Scripture Lesson: Colossians 2:6-19
Last night I received an email from a guy named Jim H. He says, “Twice today you sent me back the email containing some cute animal pictures that I sent out a year an a half ago, without explanation. I don’t know who you are and I don’t think I have ever had you in my mailing list. You must be sending me back the email that someone else forwarded to you.”
I checked my sent box and found that I did send him two emails to this guy by mistake. I couldn’t believe I did it. I was actually searching for some jokes that Mike sent to me. After reading the email, I must have been trying to get back to the previous page by pressing the back button like that of a web browser, but on an email browser the back arrow which is located at the same place as the back button on a web browser is actually a reply button.
Once you press that reply button, it becomes a send button. Since pressing the back button didn’t take me to the front page, I must have instantly press another time trying to get to the front page. Once you press that top left corner twice the email went out. You know that I am a computer geek, and I just can’t believe I made that mistake, and it was not just once but twice.
There was another guy that made a mistake with his email and messed up a big time.
It was couple from north Oklahoma decided to go to Florida for a long weekend to thaw out during one particularly icy winter. However, they had difficulty coordinating their travel schedules because of their jobs. It was decided that the husband would fly to Florida on Thursday, and his wife would follow the next day.
Upon arriving as planned, the husband checked into the motel. On his way up to his room, he saw a computer room and decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left off one letter in her address, and sent the e-mail out to someone else without realizing it.
In Houston, a widow had just returned from her husband’s funeral. He was a pastor of many years who had been called home to glory. The widow checked her e-mail, expecting messages of condolences from relatives and friends that couldn’t come to the funeral. Upon reading the first message, she fainted and fell to the floor, and died.
The widow’s son rushed into the room due to the noise, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen showing an email which came to her with the following message.
TO: My loving wife
SUBJECT: I’ve arrived!
My sweetheart, I’ve just arrived and checked in. They have computers here, so I decided to send you an email. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. I am looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.
P.S. Sure is hot down here.
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A wrong message can seriously compromise people’s hope!
In today’s scripture lesson, Paul was dealing with the Christians in Colossae that had lost their hope because a false teacher there spreading wrong message to them. Paul was trying to correct the chaos created by the false teaching because, being a loving and passionate person, he hate to see Christians being misled. Paul gives them three instructions to avoid from being misled that you and I can also benefit from.
1 – Keep Making Spiritual Progress
The Bible says, “(be) rooted and built up in him (Christ) and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” (v.7)
We live in a fallen world. The fallen world has the elements of fallen forces that always pull us to a fallen state. If we don’t make progress toward spiritual maturity, we will be sinking back to our destructive state. Our spiritual life is like rowing a boat up stream; the moment you stop rowing, your boat begins to be taken backward by the current.
So we must keep making spiritual progress so that we won’t be taken in by the wrong message of the world. How do you do that? The Bible says we must be rooted and built up in Christ. Paul was using a tree as a metaphor for a Christian maturity. For a tree to be rooted and built up, it needs nutrition. How do you get spiritual nutrition? God’s word is has the ability to nourish our spirit. Reading and studying the Bible can keep us rooted and built up.
If you say reading the Bible is boring, I can relate to that as I have been there at some point of my spiritual life. But if you never give up, you will breakthrough to a level of hunger and thirst for God’s word, and at that point, when you pick up your Bible and read, you feel like chewing a mouthful of tasty and nutritious feast.
Jeremiah described his experience with God’s word like this, in Jeremiah 15:16:
Your words were found, and I ate them,
and your words became to me a joy
and the delight of my heart;
for I am called by your name,
O Lord, God of hosts.
Once you have that breakthrough, you will enjoy a higher level of spiritual maturity.
One of the reasons that we feel bored with God’s word is because we are sick. Some of you know that I was sick a couple of weeks ago with--strep throat. I just have no apatite at all. We had a barbecue at our home with a lot of tasty food Sophie had prepared; I didn’t eat a single piece. People were surprise how I could resist such yummy food. In fact, I was not resisting at all, I just had no desire to eat.
The same thing is with our spiritual illness, which make us having not apatite for God’s word. Many years ago, when I was in college, I was talking with a Christian friend and we talked about daily personal devotion. I said that I was involved in quite a lot of Christian activities, so I didn’t think personal devotion is anymore necessary since I am immersed in God’s work. He was surprised and said, “I just don’t know how to do without starting my day reading God’s word. It has just become so important to my daily life.” I also looked at him with surprised, and thought in my mind, “How does he get the apatite for reading God’s word and why don’t I have apatite at all?”
Later I tried to discipline myself to read the Bible daily with a help of a study Bible that has the commentaries to expose the meaning of God’s word. Sometimes it was just a drag. But gradually I breakthrough into regaining my apatite for God word and reading the Bible becomes an enjoyable, nutritious, and important meal that I must eat daily in order to live. Without that I feel I am not alive, I just exist. Sometimes we confuse living with mere existing. That’s two totally different condition.
Notice that Paul says that we must be rooted and built up “in Christ.” That’s the secret of reading and studying the Bible, to become rooted and built up “in Christ.” The key is, when you study the scripture, focus on Jesus Christ. Even the Old Testament scripture is written to point to Jesus Christ. We look at the Old Testament as prophecies and preparations for the arrival of Jesus Christ. When you put Jesus Christ as the focal point of your Bible study, the entire Bible starts to make sense to you. Why? Because, as the scripture says in verse 2 and 3, “...God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” What is says is that the more you know Christ the more you can solve the mystery of God; the more you know Christ the wiser you are; the more you know Christ, the more the hidden treasure of wisdom and knowledge is raveled to you.
Paul said by doing so, your faith will be strengthened. The Bible says “Without faith, no one can please God.” I am sure every one of you wants to please God and one of the ways to please God is to strengthen your faith.
2 – Resist the temptation to take shortcuts
As mentioned before, living in this fallen world as Christ follower is like rowing a boat upstream. The temptation is to stop rowing and take some shortcuts. We are living in a culture of taking shortcuts, from the mere Internet game players to company CEO’s.
If you know anything MMORPG’s which means Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, you would have known the websites like ige.com and mogs.com. If you play games, like World of Warcraft,” it will takes you months and years of playing the game to reach a certain rank with certain power, which is measured by the number of virtual gold coins you accumulate as you play. What these websites do is that you can buy gold coins from other players who have earned it so that you can instantly jump to a higher rank. In other words, people are selling shortcuts for the game players.
How do they do that? I recently read an article about companies in China known as gold farms. They hire people, who don’t have the education for a real job, to come a play the games all day long to harvest those virtual gold coins, and then sell it online to the American game players. Those people that are hired to play games are called gold farmers. Some American game players think paying $15 for 200 virtual gold coins from the gold farmers is very cheap because it saves them several months to earn those gold coins themselves. Of course some other game players think it is cheating. Some even think it is a new form of slavery—virtual slavery, or electronic slavery.
This is just an illustration of the culture we live in. People are getting used to taking shortcuts in playing games, in passing educational tests, in climbing the corporate ladder, or maybe even in wining the presidential campaign. Some people are selling shortcuts and we are tempted to buy them. We might think, “Everyone is doing it, I feel stupid not to go with the flow.”
But when it comes to spirituality can you really take shortcuts? I have read the Bible from cover to cover many times; can I sell that rank of spiritual maturity to you? Or can I, for myself, buy the spiritual maturity from someone else like Billy Graham, so that I would instantly gain his level of spiritual power to make a difference in people lives? He is very old now anyway, why not sell his spiritual maturity to me and pass it on? But there is no shortcut for spiritual maturity.
In this passage, some false teacher came and tried to lure these Colossian Christians to take shortcuts. Paul warns them sternly in verse 8, “See 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.”
The only way to spiritual maturity is through building a deeper relationship with Christ, through knowing him more intimately, through reading his words, and there are no shortcuts. Verse 9 says, “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” which means the entire God is in Christ. He is completely sufficient for you, so you don’t need anything else to satisfy your salvation.
3 - Hold fast to Christ
One of the problems with this shortcut addicted, or quick fix world is that if you don’t join the pack, you will be condemned and disqualified by those people who take the shortcuts and want to sell the shortcuts to you. What they try to do is to make you believe that if you don’t buy into the rules and rituals they are selling, you are not a Christian. The Bible says it’s not true.
Verse 16, “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths.” Obviously, some false teacher has been selling them the idea of Christian rituals such as that you must observe the dietary laws and festival laws. He must be telling the Colossian Christians, “you must not eat pork; if you eat pork you will not go to heaven. You must observe the Sabbaths or you will be condemned to hell. Things like that...”
The Scripture says, “These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” The rules and rituals have no substance; the substance belongs to Christ.
Again in v. 18, “Do 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.” The word “disqualify” is translated from the Greek word, “hymas katabrabeueto” which also means to cheat you, or to rob you of your prize. These cheaters pretend to be pious, humble and worshiping angels and dwelling on visions but they are internally puffed up, meaning they have no substance because they rely on human way of thinking, being their own head, and don’t connect with Christ who is the real head of the body.
Here is another secret of Christian maturity. “... 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.” We are nourished by connecting closely with Christ because he is sufficient for you and me. There is no need to look for a different route or buy into deceptive shortcuts because there is no shortcut to grow, and there is no other way to grow. Jesus said, “I am the way the life and the truth, no one comes to the father except through me.”
Don’t let anyone or anything compromise your hope. To prevent that you must keep making spiritual progress, resist the temptation to take shortcuts, and hold fast to Christ from whom the whole body get nourished and grow “with a growth that is from God.” May God bless you all, Amen!
