Colossians 1 (1990)

by Luis Bush

Jesus Christ, Lord of the universe, hope for the world. I discovered the meaning of that statement in what has happened in Argentina in recent years. An Argentine citizen, with a British mother and Argentinean father when the Falkland Island crisis hit, I found myself in a crisis. Serving in a church in El Salvador at the time they were all rooting for Argentina. Knowing of my background they asked me: "Who do you think those islands belong to?" After thinking about it I said: "I think those islands belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Lord of the universe and the Lord of those Islands. An Argentinean Nobel prize winner by the name of Borges tried to capture the significance of the Falkland Islands crisis said it was just like two bald men fighting over a comb.

But that was not how the young people of Argentina saw it. To them it was a crisis of authority. Waking up to the fact that they had been misled by their earthly leaders an authority vacuum was created of enormous proportions leading to military, political and social upheaval. But in the midst of the chaos the written Word and the living Word of God were lifted up and multitudes of Argentineans came to recognize that it is Jesus who is Lord.

Carlos Anacondia was a factory worker and deacon in his church when one Wednesday evening the pastor of the small church he was attending did not show up. He was invited to give a short message. Despite the encouragement of his wife who was sitting beside him, he did not budge. A second time his name was mentioned but he said to himself "I can't preach." Even with his wife's nudging he did not move. The third time his wife's nudge became a jab and he jumped up and spoke. God blessed his word and so he was invited to speak again. This time he said, "Yes." At first he preached in the church, but it was too small, so would go to the soccer fields, set up his equipment and preach. Hundreds then thousands ... 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50,000 came to his meetings.

His message was typically on the authority and Lordship of Jesus Christ. In the meetings held in Mar del Plata, 90,000 public decisions were made for Christ. Never had anything like this been seen in Argentina. But the apostle Paul had said it before in his letter to the Colossian Church in Chapter one and verse 19, "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him," that is Christ, "and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."

And then a young man by the name of Carlos Gimenez stepped into the authority vacuum left by the Falkland Island fiasco. He had experienced the Lordship of Christ in his life giving him victory over a drug addiction problem. He rented the plush, European style theater in the heart of Buenos Aires to share his testimony and the fact that there is power in the name of the Lord. There were five meetings a day and people would line up all around the block waiting to get in. Today it is a church of 20,000 people. Gimenez learned what Paul had said to the Colossian Church in chapter one and verse 21, "Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation - if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel."

Into that same authority vacuum in Argentina walked Omar and Marfa Cabrera. Prior to entering a new town or city for ministry they would fast and pray and enter into battle with the principalities and powers of the air proclaiming Jesus to be the rightful Lord of that town or city. They understood what Paul was saying to the Colossians in chapter 1 and verse 16:

By Him all things were created, things in heaven or things on earth, the visible and the invisible, the material world and the spirit world, whether thrones, the highest grade of angelic beings, or lordships, dominions, powers, or rulers, or authorities.

As creator He is the rightful Lord over the spirit beings in the universe. North American missiologists have gone down to examine what is happening in Argentina with their macro missiological magnifying glasses and have said, "yes, 'tis so. In fact the Church led by the Cabreras, with over 100,000 people is likely the second largest church in the world.

Argentina has been discovering that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the universe and the hope for the world. That is the theme of this Urbana Conference and of the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Colossian church.

Background

Despite the fact that he was writing from jail in Rome, Paul had learned both through revelation and personal experience that Jesus is Lord. Some of you may be imprisoned emotionally as you sit here today, torn apart on the inside by broken relationships or dysfunctional family background memories. Others of you may be feeling shackled by a deep sense of inadequacy. Others of you may be just plain sleepy and many of you - as am I - are overwhelmed by the pressures of our day. Paul's got a relevant message for us right here and right now so listen up. Jesus is alive and he is Lord of the universe and hope for the world. This is unveiled to us in Colossians 1 perhaps more clearly than anywhere else.

What prompted Paul to write to the church in Colosse was the disturbing news he had received from Epaphras who we read about in 1:8. Epaphras was himself a Colossian, according to 4:12, and the prime evangelist to Colosse for the past six years previous, was a credible witness, known by Paul and likely converted in the mighty movement of the Holy Spirit that had taken place in Ephesus as recorded in the book of Acts, chapter 19.

The news from Epaphras as a Bible student has suggested was "that a strange disease hatched in that hotbed of religious fancies, the dreamy East, was threatening the faith of Colossian Christians. A peculiar form of heresy, singularly compounded of Jewish ritualism and Oriental mysticism had appeared among them."

The college campus today is the hotbed of fanciful philosophies and ideas of all kinds. In fact, the same winds of false teaching from Hinduistic roots in the Far East mixed with rituals are sweeping across our campuses all over America today in makeshift disguises such as Transcendental Meditation or what has been called "The New Age Movement."

Now, to refute the false teaching that was threatening the Colossian church this letter was written as a plea for the fuller knowledge found in Christ by forcefully presenting the exalted nature and unmatched glory of Christ as the fullness of God's person and the fulfillment of God's plan.

Big Idea

God's revelation is clear and human history bears witness too. It is Christ and Christ alone who is Lord of the universe and hope for the world. And Jesus Christ, as Lord of the universe displays the fullness of God's person, and as hope for the world he anticipates the fulfillment of God's plan.

The chapter divides into two parts, the first establishing the fact that Christ is Lord of the universe and the second of Christ as the hope for the world. The first section deals with fullness and the second fulfillment. In part one, the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord of the universe is shown to be the fullness of God in three spheres; the church, the creation and redemption.

A. Christ is the fullness of God in the church 1:1-14

1. First, as expressed through praise for what He is doing through the local church.

a. The fullness of God in the local church is expressed by faith, hope and love.

Verse 4 "...we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints - the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you ..."

It is a faith which reaches upward to God, a hope which reaches forward to the future and a love which reaches outward to your brother and your sister. John Stott recently put it this way:

The secret of our relationship with one anther in the Christian Church, especially when we have our differences, is "Jesus Christ is Lord." To despise or stand in judgment on a fellow Christian isn't just a breach of fellowship, it is a denial of the Lordship of Jesus. I need to say to myself, who am I, that I should cast myself in the role of another Christian's lord and judge? I must be willing for Jesus Christ to be not only my Lord and Judge, but also my fellow Christian's Lord and Judge ...I must not interfere with Christ's Lordship over other Christians.

b..And Christ is also the fullness of God in the universal church.

Verse 6 " ... All over the world the gospel has been bearing fruit and growing we read in."

If that was true in Paul's day how much more so in our today. When you consider that just 90 years ago considerably less than one out of every 10 believing Christians lived outside of the West, whereas today it is estimated that almost 8 out of every 10 Christians live outside of the West, you recognize the Lordship of Christ in fulfilling His promise when he said: "I will build my church." In fact this two-thirds world church is bearing much fruit and itself becoming a sending church so that by the year 2000 there are expected to be more missionaries from the two-thirds world than from the Western world.

2. From praise for the expression of Christ as the fullness of God in the church we move to prayer 1:9-14

The key word in this section is fullness found in vs 9. Paul prays that there might be fullness crescendo of spiritual expectation. This is what he would pray for you and me that we might be full of the knowledge of the

1. Will of God
2. Wisdom of God and the
3. Walk worthy of God

All of which will be demonstrated as Paul expresses in his prayer in the life of the Christian ...

a. By bearing fruit in spreading the gospel around the world
b. By growing in the knowledge of God
c. By being strengthened with God's power d. By giving thanks to God in all things
(Now Christ is not only the Lord and fullness of God in the church but also ...

B. Christ is the fullness of God in creation 1:15-18

This years' conference of Urbana 90, this book of Colossians and this chapter is about Jesus Christ and his sufficiency. It is what has been called: "Paul's full-length portrait of Christ" as:

1. ... God's son 14
2. ... the object of the Christian faith 14 3. ... the redeemer 14
4. ... the image of God 15
5. ... the Lord of creation 15 6. ... the head of the church 18 7. ... the reconciler of the universe 20

"He alone, with mysterious and unassuming ease unites in himself God and man, nature and supernature, eternity and time, heaven and earth, past and future, all worlds and our world, all transcending sovereignty and all sufficient saviorhood that in all things He might have the preeminence."

Yes, Jesus is Lord of the universe. How could you exchange him for anything else? How could he be compared to any fanciful quasi-Eastern religious new age-ish occultist set of syncretistic practices? Where are his equals? Who can match him? Why, all others were made by him. Impostors seek to steal the center stage of history and. the human heart, not least of all the heart of College students. But these impostors come and go again. Peter Kuzmic's final challenge at this Urbana will be as coming right out of new Eastern Europe is testimony to the fact that Marxism is marching off the center stage of history. Now its modernity that seeks to capture the modern mind in which media is replacing message and fun is seeking to be the substitute for content.

C. Christ is the fullness of God in redemption 1:19-23

The word fullness appears three times in this first chapter. vs 9 in Paul's prayer for the Christians, here in vs 19 assertion that in Christ, the whole fullness of the godhead dwells and in vs 25 the expression of the ministry of the Apostle Paul as one who has been called to steward the fullness of the word of God.

All the fullness of God dwells in Christ, not some of it, not only a portion of it but the entirety of God's attributes; his completeness, his sufficiency, all his power, all his righteousness and all his justice, and all of his unstoppable love and grace is all contained in the person of Jesus Christ.

In redemption Christ "makes peace through his blood shed on the cross", verse 20. As such he is the one who brings reconciliation between man and God and between man and man. Verse 21 reads: "Once you were alienated from God and were his enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish, free from accusation.

As a teenager growing on the streets of one of the largest cities in Latin America, I was alienated from God, a gang leader, running the streets barefoot, requiring each gang member to do one bad deed per day to remain in the gang. That was until the police caught up with me as did my parents but I still wasn't either reformed or transformed. Then it came time to do the military service in Argentina. I remember presenting myself to the officer on duty who was taking the down the names of the new recruits. When it came to my turn he wrote down the letters PUFF. Despite my efforts to explain otherwise he left the name as he had written it and the list was used to make the name tags and mine came out PUFF. The other soldiers would call be PUFF which in Spanish is pronounced POOF. As you can imagine, I had an identity crisis. Then I heard the good news of Christ's death on the cross for my sin. This time I was ready. Christ became my Lord and Savior.

It is Christ who can bring reconciliation to a country torn by racial prejudice as we will be hearing from Caesar Molebatsi of South Africa.

Part Two: The Lord Jesus Christ as the hope of the world and the hope of the fulfillment of God's plan is developed in 1:23-29.

Here we can observe a concern for fulfillment, the hope for fulfillment, and the way of fulfillment.

A. The concern for fulfillment

Paul described his concern for fulfillment of God's plan in 1:23 when he wrote: "This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, have become a servant." In his mind the gospel "was bearing fruit all over the world".(1:6) While Paul is certainly dramatizing the rapid spread of the gospel into every quarter of the Roman empire within just three decades from Pentecost and thus refuting the charge of the false teachers that the Christian faith was a local or regional faith he is also underscoring a vital truth.

As Christians we should be concerned with fulfillment, that the gospel be proclaimed to every creature under heaven in the whole world, not just locally. And as Paul notes in verses 6 and 10, that gospel bear fruit in every good work maks a difference in the community where it has been planted through God's people incarnating the fullness of Christ there. The report is out that the baby boomers, of which I am one, just barely, and the baby busters are not concerned about the whole world but rather their own world. May we prove that report to be wrong.

And there is one part of the world that more than any other desperately needs the gospel today. If you were to look at a world map, you would observe a geo-political region from 10 degrees north of the equator to forty degrees north of the equator from West Africa to East Asia that could be called the 10/40 window where the evidence of Christ's Lordship is strangely missing:
This is a significant region because it is the cradle of civilization, and where God's dealings with man were worked out as recorded in the biblical account. Yet this is the region of the world where Christ's Lordship is most clearly absent in our day. Here you will find almost 100% of the people living in the 55 least evangelized countries. Here you will see over 8 out of 10 of the poorest of the poor. In fact in the 10/40 Window there are 2.3 billion people who are both among the poorest of the poor as well as least evangelized.

This is where the quality of life is the lowest, where clearly Satan and his demonic host have usurped the rightful place of Christ. This is where Christ needs to be exalted as Lord. And if you and I are to be concerned with the fulfillment of God's plan as Paul shows that he is in Colossians chapter one without neglecting our commitment to other parts of the world or the community in which we live, we must specially focus on the 10/40 Window.

B. The hope for fulfillment

Webster defines hope as "the highest degree of well-founded expectation of good." Three times in this chapter you find the word "hope each time it is used it unfolds a new dimension of meaning: The content of hope is described in (1:8) as faith and love that spring out from it. Biblical hope is never egocentric, but always centered on Christ and on God. Its heart is not the blessings of the individual but the universal kingly rule of Christ.

A second dimension of hope reveals its nature as a gift. It is held out as a gift of the Father's grace offering salvation in the gospel. The third dimension of hope underscores the basis for hope (1:27). It does not rest on good works of man but on the gracious work of God in Christ Jesus. Christ is therefore called "our hope." J.B. Philips paraphrases verse 26-27 this way: "That sacred mystery which up till now has been hidden in every age and generation, but which is now as clear as daylight to those who love God. They are those to whom God has planned to give a vision of the full wonder and splendor of his secret plan for the nations. And the secret is simply this: Christ in you! Yes, Christ in you bringing with him the hope of all the glorious things to come." Jesus Christ is the basis for hope for this world. The verse has been paraphrased "Christ is being revealed in the midst of the church as the hope of glory before the watching eyes of the nations."

It has been said that the two great truths which every Christian must learn is first, that all the fullness of God is in Christ and second that all the fullness of Christ is in the Believer. Both of these life-transforming spiritual realities are developed in this chapter. Hope looks to the future and it is an open future for you. Hope is the glimpse beyond, not yet seen but which soon to be seen, not quite fully actuated now but it's going to happen. (That raises the question, how can I be a part of this glorious plan of God to make Christ shine through me to bring hope to a world in need? This has to do with ...)

C. The way of fulfillment

1. Become a servant of the gospel (1:23b)
2. Be prepared to suffer as Paul was (1:24-25)
3. Hope in Christ not in yourself (1:26-27)

Now if you are like me about this time you may be feeling hopelessly inadequate. That certainly was true for me. For my father who never got a college education the most important thing was the education of his four boys. While the other three excelled academically, I struggled. In fact, in junior high and high school I would always compete in class but not for first place, rather to avoid coming last. My mother was the kind that kept all the report cards and my teachers were consistent in saying: "He tries hard but he just does not have it together." Then the brothers started going to college and things got hotter for me around the home. The eldest graduated from Cambridge University in England. Next, the second brother graduated from Yale undergraduate school and then Harvard Business School. And just at the time when the ratings of Stanford passed those of Harvard the other graduated from Stanford Business School.

To provide a little incentive I was sent to a finishing school in England where the teacher/student ratio was about one to five. After a couple of years of that it came time to apply for College. There was suspense in the home. I decided to write to 20 different colleges on four continents, including one in the Afrikaans language in Johannesburg. In each case the response was something to the effect of: "we just do not have the kind of program you are looking for." When all seemed lost, the last college to reply cracked open the back door and let me slip in, one the main reasons was because my father had a friend on the board. It was the University of North Carolina. Talk about feeling inadequate. Yet I learned that it is Christ in me, not me in me who is the hope of glory.

(That's why as Paul writes at the end of the chapter "We proclaim him..."

4. Admonish others (1:28-29)

Wherever you are you in life, in almost any career you take make these ways your ways and you will contribute to the fulfillment of God's plan for the nations. Yet, we can be encouraged as we here the echo of the words of a cobbler turned evangelist by the name of D.L. Moody who not far from where we are located, almost exactly 100 years ago, with much less reason to say it, expected the fulfillment to come by the end of his century and said: "It Can be done, it ought to be done, it must be done." While it was not done by 1900 out of it came the student volunteer movement that led to a major thrust forward for the cause of Christ in this century.

As we contemplate Christ as Lord of the universe and hope for the world as we reflect on Christ - as the fullness of God's person and the fulfillment of God's plan I invite you to prayerfully consider the words of D.L. Moody who said in his "An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere" 100 years ago:

"The command of our ascended Lord, the voice of an enlightened conscience, the impulse of the new nature, the leading of the providential pillar, the working of transforming grace, the grandeur of the opportunity and the peril of delay - all these converge like rays in one burning focus, urging us onward and forward to the outposts of civilization and the limits of human habitation with the Word of life." "It can be done, it ought to be done, it must be done."

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Colossians 1 (1990)

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December 27-31, 2009