Apostles Church

The Letter has been focusing on the Grand Story of God in Christ – Who He is (1:15-20) and what He has accomplished for us (1:21-23; 2:11-15). It has encouraged us to not to have our imaginations captured by any other story that would seek to compete with this great story and draw us away from Christ, but to walk in Christ and rest in Him and hold fast to Him. That story is producing a new people in Colossae – in that city a new humanity is emerging with a praxis, an ethic, behavioral patterns that stand in stark contrast to that of the Empire in which they live. They have adopted this story and have been adopted by this story. This Grand Epic of God is shaping their affections and their loyalties and their communal life; it is defining for them what is good and beautiful and giving trajectory to their lives. Paul is holding up this story and exhorting this little community in Colossae to embrace a praxis that is rooted in the Kingdom of God and not in the Empire. He is calling them to be a subversive community living out an ethic that challenges the ethos and culture of the empire, undermining it and in doing so shaping a new Colossae, creating a better city (Next week). And it is what God wants to do with us – For us to Adopt this story and Be Adopted by it.

Envision this life as if Christ were Ultimate (3:1-3). As Paul seeks to shape the praxis of these Christians, he reminds them that Praxis is about Sovereignty. Sometimes we are faced with ethical dilemmas and personal decisions and we feel paralyzed. Praxis paralysis happens when you don’t have something ultimate in your life. When nothing matters more than anything else, you are (to quote King Leontes in S’speare’s a Winter’s Tale) like a feather blown about by every wind. Whatever has a sense of ultimacy in your life, is the very thing that orients your life. Without that sense of ultimacy, you have paralysis. Paul says envision life as if Christ is Ultimate because He is. Seated at the right hand of God. This is the place of unrivaled prestige and unparalleled authority. Reference to Psalm 110:1. This Psalm points to a King who is exalted to a place of dominion but whose rule has not been fully realized. Christ’s reign is a hidden reality that will be revealed. He matters most and one day it will be revealed as such.
So, don’t let the culture dictate your ethic. Be liberated from the enslaving finality of the culture’s voice. Don’t let the culture’s preferences become your principles. The culture’s preferences become benchmarks for normality, cutting off our options for a different way to live and move and be. Paul says, don’t let that happen to you. Envision life as if something other than money, sex and power were ultimate. This new and counter cultural Praxis that is emerging in Colossae and that can emerge among us requires a new vision of reality. We need to have our imaginations liberated and lifted from that and know that Christ is Ultimate. This is what I call an Ethic of Anticipation – we are early adopters embracing an ethic that envisions Christ as Ultimate and it will one day be revealed that we are not crazy for doing so.

Envision becoming all that Christ has saved us to be. 3:4 - We will one day be transformed into what He is. He has been raised and glorified and his glorification is a guarantee to all who are in him that we will be glorified as well. One day we will finally be free from all suffering, despair, loss, weakness, brokenness, jealousy, bitterness, anger, fear, greed, lust, pride, envy, and every self-promoting practice.
This new creation that God will bring about has already started. Christ is making us today into what He will make us on That Day. Paul says to these believers in Colossae and to us, The old you has died and a new you is emerging (2:20; 3:1). When you received Christ Jesus as Lord, you made a total break with your former way of life (you died) and you were brought into a new kind of life (raised with Him) with the resources to become all that God envisions you to be. The power that raised Christ from the dead is at work in you as a people through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit to raise you to a new kind of life. So the old you died and the new you is emerging. 3:9-10 – You have put off the old humanity (old man), that old creation you used to belong to that had with it all its self promoting patterns and practices, and have put on a new humanity, this new creation that God is bringing about through the reign of Jesus, a new humanity that is being renewed in His image, becoming more and more like the One who has made us to reflect what He is like. So, people who have Christ are new and they are being renewed: All that God will make us, He intends to steadily bring about in our lives now. He desires our lives to look more and more like what they are destined to become. Our real life, the one we are destined for, is hidden with Christ in God (v. 3). We don’t really look like him yet; who we really are is not clearly seen. Illustration: When you open up iTunes you sometimes get a message, 'there is a newer version of iTunes.' The final version of me has not been released yet. But one day, when he appears, I will be changed, and the final version of me will be rolled out. That final version is hidden, hard to imagine. But, beta versions are being released now and each new version of me, each stage along the way in my progress, is better than the previous one. Are you a better version of you than you used to be? When I open up the Scriptures, it is as if God is inviting me into a newer version of me. God’s desire is for you to become what you will one day be. Are we ramping up? Is His reign increasingly banishing from our hearts greed, lies, lust, self-focus trajectories and making us more of what He envisions us becoming. Can you imagine being a better version? This is not just personal. It is communal. Christ reigns in us and among us making us a community that looks more and more what this world is destined for. Can you imagine a communal life sacrificial love, purity, honesty, integrity, generosity, compassion?
This new life that is emerging and that Jesus wants to bring about among us, looks radically different from how we used to live when we did not know Him; before we came to know him as ultimate. The behavioral patterns that belong to this world, the praxis of the dominant culture that we used to live in that was self-focused and destructive to community, still tries to cling to you like a sticky piece of paper that you take off of one hand only to have it stick to other. We still find old habits, ways of thinking and acting and reacting that still find expression in our lives and we can’t seem to shake them from us. So we are left with one more exhortation from this passage:

Identify and Destroy the patterns in your life that do not fit with this new life that God is forming. When you get married and move in with your spouse, there are some things you had in a your bachelor pad that won’t make it into the new life. The leg lamp; the football helmet phone; the superman cereal bowls… Don’t fit with your new life. Paul is saying there are some old things that don’t fit with your new life in Christ. He lists these old patterns of living that used to belong to our life before Christ but that are still wanting to cling to us. These patterns are self-focused and destroy community. In 3:5 He focuses on sex and greed. God is not against sex, he is for it. God is against self-gratifying expressions of sexuality that are free from total commitment and that distort our character. He is against uncontrollable and insatiable sexual appetites that treat sex as a way to take from someone for our own pleasure as opposed as seeing sex as God’s means of giving ourselves fully to someone, an act that facilitates whole life entrustment to another.
It is interesting that he concludes these sexual terms with covetousness (greed). This self-focused, self-gratifying treatment of sex (whether it is sex outside a lifelong committed marriage relationship or gratification through a cyber image) he associates it with greed because it is a insatiable desire to control and consume another person. Walsh and Keesmaat: “Sexual sin is not sin because it is sexual but because it is invariably covetous. It replaces the pleasure and sexual enjoyment of two people in a loving relationship with a self-centered gratification of sexual longing that can never be fulfilled apart from commitment. Such sin breaks the back of trust that is at the heart of community and it is a community that Paul is striving to build here.” We are called to a different ethic. “In a world in which sexuality is a matter of erotic encounters with ‘no strings attached,’ Christian marriage is all about ‘tying the knot.’ In an anxious world of covetousness and competition, we choose a path together rooted in trust, intimate self-giving and a shared life. In place of utility we see affection, corporate control is replaced by personal risk, and disposable consumption gives way to enduring enjoyment.” – Walsh and Keesmaat.
The Gospel is calling us away from a life of self-focused, self-gratifying greed whether that is consuming commodities or consuming sexual experiences. That pattern does not fit with this new life that God is forming. And this same gospel calls us away from destructive emotional patterns (v8) of anger, and wrath, and slander that sometimes is hidden simmering in our hearts and sometimes gets expressed through abusive and vulgar speech. All this stands in the way of the life God wants for us and the community he wants to build among us; it has no place; does not fit.
So, we have to assess our lives and find those patterns that don’t fit with this new life God is wanting to cultivate in us individually and as a community. Once we identify them, we have to destroy those patterns. Put them to death (Romans 8:13, relying on the Spirit). And the key to that is seeing these patterns as idolatrous. We have made something besides Christ our life (v. 4). Something else has become more fundamental than him to our meaning and joy. If we find within us a pattern of anger, lust, greed, malice, it is because there is something we want more than Christ himself. It has become the center that our lives orbit around and it is controlling our behavior. But, when Christ is your life, when He is ultimate for you; when he is the source of your life, your joy, your meaning, these patterns lose their power and lose their place.

Conclusion: So, we are back to where we started aren’t we: The Ultimacy of Jesus. Praxis, our values and life patterns, is about Sovereignty. When Christ is ultimate, when he is our life, not only does His Supremacy shape us, it satisfies us and we have no need to go outside of him and his good gifts to find fullness of life. So, Paul is giving us Him again and saying know Him, love Him, pursue Him, be shaped and satisfied by this one, as a person and as a people. Colossae needs an emerging people like this. So does our city.