A
sermon based upon Colossians 2: 6-20
By
Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat
Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
Sunday
June 28th, 2020 (9/10. How Jesus Saves.)
Clayton Lord tells about a man who decided that he wanted to
live a good life.
He set his mind to
developing healthy habits.
He read every book he could find that laid out the path to a
long and productive life.
He never smoked, drank, or overindulged at the table.
He ate fresh fruit and vegetables and stayed away from
preservatives.
He exercised every day and got his eight hours of sleep each
night.
He lived in the country and avoided going into the city with its
smog and high incidence of crime and disease.
He visited his doctor regularly and he was set to live to be 100
years old.
But, he was only 53 when he died. He is survived by eighteen specialists, four
health institutions, six gymnasiums, and numerous manufacturers of health foods
and drugs.
If only the secret to a long and happy life was that easy. The truth is that we can follow all the rules
and still come up short. No one has all
the answers. Yet we keep looking for them. And people keep telling us that they
have just the answer we need.
I. EMPTY DECIET...ELEMENTAL SPIRITS (8)
A. Many claim to have answers to life’s
challenges...
Haven’t
you received a letter or email like this?
Dr.
Mr. Tomlin. It’s not a pleasant thought,
but if you died would your family face financial difficulties?
Would
your partner be able to take care of all the bills and expenses your income now
provides?
Could
they earn enough? Could they take care
of the home and the children? Would
your savings provide enough security?
...Never
fear, the
letter concludes, we have the answer.
THE
ANSWER IS LIFE INSURANCE!
If
you sign up before your next birthday, you get a discount.
Wouldn’t
the security of your family be worth just pennies a day.
Now,
I’m certainly not against insurance, but the somber truth is:
Life
is fragile. We do live in an
unpredictable world. We are all going to
die... There are no guarantees. There are no easy answers. But there are a lot of claims for answers out
there.
I’ve
heard recently that with Christianity on the decline, Astrology is making a
comeback. Astrologers say all the
answers are in the stars. All you have
to do his read and follow your daily Horoscope.
It’s all about fate, not
faith. If everything in the heavens
lines up for you, then you’re in luck.
But what if everything doesn’t add up? Well,
maybe you need to consult a card reader?
Maybe you need to call this number?
You can even do this on your computer.
Pick a card, scratch three numbers.
Listen to the interpretation and you can better navigate your life. You only have to pay $1.00 a minute, for 4 ½
minutes.
Or
if that’s too challenging and daunting, what about consulting a Psychic?
You can also find Psychic Readings Online; 10
minutes for only $1.99. That’s a steal
of a deal. Here are the top 10
websites. They’ve been tested for
accuracy. You can chat with an advisor
right now. You don’t have to wait. Their good advice and guidance is going to
blow your mind. Advisors are available
to you 24/7. We have a special Promo going on now. It’s $4.99 cents a minute or 30 minutes for
$20, 20 minutes for $15, or 10 minutes
for $10. Remember, every reading comes
with a money back satisfaction guarantee.
Yes,
life is fragile. We don’t live in a
predictable world. We’re never certain
what tomorrow will bring. And after
death...? Well, it’s a matter of faith,
not fact. All this uncertainty makes us uncertain and
sometimes afraid. But there are plenty
of Psychics, Astrologers, Life-Guides and religious gurus out there, who are
saying, never fear—WE HAVE JUST THE ANSWER YOU NEED.
B. There were many claims to answers in Paul’s
day too.
Even in Paul's day human ‘answers’ were constantly being suggested,
either through sophisticated philosophy or human traditions (v.8).
It’s difficult to reconstruct exactly
what this was. Paul insists that it was a
shallow, elemental (v.8) way of thinking---where may have had
some merit, but were only a ‘shadow of things to come’. This included a ‘false humility’
(NIV), the worship of angels, ‘visions’ leading only to an even
more self-centered life-style. No one
knows whether this was a perverted kind of Judaism or a perverted Christianity,
but it was filled with ‘regulations’ (v.20, 22) which were supposed to give
spiritual answers for life only through human ways of thinking (v. 18). And these ‘answers’ were not just given as
suggestions or arguments (v.4), but they were also being promoted
(v. 23) and commanded (v.22) for people to follow.
Now, in our time, we think we are far beyond such elemental
thinking. I recall being in Brazil,
sharing my faith and meeting a woman who worshipped ‘trees’. We call it ‘animism’. It’s a form of religion that goes back to
ancient times and primitive cultures, which believed that every part of nature was
filled with a divine spirit. Now, don’t
get me wrong, there is certainly something to appreciating nature and believing
that God created nature and that we should respect nature. That is perhaps what animism was
getting at, but there was much more to life and to God than worshipping the ‘powers’
of nature. Now, of course we are beyond all that, right?
Just the other day, I saw a new Lincoln Aviator commercial with
Matthew McConaughey. Did you see
it? I like Matthew McConaughey as an
actor. I’m not knocking advertising Lincoln
Aviator’s either. But what struck me
about this commercial is how not a single word was spoken, but it’s preaching a
way of life. McConaughey simply drives
his Lincoln Aviator to a very remote spot in the Rocky Mountains, he turns up
his air-conditioning to 78 degrees, opens the rear hatch, leaves his vehicle to
drill a hole for ice fishing, then returns to his Aviator to sit down to enjoy
the freezing while he waits for something to bite. As the camera pulls away and shows the Aviator
with the rugged but beautiful natural snowy mountain backdrop, the caption
simply reads, “Lincoln: The Power of
Sanctuary”.
It’s beautiful, but its really not simply selling a car or SUV,
but it’s selling a way of life, and a car as a way of ‘sanctuary’ away from life—real,
responsible life. Again, nothing wrong
with vacationing, or getting away from for a while, but we all know what is really
on display to be sold here. It’s not the
view of the mountains, but it’s the high-priced way to prove you have finally found
peace and sanctuary away from the world.
The world around is filled with these kinds of advertisements
and promotions, isn’t it? Some much of
it is still ‘snake-oil’, too. But most
of the time, we think nothing of it. We’re
used to it. We ignore it. We don’t think we’re trapped by it. But our world, the world we all live in, not
only survives but also thrives off selling and promoting ideas like this---that
the ultimate goal of life is to get rich, to have everything you want, and to
work so hard you can finally get away from everything. This is what you work for, no matter what it
ends up costing you. This is still the promoting
of ‘elemental spirits’ in our world; it’s not a world without religion, but it’s
a different kind of secular ‘religion’ that continues to spawn new traditions and
release continual currents of greed, selfishness and false worship.
As I was preparing this message, news came out that the World
Series Champs, the Houston Astros, were accused of cheating. They reported used hidden cameras to send view
hand signals of the opposition, and then signaled hitters on what kind of pitch
was coming. Will this result in them
losing their Trophy? Probably not. But it might cause them to lose their
integrity, the reported said. But who
cares about that? Did cheating cause the
other team to hit the ball less? How do
you hold a Baseball Team accountable for something that can’t be proved?
This is the kind of world we live in; a world too often ruled by
‘elemental spirits’ that take people captive and rule their lives
by ‘empty deceit’ (v. 8). What
can people do to resist these negative powers (1:13) and traditions? So much of life is beyond our control. The people in Colosse felt stuck and helpless
too. Some of them even felt condemned
(v. 16) or disqualified (v. 18) from following Jesus, feeling they had
to submit (v. 20) to these human ways and expectations, but were no better
off (v. 23).
III. IN HIM...THE WHOLE FULLNESS (9)
In
a world filled both false worship and deceitful thinking, Paul challenges the Church
in Colosse to stay with Christ. Even
the best of the world’s ideas and traditions are but a ‘shadow of things to
come’ he says, but ‘the substance belongs to Christ’ (v. 17).
A. So, what about Jesus? Is he and his way any different?
Recently,
I was given a book written by a college of mine, who went through Missionary Training
with me, and now is pastor of First Baptist Church, Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville is nicknamed ‘rocket city’
because it was here that the race to the moon was administrated. The leader of that effort was a German
Scientist, named Wernher Von Braun.
My
college, Travis Collins, recently wrote a brief book about him, not so much to
tell Von Braun’s story alone, but to point to Von Braun’s tremendous drive and
great intellect, accompanied by a deep faith in God. Von Braun never saw any type of conflict between
Faith and Science. He saw them as
complementary, not contradictory. Faith
tells us how to subdue our hearts, while Science helps us subdue the forces of nature
for human good. “Both of them, he told a
friend on a fishing trip, “are ‘windows’ through which we find the truth to see
both the reality our creator and the reality of God’s creation.
In
particular, Wernher Von Braun had some profound things to say about God becoming
a human being in Jesus Christ. In response
to people living only to please themselves,” Von Braun wrote, “the whole world
has become infected and has become ‘sinful’, but in response to our desperate
condition, God ‘reduced himself’ to the stature of humanity in order to
visit the earth”...not to remain ‘seated on a heavenly throne, but to enter the
battlefield of life’ and to call us to change our ways. But what did we do, but ‘nail him to a cross’? I find it fascinating that the person most
instrumental in one of America’s greatest scientific achievements, also believed
in what Paul called, ‘the substance that belongs to Christ’ (2:17).
In
a related story, in the most recent Netflix series, The Crown, one show
in the series included a very captivating story about America’s Moon Landing,
which particularly impressed the Queen’s royal husband, prince Philip. When the Queen invited the Apollo Eleven crew
to her home, Prince Philip requested a special moment alone with the crew. He was under the impression that these guys
were super heroes, but during the interview came to learn they were just men, like
him, who were doing their job.
Through
the experience, Prince Philip started to face the fact that he had not been
doing his job very well. He had also
lost in faith in God. He had been
looking in space, but he hadn’t been looking deep enough into the space in his
own heart. After the visit from the
Astronauts, Prince Philip renewed his faith and was instrumental in started a
Christian ministry to help ‘burned out ministers’. He said that participating in this ministry
of renewal became his most rewarding achievement.
B. Paul claims that Jesus is different---the full truth of God.
The
‘substance that belongs to Christ’ (v. 17) is much more than a philosophy
of life, a spirit, a tradition or just another human way of thinking, but Paul
says that ‘in him the fullness of divine nature dwells in a bodily form (v.
9).’
Now,
Paul is not trying to speak in a complicated way, but he is using the language
of philosophers of his day to preach the truth of Jesus Christ. What he means is that while on earth, Jesus
was God with a human body, just as he was a human with the heart of God. As the great scholars of the church came to
explain, there was nothing in Jesus that wasn’t fully God, and there wasn’t
anything in Jesus that wasn’t fully human.
He was both at the same time.
This is what orthodox, true Christian faith has always said,, but what
does it mean? What does this mean to
say that Jesus was the fullness of God in a human body. How does this help us to face the negative
powers that are still in this world today?
C. Through Christ’s Sacrifice, He alone wipes
the slate clean...nails sins to the cross.
I
really like what Paul says next, almost in the same breath or stroke of a
pen. He not only says that Jesus is the fullness
of God, but he then tells the Colossians that by receiving Christ,
and by continuing to live their lives in him (v.6), they have ‘come
to fulness in him who is the head of every ruler and authority...’ (v.
10). Here, Paul is not
talking merely about earthly rulers or authorities, but he is talking about ‘powers’
that are both ‘visible and invisible’ (1:16), which includes the negative
powers that put him on the cross (v. 15) and the negative powers in the
world that are out to destroy humanity and God’s good creation, either through
negative religion or negative thinking.
How
does Jesus ‘disarm’ (NRSV, NIV) or ‘spoil’ (KJV) the work of the
evil powers that stand over against us? Interestingly,
Paul says Jesus does this through His death on the cross, where our sins are
forgiven, (13), where the record against us is erased (v. 14) , and figuratively,
where they God ‘nailed all our sins to the cross’ (14). What
Paul means is that when Jesus died because of our sins, he also died ‘for us’
to release us from the negative power our sins have over us. Jesus not only forgave us, he bears our sins,
he defeats the negative powers against us, and he releases us to live
victoriously and triumphantly. Jesus
does this because he loves us, rather than condemns us.
This
love is the ‘victory’ we mean when we sing the song, ‘Victory In Jesus’,
the Baptist National Anthem, I like to call it. We can’t win the victory over sin alone, nor
can we triumph over the negative of life, which is like a deck of cards stacked
against us. But we can ‘win’ against
these powers, through the power of forgiving love in Jesus Christ. We can win over all the major negative
powers in life; sin, the law, and death
itself, because Jesus himself was victorious over these powers. As the
great Charles Wesley wrote, in what I’d call the Methodist national anthem, “O
For A Thousand Tongues To Sing, in verses 4 and 5: His love my heart has captive made, His
captive would I be, For He was bound, and scourged and died, My captive soul to free.
He
breaks the power of canceled sin, He
sets the prisoner free;
His
blood can make the foulest clean; His
blood availed for me.
III...TRIUMPHING
OVER THEM (15)
One
of the most important ways to understand the cross of Jesus is that Jesus by
dying on the cross, Jesus defeats not just the evil that was against him, but
he also the enslaving, negative evil powers that still work against us. Notice, it does not say that Jesus takes the
evil powers out of the world, but it does say that the makes ‘spoil’ of
them, he ‘disarms’ them, and ‘makes a public example of them’ triumphant
over them through his resurrection, but also robbing these them of the
enslaving power they once had over us.
In
the history of the church, there have been at least three major ways to
understand what Jesus accomplished on the cross. Jesus died on the cross as a ‘sacrifice’ for
sin, because by substituting himself he took the penalty of our sins upon
himself and sets us free. This was the major way the great reformers
understood the cross, and it is still the most dominate today.
But
another way the cross has been understood is that Jesus died on the cross as an
example of how a righteous person should live and die. By giving us this example, Jesus not only
shows us how to live, he gives us the promise that if we live and die for what
is right, we have God’s promise of hope in Christ’s resurrection. That’s another way to understand the
cross.
The
third major way to understand the cross, is what is going on right here. It was just as important in the world Paul
lived in, to understand that on the cross, a bigger battle was going on than
just between Jesus and the Roman authorities.
This was a larger, cosmic, struggle against evil, against the devil, of good
against evil, and it was the struggle against what sin, the law and what death
can do to us, which is probably the most important reason of all. On the cross, Jesus was not only dying for
us, he was also in the spiritual battle with us, and he won this battle against
all that seeks to destroy us in life.
One
of the oldest ways this reality was explained in the early church, after the
time of the Bible, was that when the Devil came to destroy God’s work in Jesus,
Jesus took the humble way of weakness and dying. In fact,
in Jesus, God allowed Satan to win, drawing him in just like drawing a
fish with a lure. But just when it
looked like Satan could take the bait and run, through the resurrection of
Jesus, God reeled Satan in, and won the victory over sin, the law, and death itself. This
is kind of the ‘Road Runner’ Cartoon way of explaining the cross. I don’t mean this in a silly way
either. In a very serious way, God disarms Satan’s power over us, because like
the Road Runner, Jesus and us look weak compared to a Coyote. And we are.
But even though we are weak, God takes all Satan’s weapons against us
away. There is no more sin against us,
because we are forgiven. There is no
more law against us, because we have grace.
And there is no more death against us, because we have the promise of
eternal life through Jesus Christ. That’s
how quick, God went ‘beep, beep’ and the whole world changed. There is still sin. There is still law. And there is still death too, but ‘beep, beep’,
God does not use it against us. Jesus has
revealed God’s righteousness as forgiving, redeeming, and resurrecting love.
While
Paul doesn’t go into great detail about how Jesus accomplishes, other parts of
the Bible do. We are told in Hebrews,
that Jesus won this ‘victory’ because of his obedience. We are also told in Ephesians, that Jesus
invites us to fight life’s battle in a way we can win over evil too. “Put
on the whole armour of God!” But right
here in this text we are told the how where the victory was first won, by God
for us, so that we can now win the victory through God in Jesus Christ. Jesus wins the victory through the cross---by
nailing our sins to the cross (14).
The
terrible horror and humility of the cross is the most unlikely place to find anyone
being saved, let alone Jesus saving us all.
But that’s exactly what God had in mind.
It was on the cross, in the most unlikely place, in the greatest
weakness and in the most humiliated defeat, that God reveals that the power is
not a human power that saves, but it is only God’s power that saves. The ‘power’ that saves us eternally, can’t
be a human power, and it’s certainly not.
It’s only God’s power that reveals the true nature of God’s love on the
cross, and it’s only God’s power that raises Jesus from the dead, and it’s also
only God’s power that can save us from the negatives of this world; from sin, the
condemnation of the law, and from death itself.
After
Rosa Parks sat on that bus, and was condemned by the white racist laws of that
existed in the deep south and was put in jail,
a couple of wealthy white women went to that jail and bailed Rosa
out. Rosa remained friends with those
women the rest of their lives, and they remained friends with Rosa. In fact, in a letter to them, Rosa called
them both ‘battle partners’. They were
in a battle against sin, the condemnation of the law and were all living under
the threat of death, but love drew the evil powers out in the open and love
triumph over all. That’s how love works. That’s how God works. That’s another way Jesus saves, by ‘erasing
the record’ of what stand against us, making a public example of what’s wrong,
and by nail it all to God’s ultimate power of love on the cross. And this is not a power that immediately triumphs
out there in the world, but it’s a power that always starts in the human
heart. That’s why Jesus told his
disciples, “Don’t rejoice because the demons are subject to you, but rejoice because
your name is written in heaven!” The
power Jesus gives starts in you, winning in you, and then God gives you, the Victory
and Power of Jesus over the whole world.
Amen.
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