Striving to Present Every Man Perfect in Christ - Radford Martin

For my message, I'm going to look at Colossians chapter 1. The first part of this letter, which I would say we're looking at today, is, I would say, an encouragement to the saints in Colossae and an exhortation. So we're going to pick up where we left off in verse 19 of Colossians 1. And I'll just go ahead and read verse 18 to gain some context so that we aren't just breaking into the hard pan.

So verse 18 says, "And He," being Jesus, "is the head of the body of the church, who is the beginning and the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence." So this is obviously talking about Jesus being the supreme being, being the preeminent one in all things in our life.

So then we'll go ahead and read verse 19. And the way I'm going to do it for this morning is read a verse or a verse or two at a time and then make comments about it.

Verse 19, "For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross."

So the first thing that kind of caught my attention was this phrase, "Pleased the Father." So multiple times in scripture we read about things pleasing the Father. The Father is pleased to do something. I thought of a few references. "It pleases the Father to give us the kingdom." That's in Luke 12, verse 32. "He gives life to whom He is pleased to give it." That's in John.

This is Jesus talking again in John. It says, "I do only what pleases Him." We're thinking about what pleases the Father, the Father being pleased. Ephesians says, "He has made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure."

So I always think about, so mankind is made in the image of God. So our emotion that we feel mirror to some extent the emotions that God feels, I believe. So I'm bringing this down to myself to make it practical, to be easier to think about it. So we just got done having Christmas and everything.

And I, of course, got my kids some little gifts. I was very pleased to give my children gifts.

I didn't look at it. I didn't look at it as an expense. I was more than willing to give my kids gifts. It pleased me.

In the same way, the Father is more than willing to have Jesus be the mediator and the redeemer for us. It pleases Him. It brings Him pleasure.

So fullness. So I read this actually out of the Bible we have in the footnotes.

It says that fullness was a term used by the Gnostics to describe all the spiritual beings and forces that they believed as intervening between man and God. Of these, they saw Jesus as just one of the mediators and just one force in one level of existence.

And I tried to do a little more research on that. And all my research revealed pretty much the same thing. So I'm just, I think there's some truth to that at least. So Paul here refutes this narrative by calling Jesus the fullness. He is everything.

There are no levels. He is it. There is nothing more. Jesus is all that we need for us to be reconciled to God.

So reconcile all things to Himself.

So whenever I think of reconciling something, usually finances come to mind. You reconcile your checkbook to the bank statement. Not sure how many people do that nowadays. I just have an app that I just go by. But you take the bank statement, and it comes every month. And then you look at your checkbook ledger, and they got a match. Otherwise, there's problems.

And you have to figure it out. I can remember, so in my family growing up, my mom took care of all the checkbooks and the reconciling. And I remember a few times that things didn't reconcile, and it was a big problem.

Trying to get it, where did this money go? Why isn't it reconciling? So reconcile all things to Himself.

When you do reconcile, go to reconcile accounts, and things match up, then there is all kinds of peace about it.

I've had a few experiences with trying to reconcile things. And yeah, it's just an overwhelming sense of accomplishment when that happens.

Having made peace insinuates that there was contention before and not peace.

So He reconciled all things to Himself, having made peace between God and man, between His kingdom, the heavenly kingdom, and the earthly kingdom.

And like I said before, when the accounts don't reconcile, there's tension. When they do reconcile, there's all kinds of peace, all kinds of restfulness.

We are reconciled through the blood of His cross. The way we are reconciled to God is through His Son, Jesus' death on the cross, through suffering, through the shedding of blood. Why is blood required? I think recently we've talked about this in Sunday school, I believe. There is something life-giving about blood. We're not commanded to eat blood. We're commanded not to eat blood.

And to eat blood, we are ingesting something else's life.

Life is sacred. Therefore, blood is sacred. So in some sense, God took the perfection, thinking about reconciling again, took perfection and reconciled us to it. So the perfection is a statement from the bank. And then He takes our lives and makes it match.

Obviously, our lives being co-joined in Christ, having Christ as part of our lives, makes it possible for us to match His standard of perfection. I think that's utterly amazing.

So verse 21, "And you who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death to present you holy and blameless and above reproach in His sight."

So the you here, Paul was writing to the saints in Colossians, and by extension, it's us. And us who were once alienated. So this letter is for us as much as it was for the ones in Colossians.

So alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works. So we were alienated, separated from God.

Evil starts in the mind. All evil deeds start as thoughts and desires. Jesus says in Matthew, "Out of the heart comes evil thoughts, and then comes sexual immorality, thefts, murders, etc."

I want to note here that we were separated from God by wicked works, it says. The opposite of wicked works are good works. Good works are imperative to be not separated from God.

So present you blameless in the Father's sight.

So even though we were in this state of thinking evil and having evil desires, in our reconciled state, we will be presented to God holy and blameless. Who wants to be presented to God in this way? I think everyone on earth does.

Again, it's utterly amazing. I can't wrap my head around it. But that's God for us. He is pleased to do that, just like a father is pleased to give his children gifts.

Jesus presents us blameless and above reproach. I just think that's utterly amazing, a miracle, a great gift from God. But there is a caveat. Verse 23, "If indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard, which was preached to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, became a minister."

So let's look at this first verse statement here. It says, "If we continue in the faith, not wavering, not being wishy-washy." Seems like society today expects us to be sort of wishy-washy, wavering, unsure, all those synonyms. And to be steadfast and grounded, you're looked on as stodgy, unmerciful, and unsympathetic.

So then it's easy to just write you off.

So the challenging part for us, though, is to be steadfast and grounded in the correct things, in the principal things, and not just our own opinions and fancies and desires.

So what is the hope of the gospel? Are not moved away from the hope of the gospel.

So when we witness or share the gospel with someone, what is it that we are trying to convey to the listener? Is the goal to convince them to be a better person with better habits? What if the person that we are speaking with is a moral person with values?

Then what? What are we trying to convince them of? Well, later on in the chapter, Paul says what this hope of the gospel is.

So preach to every creature. So note, Paul says preached past tense.

It does not say we are preaching. So whatever was preached, whatever was given to us, was already finished. We aren't waiting on more information so that we can respond in the correct manner. Everything that is required to be redeemed has already been given.

It's up to us now.

So I had a question here. How was it preached to every creature? And my thought was, by Jesus' death, is that what he was talking about? Jesus' death, the whole world knew about it.

Jesus died once, but he died that one time for everything living and that will live. Obviously, when Paul wrote this, I wasn't living. But I think the resurrection of Christ is for everyone that will live, everyone that has lived. It covers everything.

So every creature brings to mind that it involves the animal as well.

So verse 24, "I now rejoice in my sufferings for you and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his body, which is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God, which was given to me to fulfill the word of God."

So this was a new thought to me. We have a part in Christ's suffering.

It seems like Paul is saying that he himself makes up the part of the suffering that Christ was lacking.

That Christ's afflictions were lacking and that we can make up that part.

I'm sure there's comments that you all have on that, and I'd love to hear that. Maybe at fellowship meal. But we should count that his big honor is Paul does.

Paul says he rejoices in that. Now, when I suffer or I face affliction, I don't necessarily rejoice. But Paul rejoices to fill up in the flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.

For the sake of his body, which is the church. I think that's the key. If we're going to rejoice in afflictions, why? It's for his body. It's for the church. We are the church.

And I think if we have as the church the whole reason we are suffering, we look at that instead of the suffering, then we can rejoice.

Verse 25, "Of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God, which was given to me for you to fulfill the word of God. The mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to the saints, to us. It's been revealed to us."

So verse 26 says it's a mystery. Mystery. Mystery that has been hidden and is now revealed to us. So what does it mean, mystery? Well, the mystery, I believe, is what is God doing and why? All through the Old Testament, that question probably could be asked.

You had the fall of man and then this whole X amount of years of sacrifices, rituals, wars, fightings, conquerings, and God's seeming allowance of sin. Jesus said adultery was permitted back then because of the hardness of their hearts.

If someone would stand back and say, "Well, I know God. God's loving. Why is he telling us to kill? Why is he telling us to conquer this other nation? Why is he allowing sin apparently or seeming allowance of it?"

All that would be a mystery. What's he getting at?

Yeah. What's in the end going to happen?

It's still a mystery for some people to this day. They read the Old Testament and all the killings and stuff that happened, and they look at God today and, "Well, how can a loving God do all that?" And it's a mystery to them.

They can't reconcile it, talking about reconcile. They can't somehow reconcile it and think through it.

But Jesus came, and oh, that's what God was preparing. All this time since the fall of creation, all up through, he was preparing mankind to receive Christ.

Now it has been revealed to the saints. If you aren't a saint, you probably don't see it yet.

For the great father of faith, Abraham, and all those, they obeyed God. They had a relationship with God, but they couldn't see into the future of deep down in. They could have asked, "Why? Why do you want me to do this? Why do you want me to do that?"

It wasn't possible to the mystery wasn't revealed to them yet. Let's just say that.

Okay. Verse 27, "To them," which is us, the saints, "God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." Right there it is. What is the mystery? What is the hope of glory?

Christ in us.

That's what I was saying to Abraham and all these great men of faith. Although they had a relationship with God, they didn't have Christ living inside of them.

But now we do. Praise God, we do.

So this next verse, I'm going to change the words a bit to make a point. Verse 28, "Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man about hell, that we may prevent every man perfect in Christ." That's not at all what it says. "Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man about salvation, that we may prevent every man perfect in Christ."

No, not that either.

Here's the correct verse. "Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may prevent every man perfect in Christ Jesus."

So there's something about wisdom that will be saving in the end. We study wisdom to become perfect.

With wisdom comes maturity, and with maturity, perfection. There are plenty of wisdom books to study: the wisdom of Sirach, wisdom of Solomon, Proverbs.

So I encourage us all to do that. If we want to be perfect, that we may present every man perfect. So we have to be taught in all wisdom.

Verse 29, "To this end, I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily." To what end?

Well, the verse right previous says to what end? That we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.

So that should be our labor as well, along with Paul, to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. And to do that, we need to teach every man in all wisdom. And to do that, we have to be living in wisdom ourselves. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything.