You'll want to save the last weekend of June for a special celebration. It will be the fifteenth anniversary of our chartering as a congregation.
Moorpark Presbyterian has become a strong, vigorous church from a small beginning. We have grown year by year and have touched many lives. In the process, we have also matured and have been touched by the hand of God.
Participating in life of this congregation is one of the great things in my life. I think I can feel a little bit like the Apostle Paul as he watched the churches he had helped plant grow both larger and deeper. I'm not saying I'm like the Apostle Paul. I'm simply saying that I can possibly feel some of what he felt.
We have just begun a series of sermon from Paul's Letter to the Colossians. This is a special and powerful letter which will touch our minds and our hearts..
But what is especially important as we look at this letter — and the reason I started by talking about our anniversary — is to remember how young the Colossian church was when Paul wrote this letter. It was young both in time and in Christian experience.
When Paul wrote this letter, the Colossian church may have been in existence for only a period of weeks or months. It was is also a church made up of new believers. Fourteen times in this brief letter Paul speaks to the Colossians about their coming to faith. This constant reference to their experience of conversion suggests that it was a very recent event. Unlike the Moorpark Presbyterian Church of 15 years ago which was made up of experienced Christians as well as new disciples, the new Colossian Church was one hundred percent young in the faith.
This made it especially vulnerable to attacks. And the attacks came. The result is trouble.
Paul’s friend and emissary Epaphras tells Paul that some of these baby believers are starting to doubt what has happened in their own lives. Some of them are starting to think that their Christian experience is like a smallpox vaccine that hasn't taken a passing phase in their lives and that now it's time to try something else to satisfy their spiritual hunger.
Paul is an activist. Paul would normally hot foot it to Colossae right away to set things right. He sees trouble. He goes after it. But he can’t. Fortunately for us and our growth today, he had to write it down. He can't go in person because he's in prison either in Ephesus or Rome. He aches to go. But he has to be content with this letter.
Here's what he tells them.
He tells them first about his prayers for them. Think of what an encouragement that must have been for the strugglers. Paul and his friends don't just know about the difficulties the Colossians face. They are also see the evidence of Christ at work in their lives their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the love they have for all the saints even the gnarly ones. Paul says that this faith and love are both products of the hope that God has given them. Paul says, "Your walk with God isn't a wish dream. Look at what it has already accomplished in a few short months."
The good news of Christ's life and death for them is the source of their new freedom and joy. Where did the Colossians get faith hope and love in their lives? They grew out of a message from God Himself. This isn't just a dream. The Colossian’s hope is rooted in objective truth.
Now in the short section we are looking at today, Paul makes a number of statements about the gospel and the baby believers in Colossae.
He says first that the gospel is the good news of God. That's what gospel literally means "good news."
Mark tells us that Jesus begins His ministry by coming into Galilee saying, "the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel." Have you ever wondered what Jesus preached? What did the preaching of the Gospel include before the cross and the resurrection the two things that are the backbone of Gospel preaching today?
Well Jesus preached the good news that God is on our side. He gave a message of a God who is a friend and a lover of the souls of people. He said that we can enter into a right relationship with God.
Now later we discover in Mark that the cross is the means God uses. So the cross is a part of the Gospel. But the foundation is the love of God. The gospel is the good news.
The second thing Paul says to us is that the Gospel is true. In contrast to the “something more” messages the Colossians are getting from the superspiritual elitists and also the false foundation messages of the law lovers in their midst, the Gospel is the truth. It is not a truth. It is the truth. All other religious messages can be described as guesses about God. Some are closer to the mark than others. But the Christian Gospel doesn't give us guesses. It gives us certainties.
One of my favorite films from 1999 is The Matrix. The world has been taken over by computers -- not my computer which keeps performing illegal operations but smart computers. The computers need the energy that comes from human bodies, so they keep a supply of genetically engineered humans in a permanently anaesthetized state. They then create an imaginary world for these comatose humans. This is the Matrix, in which people think themselves alive and conscious, going to work, living normal everyday lives. The Matrix is the wool that is pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them to the truth. The Matrix keeps them in bondage to acceptance of the way things are.
But there is a group of rebels who have broken free of the Matrix. Led by a man named Morpheus they lead a shadow life committed to an alternate reality and hunted by cybercops. Then they discover Neo, the prophesied One who will break people free from the Matrix.
Early in the film we find Neo beginning to awaken to the truth. Part of the computer created illusion breaks down. Neo experiences unexplainable doubts about the ways things are. These doubts which act like a splinter in his mind and make him feel uncomfortable. Then he is introduced to the rebels. Morpheus offers Neo a chance to see the truth. He holds out two pills. The blue pill is a pleasant analgesic which will blur over the pain his honest enquiry is creating. Swallow the blue pill and he'll be comfortably back in the Matrix. Or he can take the red pill, which will open his eyes to new possibilities.
At the heart of the gospel is the idea that we are all by nature caught in a false view of reality. We fail to see the world as it truly is. The analgesic of consumerism and technological prowess blinds us to the realities and values of God's kingdom. So Jesus calls us to a new way of seeing reality. He invites us to swallow his red pill rather than society's blue pill, and to be forever changed. It's harder. But it's also the truth.
The gospel is the truth.
The third thing Paul says is that the Gospel is universal. It isn't confined to one race, nation, class or condition.
All the false gospels are the outgrowth of local circumstances and situations. The true Gospel is the same everywhere. False gospels address themselves to limited circles. The true Gospel proclaims itself boldly throughout the world.
C.S. Lewis illustrates what Paul says this way. Lewis writes that one of the great demonstrations of the truth of the Gospel is the way it breaks down barriers between people the way it takes "a convert from Central Africa and teaches him to obey an enlightened, universal ethic" and, at the same moment, takes a twentieth century academic prig from England that's Lewis' selfdescription and tells him to "go to a blood feast and eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord. The two have little to draw them together but they are brothers."
Now Paul perhaps engages in a bit of deliberate exaggeration when he tells the Colossians that the gospel is spreading everywhere in the whole world. When Paul wrote these words, the Gospel was confined to the Eastern Roman Empire and Italy. It hadn't yet reached the savage Germans and the Beastly British let alone the Aztecs, the Eskimos and the Australian Aborigines. But Paul can see what has already taken place. The Gospel started with a handful of people in Jerusalem. Within twenty years it is a mass movement. And Paul can see what is ahead. He knows how many new territories are being entered by preachers and the results of the proclamation.
When Christian missionaries went to China they led many people to faith is Jesus. Then the Communists took over and the Western missionaries were required to leave. Everyone wondered what had happened to the Chinese believers. Had they stayed true to the faith? Was the Gospel still bearing fruit? No one knew.
Finally, through roundabout means, a mission organizations received a coded message from the church in China. It simply said, "Tell our friends that the 'this I know people' are well."
Who are the 'this I know people?" They are the people who have taken to heart the message of the simple song, "Jesus loves me, this I know." The believers in China wanted to assure their brothers and sisters in the West that they still know what they know." And there are "this I know people" all over the world. The true gospel is universal. It brings people together.
Fourth, Paul says, the Gospel is effective. It bears fruit.
The Colossians have already seen its impact in their lives and in their city. And the Colossians are not alone. Paul tells them that the Lord is on the move changing lives all over the world.
That's important. The Colossians need to know that they aren't a backwater. Even though their little city is in major decline, they are a part of the dynamic movement of God Himself. That's why Paul assures them that the same Gospel which changed their lives and brought them faith, love and hope is changing men and women wherever it's power is proclaimed.
He writes: "All over the world this Gospel is producing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all it's truth." The city of Colossae may be a backwater. But the Colossian Christians are firmly in the mainstream.
It is a plain fact of history that the Gospel has the power to change both individual lives and entire societies. For example, I know that some groups claim that the Bible is sexist. But the simple fact is that there is no place in the world where women have risen to a place of freedom and equality apart from the Bible. It's not the natural condition of society. You will not find the liberation of women in Arab lands, in tribal Africa, or in Native American cultures. It takes the Gospel.
Dorothy Sayers said, "The test of any religion is not whether it pleases us or is comfortable, but whether it is true." Does it accord with reality? Does it do what it says it will do? The Gospel does.
Last summer Carol and I were in Belfast for a morning where we had breakfast with Sally Coppersmith. It was a peaceful time in a seemingly serene city. But you and I both know what happened there.
Some years ago at a conference held in Belfast there was an interview with a man who had been a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, that has caused so much bloodshed in Northern Ireland. He had been a wild and rough man, raised in a Catholic area, and who would have nothing to do with Protestants. He joined the Provos and became what was called "an enforcer." He was responsible to see that orders for terrorist acts — murders, bombings, or whatever — were carried out even if he had to break the legs of the person who refused to carry them out. He had been in prison several times and during one of those prison experiences somebody gave him a New Testament. Reading it, he heard for the first time of the grace of God and the availability of Jesus Christ to forgive his sins.
He received the Lord, and was wonderfully changed. He was interviewed at the Belfast conference by a Protestant pastor whose cousin had been killed some months before by the IRA. The men ended the interview by embracing one another before a thousand people in riottorn, strifefilled Northern Ireland. What a change the gospel makes! That kind of thing had been happening also in Colossae. It was happening all over the world, wherever the apostle went, and it still happens today.
The Gospel is effective.
Fifth, the Gospel tells of grace. It is not so much the message of what God demands as what God is willing to give. This is exactly where the Colossians are getting into trouble. They are starting to buy into the message that God will only accept them if they keep a list of rules or attain some hidden knowledge. They are forgetting the grace the unearned, unmerited favor of God which is the core of Paul's message.
The Gospel tells of grace
Sixth and finally, the Gospel is carried by people. Epaphras who brought it to the Colossians. But there is always a human channel.
This is where we come in. We are the feet and lips that bring this good news to those who have not heard it.
Too often we fall into the trap of thinking that the Gospel has moved across the world because of superstars like Paul. Certainly there are occasional people like Paul, Francis, Luther, Wesley and Billy Graham. But if they were alone in their witness, there would be no church today. The existence of the church also comes from the witness of people like Epaphras, and whoever it was who first shared the Gospel with you.
As you hear the Scriptures taught on Sunday, perhaps some of you may be thinking that if you only knew the Bible, then you could be of use to God. But don't you see that you already are the important people, the true evangelists? You are out there, rubbing shoulders with people who have no hope, hearing their stories, meeting them in the streets and in the stores, having coffee with them. You are the ones who can spread the word of hope. That is how the Gospel spread throughout the Roman province of Asia, and hundreds of churches came into being. The Gospel has power to change, power to awaken, power to give hope, and out of hope springs faith and love. What a remarkable thing it is!
We have something special to celebrate here in June. We are in the ministry in Ventura County. But we are also in the mainstream of God's plan for the world. That is what we will learn as we continue in Colossians.