Growing In Christ

Sunday, July 29th, 2007
Ninth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Colossians 2:6-19

6 As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. 8See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; 12when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. 13And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, 14erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. 15He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. 16Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. 17These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, 19and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

I don’t know the exact amount, but it was during my 15th year that I grew somewhere around three inches, maybe more in the span of THAT year. One of the lasting memories from that time, aside from seemingly outgrowing shoes and pants on a monthly basis, is the memory of lying in my bed and writhing in pain – at the aching and throbbing in my joints – especially in my elbows and knees – as I went through that growth spurt. I remember literally crying out for my momma late into the night to come do something – anything – whatever it is that only mothers can do to bring comfort to their children … and after a while, usually after Jimmy would get up out of HIS bed, which was between my bedroom and our parents’, and go tell momma that I was keeping him awake.

Obviously, I made it through. Any aches and pains I feel nowadays is due to a very different process from the one I was going through then, but that is another story for another day.

I’m afraid that before too long WE’LL be starting to hear OUR kids calling US for the same reason as I called my mother then. We’ve already had a few nights when Caleb has called out to us and, from his description of how he is hurting, he may be getting a head start on his growing pains.

Everything that grows goes through changes. Richard, the leopard Gecko we own, periodically molts, sheds his outer layer of skin as he grows bigger. He develops these milky white patches that extend along his body, or around his middle and legs, and then one day he’s back to his regular coloring, and sometimes there will be a patch of skin still in the case he is in, but most of the time we don’t see it – since he eats it.

An interesting bit of information that I gathered while on vacation, do you know how much of our body humans replace in the course of a year? In terms of a cell that is in any given place in or on our body, 98% of those cells are replaced by different cells at the end of a year. Pretty amazing, huh?

The Christians at Colossae were growing as well. Epaphras, who brought the Gospel to them, Paul calls ‘our beloved fellow servant … a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf.’ There is little doubt that their initial introduction to the good news of Jesus Christ was a solid foundation.

What becomes clear in the reading of the letter, though, is that although that foundation was laid, there were some influences in the Colossian environment that began to tinge and twist the direction of the deepening understanding of the Gospel on the part of the Colossian Christians. While it is not explicitly spelled out for us, there are hints about what those influences might have been. The references to circumcision and the law would lead us to believe that some of the problems in the church were coming from Jewish Christians who were insisting that gentile persons who came to know Christ go through the necessary religious rituals to become JEWISH before becoming ‘fully Christian’. There are references to elemental spirits – earth, wind, fire, the sun, the moon – all those point to the possible influence from pagan or animistic religions that predated the Jewish presence in the city, and probably the Greek influence as well. References to ‘philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition’ could be understood to be a reference to that movement … really more of a mindset … that today we refer to in general as Gnosticism – a philosophy and a theology that combined Christian elements, pagan practices, Greek philosophical thought and even some mystical Jewish ideas into an amalgam of understanding that was apparently heavy on the thought side, but not so much on the action side.

The central point of the entire letter to the Colossians is found in the first two verses of our text this morning:

6 As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

He gets it out there early, and then drives it home point by point. Sometimes, in order to grow, especially in terms of knowledge, we need to hear something from a different person that we may have grown deaf to from someone else who has been telling us the same thing for the longest time.

Paul brings out the central tenet of the Christian faith – the divinity of Christ, first by simply naming Jesus that – in duplicate – notice how he says ‘As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord,’ the word Christ is from the derived from the word Kyrie, which MEANS “Lord” in Greek. So in a way he is saying ‘Lord Jesus the Lord’. After naming Jesus Lord, he then spells it out as plainly as it can be said in verse 9: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” in case there was any question about what he meant when he called Jesus Lord.

He then runs through the list of what seems to be all those things that are trying to distract the Christians at Colossae from their true faith and calling – making Jesus Lord of their lives.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

You see, all these other things have their glamour, their interesting and even enthralling aspects, like the Shroud of Turin, or the remains of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat, or the time and date of Christ’s return; ultimately, they are not at the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. So while Paul called the Colossians back to the central truth of the Gospel, we here at Jerusalem are also called to remember that central truth of the Gospel that compels us to proclaim Christ as OUR Lord. That one act in which God in Christ redeemed us and gave us the chance to be children of God, inheritors of the covenant, and ‘little Christs’. We are called to LIVE OUT what we say we believe by truly making Jesus LORD of our lives.

(communion)

We are called to service and to sacrifice. That is why it is so important to remember that when we gather around the table that we remember that THAT is what it is all about.