insight into this book.  The second part will be the application component. Verses 9-14.

The 6 questions are Who, What, When Where, Why and How.  Whenever we start a new book, I think it is always good to find out the facts and context about the fundamental issues it is going to cover.

I am going to pair these questions up, so let’s start with the first two questions:

  1. When: was this book written?
  2. Where: Was Colossae and where was Paul when he wrote it?

There are four books that Paul wrote from prison and because of that they are called the prison epistles. Ephesians, Phillipians, Philemon and Colossians. In the last several years we have gone through two of the other prison epistles that were written to specific churches and the last one was written to an individual (Philemon) and is only one chapter long.  If you add up all the chapters from all four of these books there are only 14 chapters total, but wow what content.  I would encourage you to read through these books, but do it differently, read the first chapter of each one and so on, do some comparing and contrasting.

Anyhow, as for question #1 When, scholars have narrowed the timeline down to between 60 and 62 AD for the time that he was in prison. This naturally leads us to the second of the paired questions: Where?  Paul was in prison in Rome, and he was writing this letter to the Church in Colossae.  Paul came through the area on his third missionary Journey, and it is believed that he did not reach Colossae but he spent over two years in Ephesus and about 3 months in Phillipi. 

You can see from the map that Colossae and Ephesus are not far from each other and are in fact about 80 miles apart. A reason we have to believe that Paul had not visited is in verse 4 Paul says “We have heard about your faith” and in verse 7 “you learned it from Epaphras”. In the letter to Philemon in verse 22 he mentions that he would like to visit Colossae.

That covers the When and Where, now for the Who and How:

 

3.Who is this letter to?  Who were the Colossians?  These were Christ followers that had heard about the Gospel when it was spreading across Asia, as it says in Verse 5b-6 “about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel 6 that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace”.

The Church had formed when they had heard the Gospel while it was spreading across the “Whole world”.  The word Gospel comes from the Greek word “euangelion” where we get the word evangelism from- and it comes from a word that was connected to war.  The word means Good News. Many of the cities in ancient Greece were city states that warred against each other.  When the home city was waiting for news of that battle the messenger would come, and if he was wearing a laurel wreath around his head and was in good condition, they knew that there was good news “euangelion”, it meant more than good news, it meant victorious news. This is synonymous with the gospel, it is more than just good news it is Victoriously good news, we have victory over sin because of the of Christ redemptive work on the cross on our behalf.

While Colosse used to be an important city, by the time of this letter to them it had dwindled, in fact, this is probably the smallest and least important church that he wrote to.  The city itself was destroyed by an earthquake at some point around the time that this letter was written.

Who was the Author? -The Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul. Isn’t it amazing how God used the Holy Spirit to speak these words through human agents and still maintain some of their style or personality? 

 In II Peter 1:20-21 “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”          

Also, in II Timothy 3:16 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Holy Spirit spoke through Paul as he was writing this message and it was classified as scripture, not just by the church in Colossae but also by the early church fathers.

Colossians 1:1 “1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God”

Paul was an Apostle, and this bears mentioning because there are some criteria that scripture has set out for what an apostle is.  He has made it clear that he is a genuine Apostle chosen specifically by God himself, it wasn’t man that called him.

Gal 1:11 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.

Romans 1:1 “Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God”.

I Tim1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope

II Tim 1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, in keeping with the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus

Ephesians 1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God

At one point Paul was apparently accused of not being an apostle and so he defended himself.

1 Corinthians 9:1-2 Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord? If to others I am not an apostle, at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.

1 Corinthians 15:8-11 For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

 

I think Paul has made his case that he is an apostle.  The word apostle comes from the Greek word Apostolos which means “A messenger” or “one sent with orders”.  However, while there are other cases where people are “messengers” and the same Greek word is used, it is not translated Apostle, that is reserved for those the Jesus chose to specifically be classified as biblical apostles.  Paul argues that he was chosen by Christ personally on the road to Damascus, and in fact, the miraculous signs are proof positive that he indeed is a true apostle.  I would caution you to exercise discernment if you encounter any ministry where people claim apostleship. 

 

Because he has never been to this place before and does not know any of the people personally, he uses this title to lend credibility to his message, that and he references two other people.  Timothy who was with him, and Epaphras who was a Colossian himself, and the one that had started the church in Colossae.

The last two questions are What and Why.  What is the main theme of the book and why did Paul feel the need to write this letter?

Every book of the Bible has so much truth and knowledge that we can glean from, there is practical application that we can pull out and put into practice.  Some books have a real overarching theme though.  For example, we just spent eight months this year in Deuteronomy.  Can anyone tell me what Moses’ main push was in that book? Give me one word.  I’ll give you a hint, it starts with the letter “o”.  Yes, Obedience!

Before that we were in Romans, which has a strong emphasis on Grace, and we can think of other books like James that talks about works.  The main message of Colossians was the sovereignty of Jesus, that Jesus is God and Lord over all creation and that He is our Redeemer.  He gives instruction on how we are then to behave.

Why is Paul writing this?  There is a specific reason.  You see, just like today there were people that were bringing in false doctrine into the church there and the heresy that was taught was the root idea of what came to be known as Gnosticism.  Now that didn’t fully develop until the 2nd and 3rd century fully, but they were espousing similar ideas.  Russell Bradley Jones in his Survey of the Old and New Testaments describes it like this:

"heresy that denied the deity of Christ, excused evil conduct on the supposition that the body is evil, encouraged asceticism, limited the sufficiency of redemption through Christ, and gave rise to ritualism, speculation, and low standards of righteousness" (Russell Bradley Jones, Survey of the Old and New Testaments, p. 332)

They believed that the spirit was good and the material was evil.  Since God wouldn’t touch evil material, he spawned off lesser gods until one was far enough away from his holiness that it could interact with this created evil. Some of these spin off creatures were angels and some were demons, and they claimed that Jesus was one of the good ones.  But they were denying that Jesus was God, and so they were praying to Angels.  They also worshiped knowledge; in fact, the word Gnostic comes from the Greek word Gnosis which means “to Know”.  The philosophy attacked the deity of Christ and said you need to have knowledge and Jesus, but Paul makes it super clear in this book that All you need is Christ!

Another one of the ideas that was mixed in with this heresy was that you had to observe certain Jewish ceremonies, asceticism was a component of it.  We don’t know exactly where this philosophy came from but there is an idea.

The main religious sects at the time in Israel were the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Essenes practiced asceticism, which is the philosophy that material was evil, and the spirit was good, so they punished the body.  They were vegetarian, they were celibate, in fact they would adopt children so that they could raise them up and keep the theology alive.  Some of them would marry but allowed a three-year probationary period for their wives.  Another thing is they hated riches. The writer Josephus said that they worshiped angels.  Imagine that, these were the same ideas that were popping up in Colossae. 

In the three cities that were right near each other Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossae there were thought to be around 50 thousand Jews living.  We know that number because of a tax document from the period was found showing the amount of tax on the funds that the Jews were sending back to Israel, and they could deduce from that how many people it would take to make that amount.

The church in Colossae was made up of both Jews and Gentiles, and it seems that some of these people were bringing in their old beliefs and it was polluting the true gospel.

The problem was so concerning to Epaphras that he travelled over a thousand miles to Rome to see Paul and explain the problem. 

We see in verse 9-14

9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,[e] 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12 and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you[f] to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

In this passage he emphasizes knowledge, but knowledge of God’s will, not earthly knowledge that these others worshiped.  He is also telling them to live a life worthy of Christ.  We are alive in Christ because we have been rescued from darkness and have been redeemed by his blood.  Because of that our sins are forgiven, not because of some Angels we need to pray to, but rather solely because of the redemptive power of Christ.

There are 5 steps to living a life in Christ that we can find in this section, probably a lot more than five, but these are the ones that stood out to me.

  1. Be filled with the knowledge of his will through the wisdom and knowledge of the Spirit
  2. Bear fruit in every good work,
  3. Grow in the knowledge of God,
  4. Be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience,
  5. Give joyful thanks to the Father

 

How can we live this life worthy of the Lord?  How do we remain alive in Christ?  I brought an illustration today.

We are all sinners and when we commit our lives to Christ, we are made new and clean.

I wanted to have a visual representation of this idea of being filled with the Spirit and living our lives in Christ.

We were bought with a price and made Holy.

(Bring up clean glass- fill with water).

However, just like the Colossians, we allow some of our old habits or doctrines to seep back into our lives.  This lime juice represents envy, it’s green or perhaps greed, the lemon juice is bitterness, and the siracha is anger- lots of anger.  This looks like water, but it is vinegar, and it represents hypocrisy.  And this coffee is an example of all the other sins that we don’t talk about the secret sexual sins, lust, and fear.

This looks gross, and it smells vile.

Again, Paul says We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.

How is that done?

First of all, what are we doing to be filled with the Spirit?  We can be filled by spending time in the word of God.

We can be filled by meditating on what we have read, by journaling.

How many of us have a dedicated time of prayer in our lives?  Over the last month we have been focusing on fellowship.

To be filled with the Spirit and live a life in Christ we have to discipline ourselves and have spiritual practices that lead us closer to Christ.

In doing that we are made clean and look, now I can taste the water and it is completely clean.

We have been made Holy, we are saints looking forward to the inheritance that God has qualified us to share in.  The word “Holy” means set apart, we are consecrated to God. That doesn’t mean we don’t sin anymore, that won’t happen until we have been glorified with Christ in heaven, so for now we focus on being filled with the spirit of Christ, in order that we can have great endurance and patience and give joyful thanks to the Father that qualified us for the Kingdom of light.     END WITH BIBLE VERSE COLOSSIANS 3:16-17