Preachers have different ways of doing their sermon
preparation. Mine involves writing a full manuscript for every sermon I
deliver. Normally these manuscripts then find themselves consigned to the
filing cabinet (or in my case the filing plastic bag!) and never see the light
of day again. That seems to be a bit of a shame, so I’ve decided to start a
blog series where I basically post my sermon manuscripts online. I won’t put up
whole sermons at once, as most of them are over 3000 words long. Instead I’ll
divide them up in to three or four separate posts that will appear over the
course of a week.
I’m going to begin with a series I’ve just finished
preaching through at Ingleton Evangelical Church on Paul’s letter to the
Colossians. It's a fantastic book, all about being rooted and built up in Christ. The sermons are very lightly edited from the originals in order to
make them fit the context of a blog, but the substance of them hasn’t been
changed at all. I hope they prove helpful to you, and glorifying to God.
Who is the letter to the Colossians from?
In one sense I’ve already answered that question above, Paul
writes this letter. But who was Paul, and why does it matter who he was, and
that he wrote this epistle?
We need a bit of background about Paul.
First of all, he wasn’t always called Paul. The name he was
given by his parents as a small child was actually Saul. Saul was a Jewish name
and Saul, as he then was, was brought up as a Jew.
He came from a town called Tarsus, which was not actually in
Judea but in Cilesia, a part of modern day Turkey. But Tarsus would have had a
Jewish community, which Paul’s family would have been part of.
Saul grew up to be a gifted teacher of Judaism as at some
point early in life he moved to Jerusalem to study at the feet of Gamaliel, a
great teacher of the law within 1st century Judaism.
The 1st century of course was also the time when
Christianity was in its infancy. But despite being in its infancy, it was a
taking a strong hold in Jerusalem, and increasingly in the Roman Empire around.
This was not pleasing to the religious elite within Judaism who saw
Christianity as a blasphemous distortion of their religion, so they sought to
stamp it out. One of the leaders within the Jewish attempt to crush the
fledgling Christian church, was Saul.
In Acts 7 you can read about the first Christian martyred
for his faith in Jesus, a man called Stephen. Saul was there, looking on
approvingly as Stephen was stoned to death. More than that, the beginning of
Acts 8 identifies Saul as a ring leader of the persecution of the first
Christians. He is detailed there as being a man who ravaged the church,
entering people’s homes and dragging men and women off to prison.
Saul was a very intelligent young man, but he was also an
extremely nasty piece of work. The last sort of person, you would think, who
would write a letter like the one we’re looking at now. As a young man the only
letters that he was interested in were ones that authorised him to imprison and
murder Christians.
But then Saul had the original “Damascus Road Experience”.
He was on his way to Damascus, with letters from the Jewish
religious authorities, authorising him to breath threats and murder against
Christians in that city, when he met someone. Or rather someone met him. It was
Jesus Christ, appearing in person to Saul, in a blinding vision, asking him why
he was persecuting him. At that point Saul had no answer. For three days
following that encounter with Christ he couldn’t see, he couldn’t eat, he
couldn’t drink. But he had been changed.
From that day on Saul did not persecute Jesus, or his
people, any more. Instead, he became a follower of Jesus, just like those he
previously persecuted.
How God can turn lives around. Never give up praying for,
and witnessing to, even the people who are most antagonistic and violently
opposed towards Jesus. He can turn them round in a moment.
In time Saul came to be known as Paul. He was known as Paul
by the time he wrote his letter to the church in Colossae.
But the fact that Paul was a man whose life Jesus had turned
upside down isn’t all that there is to say about him. It isn’t all that Paul
says about himself at the start of this letter.
Who is writing this letter? Paul, an apostle of Jesus
Christ.
Immediately after Paul’s blinding vision of Jesus on the
road to Damascus a man called Ananias, a Christian, takes him in to his home.
He’s only willing to do so because the Lord appears to him too in Acts 9 and
reassures him that it’s OK, Paul isn’t going to rip his head off or anything –
he’s a changed man. In fact what the Lord tells Ananias is this in Acts 9:15;
“Paul is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before
the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.”
In other words Paul was going to become Jesus’ mouthpiece.
Someone specially set aside by God to be a foundation stone in the early
church. A teacher carrying Jesus’ own authority as he spoke about the gospel,
the way of knowing peace with God through Jesus, and about what it means to be
a follower of Jesus Christ in every aspect of life. An apostle in other words. And the fact that Paul was an apostle is significant when we
come to read this 2000 year old letter.
If Paul had been just anybody, or even
just any normal Christian writing independently, then there would be no reason
to treat what he says here as having any authority over the people he wrote to,
or over us. If he hadn’t been an apostle, or writing under the direction of an
apostle, then we could just take what’s written here as being his opinion, and
not something we actually have to treat as the word of God.
The apostles, including Paul, were part of the foundation of
the New Covenant church. Christ Jesus himself was the chief cornerstone, but
the apostles, to whom Jesus gave his authority, were also part of that
foundation – the church is built on their Jesus authorised teaching.
Whenever Paul wrote to a church that didn’t personally know
him (and 2:1 suggests he hadn’t actually met the church in Colossae), or to a
church that did know him but was in danger of abandoning what he had taught
them, he made sure to introduce himself as an apostle. It was a shorthand way of saying;
“What I’m going to write to you in this letter, I’m not
saying on my own authority, but on Jesus’ authority. This is stuff that you
need to know as a Christian, and it’s stuff that if you reject it, then it’s
the same as rejecting what Jesus says.”
Now that might sound rather proud and arrogant on Paul’s
part, so just to make sure that people understand, he adds that he’s an apostle
of Christ Jesus, “by the will of God”.
In other words Paul didn’t wake up one day and decide to be
an apostle. He didn’t authorise himself to tell everyone that he was speaking
on Jesus behalf so everyone better sit up and listen. Not at all, God had decided to make Paul Jesus’
mouthpiece. Left to his own devices Paul was trying to destroy the church of
Jesus Christ, it was God who had turned his life around and who had also
appointed him an apostle.
Now the fact that Paul was an apostle of Jesus had
implications for the church in Colossae as they read this letter, and it has
the same implications for us reading it too. Whatever Paul is going to go on to
say, we can’t just dismiss it as his opinion.
What Paul says in this letter, in all his letters, is what
Jesus says, what God says – and so we have to respond to it as such. It has
authority over us.
So there’s the answer to our first question – Who is writing
the letter to the Colossians?
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God.”
We need to listen up to what he says; we need to act on what
he says.
No comments:
Post a Comment