Remembering Our Home

open your bibles to colossians 1 you guys excited to begin to work through the book of colossians together okay we're going to begin in verse 1. so read along with me if you don't have a bible you can follow along on the screens we read paul an apostle of christ jesus by the will of god and timothy our brother to the saints and faithful brothers in christ at colossae grace to you and peace from god our father amen when we begin to outline this series mike did most of that work and uh we assigned colossians 1 1-14 for the first week uh and then we talked more and on tuesday we were like one one through eight and then on friday i was like one one through two so there are a hundred verses in colossians you guys want to do some math with me now we'll we'll speed up we'll speed up but it's not going to be a a run to catch a train it's going to be a bit more leisurely i think we'll find out um what i want to do this morning is talk a little bit about the biblical and theological framework that undergirds uh the book or the letter to the colossians um when you when you read a letter and you have correspondence usually there's a back and forth but the letters we have in the bible are only in one direction they're what we call occasional letters that is we don't always know what it was that the colossians or their emissaries said to paul and also there's a number of shared assumptions between paul and the colossian christians um so i do want to talk about these first two verses but i also want to do some background some theological and biblical context is that okay with you guys all right i'm gonna i'm gonna begin with a story uh a few years back i wanted to get my wife a birthday present i'm an awful gift giver i want to be a good one i just am not good at it but i thought i had a good idea i was going to go to a spa and get her like a a gift card for a spa does that sound like good good somebody like to me it does something like nope so i go to a spa i walk in walk up to the counter there's a lady behind it and i was like hey i'd like to get something for my wife here i think she you know really really could use it and ladies like excuse me like what she's like annoyed with me and i was like i would like to get something for my wife can we do that and she's like i mean i guess how do you know you don't need something are you confused i was like i'm 100 fine i'd like to buy a gift card and she's like we don't sell gift cards so they get pamphlets she's like yeah i got pamphlets so i take some pamphlets i go to my car and i realize i'm not in a spa i'm in a cosmetic surgery place and i was like you know she needs this i don't need it i didn't make that up that's a real thing that i did and and the point is is pretty self-evident uh knowing where you are matters it really really does matter knowing where you are your location matters a lot um as believers we experience occasional frustration just occasional right occasional annoyance we experience i think a fair amount of anger and feeling alone and various types of tragedy and i think it is true that christians will experience some of those things i also think it's true that many christians experience more of those things than they need to because they have forgotten where their home is because knowing where your home is is a great source of hope that carries you through everything that's happening right now in your life colossians i believe is very much about reorienting the minds of the christian believers at colossae and the christian believers in the south bay to remember where their home is to remember what their greatest hope is to remember who is the greatest and then to live their lives in light of those things i want to talk about like three houses as a metaphor for understanding what's happening in colossians the first is the house that adam built did adam build a good house weird i said did adam build a good house no one responded but one guy laughed i'm presuming he's implying no did adam build a good house no it's a decaying house it's a house that's condemned to be destroyed it's got black mold in it adam got black mold in the house and everyone who's in adam's house suffers from that black mold uh what happened the house that i'm talking about is a metaphor the story of adam and eve isn't a metaphor god created adam and eve and they bore his image unlike anything else in creation they represented god and god told them to be fruitful and to multiply and to subdue the earth which meant to create more order god had made a beautiful creation and adam and eve as god's representatives were going to rule over that creation and bring more good order to it but adam and eve chose their own way they rebelled against god they sinned against god they wanted to consider themselves god they broke his law and in doing so they brought sin and death into the world we know we know that adam's house is broken we know it i have small children and i do the best i can to to open their eyes to the brokenness of adam's house in small measures as they grow older do you tell your kids every awful thing that happens in the world immediately you do it slowly over time and kids come to reckon with the evil that's in the world the evil that's out in the world and very importantly the evil that is in their own hearts um my son is a professional at getting specks of things in his eye unbelievably good at it a windless day outside and he hits the floor like a grown man just punched him in the chest just drops on the ground and he says he says i hate that this is happening this is so awful i can't believe why is this happening to me i don't want this to happen some people we have moments where like yeah i get that i feel that like he's realizing that the world's not as it should be it's just like one small example we all have a million ways that we can identify that the world is not the way it should be that the house that adam built is doomed to decay and that we must not stay in that house because anyone who stays there is going to die as we'll learn later will be the subject of god's wrath so we know this from our own experience but i want to point you to what the bible says what the bible says about sin um and the state of the world in romans paul says what then are we jews any better off no not at all for we have already charged at all that's an important word all both jews and greeks are under sin as it is written done as righteous no not one no one understands god no one seeks for god all have turned aside together they have become worthless no one does good not even one and just real quickly there's a moment here where most of us want to go but i do their throat is an open grave they use the tongues to deceive the venom of aspects under their lips their mouth is full of curses and bitterness their feet are swift to shed blood and their paths are ruined in misery and the way of peace they have not known there is no fear of god before their eyes this is the state of those who are in adam's house james gives us more detail the progressive nature of sin but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own sin our own desire then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin and sin when it is fully grown brings forth what death so the world is broken things are not well there is uh sin endemic to humankind we see it in other people we see it in institutions we should see it in our own heart and that is the crisis that humankind is in it's the problem it's another house uh caesar's house have you heard of caesar a couple of you just a few people heard of caesar little caesar caesar salad who's caesar caesar was uh was the ruler of what empire come on help me out i'm so glad that there was a unanimous roman there the roman empire lots of empires lots of successful empires i can't think of anything at least in the western world quite like the roman empire how long has america been around about 250 years right we're hoping for many more years 250 years uh rome established itself and maintained power for about a thousand years that's a really long time some people extended even even beyond that but at minimum a thousand years and rome the roman empire was a way for people to bring order to the world that was filled with chaos and wickedness and sin and all kinds of other problems and there were all kinds of ways that they did this one was they established peace across huge swathes of geographical territory now when you look back on the roman empire you might say well didn't seem very peaceful wasn't peaceful on the edges wasn't peaceful on the battlefield wasn't necessarily peaceful outside of rome but if you lived inside rome your experience of human violence and your threat of human violence was far lower than it would be outside the boundaries of rome you experience more peace more often than many many many other hundreds of thousands of people in other parts of the world caesar brought a certain kind of peace the romans built roads anybody ever seen a roman road i walked on roman roads that are in better shape than the street i live on they literally last they made them well roman roads connected the world and made it small it took something that was a like a life-threatening life-endangering thing long-distance travel and made it possible you could go to spain from syria and like have more than an 80 chance of living this used to be the case made the world small um also things like uh production and manufacturing rome turned uh spain essentially into a giant olive farm so everyone in the empire could have olives and olive oil they had law to deal with disputes that we still use some of their their legal innovations today rome brought a certain type of order it was a house for people to live in they would try and move out of adam's house and they would move into caesar's house because if you were a fan of rome if you're a roman citizen if you experience the various goods that rome gave to you you could think caesar has built a good house anybody ever seen the colosseum you've seen pictures of it at least right and the colosseum to us is like an old broken down ruin like it's impressive but come on right that's what ruins do right they like rob things of their dignity the colosseum is not a good picture of what it was at the time it would have been painted it would have been adorned and well furnished it was possible they had like glass windows like the colosseum would have been really really impressive would have been really really amazing to see i just want us for a moment to say there are probably lots and lots and lots of people that saw rome as the answer to the question of how we deal with our crises how we deal with our wickedness how we deal with our disorder you following me and in fact people would write inscriptions dedicated to caesar and they would say caesar and usually it was caesar augustus has done so much good for the people of the roman empire that no one could ever do as much good as he did they would call him savior using the same word we use for jesus and they would also say the news about him is the gospel which is the same word we use for gospel you still follow me you still with me i still have you okay the problem is adam's house and caesar's house are the same house with different names if you left adam's house to go to caesar's house you found some source of order and protection that maybe you felt like you didn't have before if you go to caesar's house you are actually still in adam's house how do we know well how do i know caesar's house was not successful in solving the basic problems that human beings have for one the roman empire's gone it has no opportunity or chance to actually help human beings it's been gone for a really really long time there is no one alive today whose life has been given order because of caesar you following me another problem is caesar's house does not address the actual problem that human beings have it addresses some of the symptoms it doesn't address the actual root problem is a lack of peace the main problem we have as human beings is it a real problem is it the main problem no the point i'm trying to make is this the real problem and i've already said it the real human being problem is this we have not obeyed god the greatest lack of peace we have is not between each other i'm not saying that doesn't matter it's between us and god paul says it we read it in the psalms it's all over the new testament the main problem we have is what sin if you're new today you're visiting us i know this seems a little intense but it's true if you're here today looking for anything other than salvation found through the name of jesus i'm not going to give it to you i want to give you the real thing you need you need to be saved from your own sin i think in the time of the colossians caesar's house made a lot of sense caesar's answer to the human problem made a lot of sense to a lot of people it obviously does not for us today but there are many houses with many names that give us answers that are not sufficient there are places where we want to live metaphorically that we think will solve our problems all kinds of various pseudo-religious or philosophies that we think are going to answer our problems they will not there's only one name under heaven and earth in which you might be saved and that name is what so there's a new house and there's a new gospel remember over and over again you could read inscriptions saying the gospel of and it would be caesar augustus and now there is the gospel of jesus christ it's a different sort of gospel it takes a different sort of shape it answers the actual problem and paul in the fifth verse of colossians says this he says of this you have heard before in the word of the truth the gospel a bunch of ways you could translate that it could be the true word of the gospel or the true message of the gospel he's saying you've heard of gospels before i have the actual one that is actually good news paul paul uh cares a great deal about conveying to the colossians what it means to be saved how to be saved however a lot of that is assumed in colossians there are various places we can go to colossians to understand more about the gospel but the most succinct helpful places that we can go to to understand what the gospel is are actually in my opinion in first corinthians and in romans i want to read them to you and if you're new if you don't know jesus yet i want you to want you to follow along here and if you're not new and you don't have these bookmarked in your bible i don't want to tell you to mark in your bible i'm just saying these are good places to have access too quickly paul says now i would remind you brothers of the gospel i preached to you which you received in which you stand and by which you are being saved if you hold fast to the word i preached to you unless you believed in vain for i delivered to you as a first importance what i also received that christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to cephas then to the twelve then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time most of whom were still alive then he appeared to james then to all the apostles last of all as to one untimely born he appeared to me paul is saying the gospel is something that happened it's news about something that happened is that advice for your life although the bible gives lots of advice it's not a secret about how to you know be your best or be your best to you the gospel is essentially news about something that has already happened and and then in romans romans 3 and again if you'd like to bookmark that in your bible i'm not going to stop you romans 3 21 paul dives more into the theological content of the gospel he tells us more about how it actually works paul says but now the righteousness of god has been manifested apart from the law although the law and the prophets bear witness to it the righteousness of god through faith in jesus christ for all who believe for there is no distinction this is important for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in christ jesus whom god put forward as a propitiation if you were here a few weeks ago you heard zach preach on the concept of propitiation the idea is that jesus exhausted the wrath of god there was none left for anyone who might call in the name of jesus to be received by faith this was to show god's righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins it was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in jesus and just leave that last screen up for a second what paul is saying is sinners deserve destruction they deserve the wrath of god he's saying that sinners can't escape the wrath of god except in that god sent his son jesus who lived a perfect life committed no sin and went to a cross and on that cross the wrath of god was poured out on him so that all who might call on him can have his righteousness and not suffer the wrath of god it's a way that jesus rescues us from coming destruction are you still with me okay there's this word faith we hear it all the time people are named faith it's in a lot of songs there was a uh missionary that was doing work in the outer hebrides like the very very very north of the united kingdom and he was working with the native languages there and he's trying to translate the word faith what does faith mean what is the best word to translate the greek word for faith and he found a native word that meant to lean your entire weight on i think that's a really good picture of faith i i took my family camping recently love camping lots of fun big fan of camping and we want to go on a hike uh you know those camping hikes where you're like there's like a stream and big rocks you're jumping from one rock to the next you know what i'm talking about if you're a kid it's exciting if you're a parent i don't think the other parents would like i wanna get my kid like a helmet knee pads elbow pads like andrew you gotta chill my son he's like five or six i should know his exact age at the point um he's young he wants to go on this hike and i'm like son you're not ready and like the group's headed off i'm like let's just take the flat safe dirt path you're not really like i'm ready i'm ready i'm ready i'm ready other people are now you know 100 feet down and finally i just relent i say okay all right fine let's go and my son experienced zero fear or danger during the entire walk and here's why he would just jump around he's just a stick figure kneecap like jump like from rock to rock to rock and multiple times he would make a leap with no place to land and i would just catch him in mid-air and i realized he has no plan he also feels no sense of danger he trusts me 100 percent do you know what i mean absolute faith in me leans his entire weight on me literally i think that's what true faith looks like it's not like intellectual agreement i think that's part of it it's not blindly believing in something that you want to be true it's leaning your entire weight on something because you know only that thing can actually save you amen so paul is in prison can we just jump back to paul real quickly he's in prison i think he's probably at the end of his life there's some disagreement over when exactly he wrote this letter but he probably i think wrote it in a prison in rome towards the end of his life and he's in prison because of his missionary work paul was an aggressive and active missionary he went on three different missionary journeys and at the end of his third one he's back in uh in israel in that area and he's in prison and there's a series of trials and throughout the series of trials he eventually invokes his roman citizenship he actually uses rome to get to rome the city the center of the known world so that he can do missionary work in rome and what i want us to understand is um although paul is in caesar's prison he's not in caesar's house so he's physically in rome in a prison but he knows that that is not his home so he can persist through any kind of suffering or any kind of tragedy any kind of inconvenience because he knows wherever he is that is not his home then he writes a letter to the colossians and uh colossae was not a very important city not a very big city not particularly culturally significant not very wealthy not placed in a location geographically that mattered a great deal in fact many commentators note that paul wrote one of his most important letters to one of the least important cities in the roman empire he also doesn't know the colossians sometimes uh we read letters that paul writes to people who he pastored who he spent time with who he met personally but that's not the case for colossians paul did ministry in ephesus and in ephesus a guy named epaphrist comes to faith and then epaphras goes out to most of asia minor and epaphras preaches the gospel in colossae and people come to faith in colossi because of epaphras's teaching paul doesn't even know the colossians paul writes them because they are ready to make the mistake that so many of us make that the world we detect with our senses is the most real thing they go to colossae they live there they they have houses there or whatever they eat food there they go to the marketplace they have friends and they have families colossi is very real to them for those of you who live here in the south bay really any does it feel real to you it's real right you're reminded of the place that you live by the things you see and hear and taste and touch it feels like the place you live and paul's concern is paul's concern is they might forget that even though they exist in colossae the colossi is not their home even though you might exist here in the south bay or the surrounding area you might own a house like a paying mortgage here this place is still not your most permanent most real home so this is what paul does paul paints perhaps the most sweeping magnificent profound picture of jesus in the entire new testament it's immense and feels edgeless and it's cosmic it's like all throughout outer space and then he draws this absurdly straight line between jesus the lord of all of outer space to just like regular human daily life it's a very straight line he does it in less than 100 verses really really really quick and so now i want to go back to our first few verses here and i want us to see what he says in verse 2. paul says to the saints and faithful brothers and here we go in christ at colossae i think a lot of what he does in colossians kind of sits hangs on what he says here can i teach you just a little bit of greek is that okay greek's really hard so once you pay attention the the greek word for our english word in is in i'm gonna write that down if you need to as i said greek's very hard and that greek word appears before christ and colossi because it can also be translated at so like a more literal translation would be the the believers the saints in christ in colossae paul's saying you are in a sense in both places once these what scholars uh call using sphere language um he's saying even though you're walking around colossae even though you're walking around hermosa or torrance or gardena or lemire wherever you live and you're experiencing that city you're more permanently currently and more importantly in christ you are not primarily a south bayonne or whatever you're primarily a christian fundamentally your identity is in christ himself he is where you live so here's what happened to me as i was reading colossians over the last couple weeks have you ever read a passage of the bible after a long time having not read it and it has totally new life for you this is a very good response i'm glad that that's happened to you i grew up as a christian you know i read the bible you know as a kid maybe not with his uh careful eyes as i do now and in between now and the last time i recall really sitting down with colossians i've had like a decade of uh of like theological training um and then so i i read it over the course last few weeks and it really really like messed me up like it kind of blew my mind and here's what i mean um there's this weird absurd debate in scholarship uh uh where people are like oh yeah did the early christians think that jesus was god and that sounds absurd to you and that's because it is absurd the early christians did think jesus was god and i'm like i wish i had been like hey uh other academics have you read colossians because it kind of seems like like they thought he was god like in a completely unmitigated unprecedented uh scandalous way it seems like that's what paul thought um like i just imagine paul goes to colossi and i know he he didn't but like you imagine he goes there or i really to any any uh grunkle roman town and he sees all the people walking around he hears all these great things about caesar he's like yeah caesar built this place really nice place roads are really great economy's good because of caesar he protects us caesar's really really great and paul's like caesar yeah uh have you guys heard of jesus like yes caesar the emperor right jesus is the image of the invisible god he's the one who uh created everything on heaven and earth you know thrones and dominions visible and invisible he's the one who like what else is great about jesus oh he created all things and and all things were created for him that means he made you for him he's the preeminent one first in all things the firstborn of creation the firstborn of those risen from the dead paul is painting a magnificently large picture of jesus and a pause that's first caller that's colossians 1 15 through 20. and we agreed because it's such a great passage and i've gotten many great passages that mike gets to preach that one i can see him in the back he's like you're sitting on these verses a little long andrew just trying to tell you about jesus guys wouldn't that be if i walked up and i was like you know what i'm just going to start with 115. no be ready be ready for that passage amen okay point is this paul is meeting them where they live in their lives and he's saying christ is supreme what is he first in everything what did he make everything what is everything for him christ is supreme do you believe that christ is supreme christ is supreme and precisely because he's supreme and here's the absurdly short line because christ is supreme he is also sufficient everything you need you have in jesus everything you need you have in jesus and by the way jesus is not just a carpenter he's the cosmic lord of the entire universe who holds all the atoms in your body together he's supreme so therefore he is sufficient the occasion of this letter is that this uh the colossians because they see colossi around them because they live regular life because they cannot always detect with their eyes the spiritual realities that they believe are true have started kind of walking back into other houses houses that might bear names like gnosticism or pagan worship or angel worship or legalism but are actually just adam's house paul says things like this i'm going to read you a couple quick verses he says i say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments a little bit later he says this see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to christ i'm going to read you one more therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath these are a shadow of things to come but the substance belongs to christ let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels going on in detail about visions puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows with a growth that is from god if with christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world why as if you were still alive in the world do you submit to regulations do not handle do not taste do not touch referring to things that all perish as they are used according to human precepts and teaching these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body but they're of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh and when i read that you guys 100 understand what paul's saying there something like nope it's called the colossian heresy you can read a hundred books about the colossian heresy don't recommend it when you're done you won't know what it was you'll just know that it was weird really hoping mike gets that section also we don't 100 know i'm not really going to get into the weeds now we'll talk more about it at some point i'm sure could be an anti-materialism could be a form of jewish legalism it could be something about worshiping the foundational elements of the earth the word paul uses stoichia kind of like pillars uh it could be all kinds of different things we are not a pursuit the point is this paul's saying there are other things that you are going after now you're not just learning about them you're not just curious by them but you're going back into those houses they're taking you captive paul is not saying that other world views out of christian outside of christianity are always wrong about everything that's not true he is saying only christianity is correct about everything so stop going after other gods are you weary from these last 18 months anybody has it been confusing like i don't know what to believe there's so much data return to christ who is supreme who is sufficient and live at his house hope chapel uh we have a new house we have a new house it is built by jesus and he is supreme and we should live like we believe that amen we pray father we thank you for the many wonderful things that you've given to us through your word we thank you that you sovereignly uh guided paul as he wrote these letters that you inspired them that you preserve them for us that we might have them that we might possess in our bibles your very word and learn we thank you uh for the work that your son achieved at the cross we thank you for a sacrifice we thank you for his righteous life before the cross we thank you that jesus traded places with us pray for those who are here who do not yet know you that you would grant them the illumination of the eyes of their heart that even now they would feel a desire to know you more that you would reveal yourself to them because we know that as a gift from you pray you bless us as we walk through the book of colossians that you enrich our hearts and our lives with the words that we read there i pray that as we read colossians as we read about the greatness of jesus christ that we become more like him pray all these things in his name amen you

Channel: Hope Chapel Hermosa Beach

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Keywords: pastor, hope chapel, Hermosa Beach, sermon, church, service

Id: 9djqNEW7-bM

Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021