Fullness (4): Fullness Leads to Freedom
- Rev Norman Cameron
“Tis
the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free, 'tis the gift to come down
where you ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, It
will be in the valley of love and delight”.
(Written by Shaker Elder
Joseph Brackett, Jr. in 1848).
As life
goes on one of the revelations we discover is that so often the best things in
life are free and the greatest delight is found in simple pleasures. A walk
beside a river, warm sun on your face, the laugh of a child, the smell of
freshly cut grass, a rainbow, the fellowship of friends, paddling in the sea.
Simple pleasures, but hard to beat.
Mankind has a way of complicating
life in the search for fulfillment, fullness and fun. As we approach the great
spend of Christmas we need to keep reminding ourselves that often the best
things in life are simple and usually free. We have a way of complicating life,
and we have a way of complicating our religion too. This was part of the
problem with the Colossian church, as with so many of the young churches that
Paul wrote to – the gospel of Jesus Christ was so simple they felt it was
inadequate and you had to keep adding to it to make it work.
The Colossian church was battling against
teaching which sought to add secret knowledge to faith in Christ, or Jewish
customs to faith in Christ, like circumcision and fasting, or special
observance of festival days to faith in Christ. Now some of these practices may
be helpful, but if they obscure the truth that belief in Christ is sufficient alone for salvation, sufficient alone
for reconciliation with God, then they are not helpful. Or if they obscure the
truth that a relationship with Christ provides us with the key to the resources
and the riches and the rewards of a God-honouring life then they are not
helpful but rather a hindrance to maturing in the faith.
The start point and the end point of
all that we do must be belief in Jesus Christ. In all our courses and church
services and everything that we do as a church we must keep coming back to
Christ. To illustrate - it is like a bicycle wheel. Christ is the hub and all
the spokes of church life must radiate from Him. The spokes are nothing without
the hub. Our activities, our church worship, our organizations, our rituals,
our bible studies and bible courses are nothing if they do not begin and end
with Christ, otherwise they are activity for activity’s sake and they miss the
point. They are there to service our relationship with Christ, to help us to
get to know him and God’s will better, and through Christ to love others better.
Paul was dealing with a Colossian
church that was being misled, that did not see the sufficiency of Christ and
the fullness that could be theirs in Christ and they were getting themselves into
slavery to that which hindered rather than helped their walk with God. They were
looking elsewhere when the best answer was the simplest answer.
As we look at this passage today perhaps come
of us need to refocus on Christ. Perhaps some of us are obsessed with the
spokes but we have no relationship to the hub. Instead of serving Christ we are
actually enslaved to things, to rituals, to worldly principles. Instead of
knowing the fullness of Christ in our lives we are weary, and empty and lacking
a genuine spark in our faith because we are focused on the wrong things. We
have lost the simplicity of desiring the one thing. Jesus said to the rich
young ruler – one thing you lack. In this passage Paul will teach that there is
no lacking in Chirst and in him is fullness which leads to freedom;
specifically freedom from four particular complications that beset religious
people.
But before we get to those we need to look at v.6 & 7. “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness”.
We can receive teaching about the
Lord, we can even receive Jesus as Lord in our lives, but we must move from
that teaching about the Lord to living in the Lord. Now that you have received
this teaching, Paul says, live it out. Get more firmly rooted in Christ and
then grow up in him. Strengthen your faith and make it work for you.
The
word “live” literally in the Greek
means walk about. Walk about in Christ, familiarize yourself with him. If I can
illustrate it in this way. Let us think of a suit that has been passed down
from a father to a son. The son can receive the suit and put it in the wardrobe
and forget about it, not put it on. It will be of no use to the son in this
way. On the other hand if he wears the suit and walks about in it and goes to
work in it then the suit is being put to good use. He owns the suit, he makes
the suit his. It becomes part of him almost.
Now
the Christian faith can be a bit like a suit of clothes. The Christian faith
can be handed down from one generation to the next and may be received in some
form. Like a suit, the faith may be put on for some occasions, funerals,
baptisms, weddings, even Sundays, but after the service, or the special
occasion, the suit is put back in the cupboard. It is not worn at work, around
the home and so on. This is to receive a tradition but not actually to live it.
People can say they are Christians but
actually it makes little or no practical difference to how they live their day
to day lives, how they think, how they spend their money, what they read or
watch, or how they conduct their work. They are not living in Christ, and they
are fooling themselves. All that they have is a dead tradition with no real
ongoing relationship with God, and thus there is no rootedness, no building up,
no strengthening, no overflow of thankfulness. The fullness Paul speaks of here
in Colossians will pass us by unless we do business with God personally.
The church which Bill Hybel’s pastors is
called Willowcreek, it is one of the best known churches in the world and it has
recently made a discovery which for many of us is not really a new discovery
but it is worth passing on for we all need to hear it again and learn from it.
They have discovered through surveys and talking with people and observing them
that church attendance in itself is not moving people on in Christ-likeness and
maturity. Church attendance has a measure of success, but after a number of
years of attendance the graph of spiritual maturity and spiritual fullness and
blessing begins to plateau and taper off. More worryingly they found that even people who are most heavily
involved in small groups, in other church activities and in serving do not
necessarily show a more increased love for God and love for others despite all
this extra activity. There was no direct co-relation between growing attendance
in itself and an increasing love for God and others.
What they did discover however was that there
was a strong co-relation between love for God and love for others and on how
vital and real and close their relationship was with Jesus Christ. The more
Christ-centred they were - the closer they felt to him, the more they had a
real relationship with him, the more they prayed and genuinely sought the
leading of the Holy Spirit in their daily lives – then the more this
transformed them as people. When they got the relationship right then the
church attendance, the bible studies, the serving facilitated their growth and
more love for God and others. But the key, the hub, the foundation is the
relationship with Christ. The people who were, to use the words of Paul, living in Christ were showing fruitfulness. Note The Message
translation – “You know your way around
the faith. Now do what you have been taught. School’s out; quit studying the
subject and start living it”.
Paul says in v.9 “Now in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form, and
you have been given fullness in Christ”. It is simple. In Christ alone all
hope is found, in Christ alone is found our resourcing, in Christ alone we have
our purpose and our goal. Everything that we do as a church needs to work from
this centre. Do you know him, not just about him?
Now Paul found, and today we still find, that
there is something in human nature that tries to get around this simple truth.
It is as if we do not believe Paul when he says you have been given fullness in
Christ, do not look elsewhere. He tackles four traps that people, especially
religious people, fall into in trying to reach God and achieve satisfaction in
their Christian lives. He says Christ is sufficient and he wants to set us free
from these false paths that we tend to follow.
1.
Christ sets us free from wrong thinking (v.8)
“See to it that no-one takes you captive
through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and
the basic principles of the world rather than on Christ.”
In Paul’s day there was a lot of
superstition and praying to many gods, and believing that the sun, moon and
stars had an impact on our daily lives. And also of course there was the
thought that we are to reach God by striving upwards. But we know that in the
gospel God came down to us, Love came
down at Christmas – this is the reverse of human religion which says I must
reach God through my effort, my goodness, my religious ritual. It is
fundamentally wrong and it is the way that the world thinks.
Jesus cuts across manmade religion and
superstition and he sets us free from it, for how do we know that we have done
enough and achieved enough to satisfy God? We can’t. But in Christ there is no
condemnation. The closer we come to Christ the more he sets us free from wrong
headed thinking.
2.
Jesus sets us free from dependence on religious ritual (v.11-13) Religious rituals can
be good and helpful, but they can also obscure a key truth. Ritual does not
save us, it is God who saves us through Jesus. The Jews were very proud of
their traditions, especially of circumcision for it was a mark of belonging to
the family of God. But circumcision in itself is nothing, it is just a sign
that ought to speak of an inward reality.
By implication I think Paul is
saying don’t be circumcised for two reasons. First, that was a Jewish ritual that
has now been superseded by a different sign, baptism; and second, do not do it
for the outward mark in itself does not guarantee a godly life or the putting
away of the sinful nature. That happens in Christ. Christ died in our place and
as we receive him we die to sin and rise to a new life. Christ is the real
thing, not the ritual. Baptism speaks of the reality we have in Christ, death,
or burial of the old sinful nature and rising to a new life of love and
service. The baptism in itself does not save us. It speaks of the reality of
Jesus who saves. Don’t mix up the ritual and the reality. They are linked but
the ritual can never replace the relationship. The ritual, whether it is
baptism, or church attendance or whatever can never replace knowing Christ.
3.
Jesus sets us free from the debt of sin (v.13-15)
When v.14
speaks of God cancelling the written code that was against us Paul is thinking
more about the debt we owe as breakers of the law than the law of Moses itself.
It is not that the ten commandments etc. were nailed to the cross, rather it
was the debt we owed as a result of breaking the law; our IOU was nailed to the
cross and paid in full. The punishment was nailed to Jesus and he took it in
full. The debt has been cleared.
“Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place
condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood, Allelulia, what a
saviour.”
“The price is paid, come let us enter in to
all
that Jesus died to make our own;
For every sin more than enough he gave,
and bought our freedom from each guilty
stain.”
Whatever
your sin, Jesus has paid the price for it, whatever the weakness or failing or
punishment you feel you deserve, Jesus has paid the price and he says to us
stand up, you are forgiven and satan is defeated and start to live like a saint
not a sinner.
You may feel like you have a bad credit
rating with God and you may feel that you have to earn your way into his good
books but actually when you come to him, truly come to him and confess it all,
then he takes it, he clears your account and credits you with his
righteousness, his purity, his goodness and calls you his son or his daughter.
This is the simple gospel and it sets us free.
4. In
Christ we are set free from legalism (v.16-23)
Legalism
occurs when we take scriptural regulations and turn them into requirements to
earn God’s favour, or we impose them on people as a means by which a person is
qualified for full participation in the family of God. We should not add to the
basic requirement of faith in Jesus Christ to get right with God, and we should
not insist on the observation of certain things as a pre-requisite to joining a
church. We can be well meaning in wanting certain standards of behaviour but it
can actually detract from the one thing necessary which is a vital living
relationship with Christ. If we are connected to Jesus then our behaviour should
naturally fall into place. If our relationship with Christ is wrong then the
behaviour will not be right. But the key is the relationship.
In the Colossian church there were
people judging you by what you ate or drank or wore or what festivals you
observed. They were concentrating on side issues and the most important thing
was ignored. Jesus sets us free from petty rules. He also sets us free from
what we could call experience seeking. We can run after experiences, visions,
miracles, (v.18) the latest religious gurus and crazes but again we are leaving
behind Christ. He is the Head to whom we must be attached.
So Paul says that the reality, the
fullness, is found in Christ. He sets us free from the traps and the false
trails we so often find ourselves in. Perhaps some of us need to do business
with God. Go into our room, close the door, get on our knees and just do
business with God and seek to get close to Him and see what he would reveal to
us by His Spirit. We need to strip away the outer trappings that we have been
hiding behind, put them to death, and get real with God – the audience of One.
His opinion is the one that really matters and he knows us best.
Psalm 31:6-8
“I hate
those who cling to worthless idols. I trust in the Lord. I will be glad and
rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my
soul. You have not handed me over to the enemy, but have set my feet in a
spacious place.”
It’s
simple really - In Christ we have fullness, and with fullness comes freedom.
One by one God took them from me
All the things I valued most
Till I was empty handed
Every glittering toy was lost.
And I walked earth’s highway grieving
In my rags and poverty
Till I heard His voice inviting
“Lift those empty hands to me”
So I turned my hands toward heaven
And he filled them with a store
Of his own transcendent riches
Till they could contain no more.
And at last I comprehended
With my stupid mind and dull
That God could not pour his riches
Into hands already full.
(Anon)