Maturing In Christ

Colossians 2:1-5

The story may be fact, may be fiction, but the story is told of a little nine-year-old boy who got tired of practicing the piano. His mother heard that the great pianist Paderewski (p ae – d uh – r eh f – s k ee) was coming to town to do a concert. She bought two tickets, one for herself and one for her boy. So she stuffed him into a little tuxedo and pretty much dragged him to the concert hall.

What nine-year-old boy wants to sit and listen to some man he didn’t even know play the piano for a couple of hours? A couple of hours sitting is like an eternity to a nine-year-old! As they took their seats, the mother began visiting with her friends, and the little boy looked up at the platform and saw the giant, ebony black, Steinway concert grand piano. The lid on the keyboard was lifted and the leather bench was there. He looked at the piano, popped his knuckles, and said to himself, “Oh, man, I’d like to play that.”

So as his mother chatted with her friends, he slipped down the aisle, walked across the front, up the steps, sat down at the piano, and started playing “Chopsticks.” The people down front said, “Who … who is …? Quit! Quit playing! Hey, kid, stop! Whose kid is that? Where are his parents?” His mom was speechless, embarrassed beyond words. But the great Paderewski, who was backstage fixing his tie, heard what was going on. And without the boy seeing him, he slipped out on the stage, and came in behind the little boy, reached around him and improvised a beautiful melody to go with “Chopsticks.” And as he did, he whispered in the boy’s ear, “Keep playing. Don’t quit. Don’t stop.”[i]

That’s exactly what Paul and Timothy are doing in the five verses we are looking at today. They’re encouraging us, reminding us that we are complete in Christ. The key to great living, the key to hope and healing is in the centrality of Jesus Christ in our lives. So they wrap their  arms around us, whispering in our ears “Keep playing. Don’t quit. Don’t stop.”

When you place your faith in Christ, you are completely his. And you are complete in him. And just as an adopted son or daughter slowly matures into their new identity as a part of their new family, so we all grow into and mature in our new identity in Christ. And that growth in Christ is available to everyone. As we continue our journey through the New Testament letter of Colossians, take out your Bibles and turn with me to Colossians 2:1-5.

Paul is in prison in Rome. Timothy was there with him. They had never met these Colossian Christians. It was likely that they never would. But they are fighting for them nonetheless. They are fighting for them in prayer.

The word we translate as “struggle” is the Greek word “agōn” from which we get our word “agony.” The word has its roots in the place where the ancient Greeks assembled for their Olympic games, the place where they agonized in wrestling and footraces, where they fought to win.[ii] Back in V. 29, the last verse in chapter 1, the verse immediately preceding this one, Paul uses the same word when he says “for this I toil, struggling with all HIS energy …”

When most of us say “I’m praying for you” what we mean is I’m thinking about you. I really hope good things happen for you, but secretly we believe nothing will change. Our view of prayer is ANEMIC. That isn’t the view of prayer Paul and Timothy have here. This is no shallow “I’m thinking of you.” They KNOW their prayers on behalf of the Colossian Christians are making a difference. Listen to how different translations render this verse. “How greatly I strive for you” (RSV). “How deep is my anxiety” (Phillips). “How strenuous are my exertions” (NEB). How many of us think about prayer in those terms? Paul is describing unrelenting prayer.

Prayer is both conversation with God and dependence on God. When I pray, I am communicating with God. I am not just talking AT God, like God is some cosmic Santa Clause waiting to fulfill my list of wants and needs. I am also listening TO God. And that means I have to create space in my life for quiet. For silence. For listening.

It means I have to be willing to open my Bible and allow God to speak to me through his Word. It means I have to participate in the church, the body of Christ, allowing God to speak to me through the collective wisdom of my brothers and sisters in Christ. It means I have to learn to discern his voice in my own heart and mind, always checking what I am sensing in my heart against Scripture and with trusted friends.

Because our view of prayer is anemic, our prayer lives themselves are anemic. I hear people all the time say “When there’s nothing left to do, I can pray.” “When I’ve tried everything else I can think of, exhausted all my other options, I can pray. God is there for me when everything else fails.” But look at the word Paul and Timothy use to describe prayer here: AGONY. The agony an athlete experiences. The agony of hard work in prayer. We’re talking about deep, time-consuming, energy-expending, emotion-draining prayer.

And Paul knows that he will never meet them. But he also knows that through his prayer for them, he is with them nonetheless. Look down at V. 5.

We say that almost as often as we flippantly say “I’m praying for you.” We get invited to something, a wedding, a graduation, a church outreach event, and we say, “I can’t be there, but I’ll be with you in spirit.” Truth is, we can’t be … UNLESS we really are praying. If we want to see God move in our church, through our church, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our community, in our nation, our practice of prayer must change, must deepen.

So what are Paul and Timothy praying for? They pray that our hearts will be encouraged. Look at V. 2. In that culture, the heart was viewed not only as the place from which our emotions come, but the seat of intention, the source of our actions, our will. Paul seeks encouragement that does much more than just make us feel better. He wants us to be encouraged in such a way that our actions change, like an exhausted runner enabled to find enough energy to cross the finish line because of the cheers and encouragement of her fans. When was the last time you really encouraged someone?

Paul and Timothy’s prayer for us is that as we encourage one another in Christ, we will be united in love. It is through our love for one another that our hearts are encouraged and we come into a deeper understanding of Christ. Christ cannot be known apart from acts of sacrificial love for others that grow out of God’s sacrificial love for us. Not only does real, practical love bear witness to the love of Christ, it also draws us together deeper in our knowledge of Christ. When we love one another, we experience Christ through that love.

Look again at V. 2. And as we encourage one another and love one another, we grow toward maturity in Christ together. But when our love dies, when we stop living out the love of God in Christ, when we stop loving one another and loving those in our community in need, and begin to sit back and become observers in church, the church dies.

Sadly, our view of prayer is anemic, our hearts are discouraged, and our love runs cold because our view of Christ is anemic. Remember Paul’s unparalleled description of Christ in chapter 1: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation … by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell …”

Those words shine their light on everything Paul writes in the rest of this letter. His prayer, the thing for which he is in agony, exerting himself, is that we’ll mature in our grasp, our understanding of that truth, that we’ll be encouraged by those words. Look at Vv. 2-3 here.

The key to real life in Christ and maturing in Christ is a crystal-clear vision of who Christ is. Your vision of Christ will shape your whole life – how you play and how you pray, how you work and what you work for, how you parent and how you relate to your own parents, how you serve, and whom you serve.

If our vision of Christ is off, everything else will be off too. And our vision of Christ must be shaped by the Word of God. Think about it.

If I believe that Christ is eternal and without end, that there never has been and never will be a time or a place where he was not;

If I believe that he is the creator of everything, from the smallest atom to the mightiest star, the creator of textures and shapes and colors;

If I believe that he is the sustainer of all creation, the force holding the atoms of my body, my town, this universe together, that without him it all would dissolve[iii];

If I believe that he is holding me together, that there is no place I can go where I cannot find him, no place where I am outside of his grasp,

Then there is nothing I will not do for him, no place I will not go for him, nothing I will not go through for him. Although I will feel fear, and anxiety, and sadness, and pain, beneath it all will be a current of hope and joy, knowing that I rest firmly in his grasp until the moment he has ordained to draw me to himself, beyond this life, from his grasp into his loving embrace.

Now, look at Vv. 4-5. Paul and Timothy are agonizing for us in prayer, praying that we will be encouraged by their words AND that we will encourage one another, that we will love one another well as we do life together, that we will grow in our knowledge of Christ, SO THAT we won’t be led astray.

There is a warning in Paul’s encouraging words. Paul had received word that some of them were beginning to teach things contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s what it means to destroy the unity of the church. We destroy the unity of the church when we lead people away from Christ and into trusting other things too. Making Christ just a part of a larger spiritual burrito, mixing Christ with philosophies and ideas that are fashionable in our time. We’ve become enamored with Qdoba style faith.

There’s a pervasive approach to the spiritual life in our culture that I would simply call “The Religion of Qdoba.” Now, if you love Qdoba, that’s a good thing. Qdoba offers a very simple and fun way to eat lunch or dinner: you come up to a burrito bar, look down at all the food options, and then you decide how to concoct your own burrito. Or, if you don’t want it all stuffed in a tortilla, you can get it in a bowl. The ingredients are laid out behind the glass, but you design the meal to suit your personal tastes.

Unfortunately, most of us take that approach in our lives in Christ. It’s tempting to think we can walk up to the great burrito bar of the religious world and say something like this: I’ll have some of that evangelicalism. I like their energy and cultural adaptability. I like the regal nature of Roman Catholicism, and it seems kind of ancient, and I also need a little dab of mystery in my life – but not too much, please, because I also want to figure things out for myself.

Give me a dash of Hinduism because I sure like that open-endedness; and if I’m a good person, I’ll be reincarnated in a higher life form. I like the calmness and detachment of Buddhism. But once again, give me just a small portion because I don’t want to quench all of my earthly desires. And that “Jesus is the only way to God” salsa – no, I don’t want to limit myself to that option. Please keep that out. We literally choose and pick, often without research, often very subjectively, the things that we think must be true. As a result, we make our own faith like a self-made burrito.

And that approach has been found wanting.  If we discard Christ, ignore Him, reject Him, or seek to make him anything less than “the image of the invisible God, the one holding all things together, the head of the church, the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the one through whom God has reconciled all things to himself through the cross,” we reject the meaning and the purpose and the explanation of life!

Retired Congressman Frank Wolf, a committed Christian from Virginia, was an outspoken advocate for international human rights for 30 years. He visited hotspots for persecution and human rights abuses all over the world. At one point, he was asked if America – especially the churches in America – were failing the oppressed peoples of the world. He replied: I meet many people [from around the world] who are baffled and concerned that the West doesn’t seem to be that interested in their plight.

Three nuns from Iraq just came to my office. They said they felt abandoned. Half the Christian community in Iraq is now living in ghettos in Damascus, Lebanon, and Jordan. I was in Egypt last month. The United States has given the Egyptian government over $50 billion [since the late 1970s]. And yet the Coptic Christians have been persecuted during that time. If you’re a Coptic Christian in Egypt, you can’t get a government job, and you can’t be in the military. They wonder why the church in the West hasn’t spoken out. In China, you have roughly 30 Catholic bishops who have been arrested. You have hundreds of Protestant pastors and house church leaders being imprisoned and persecuted. The church in Sudan has suffered persecution. In southern Sudan, 2.1 million people have died – mainly Christians, but also some Muslims and some animists. I had one woman tell me, “The West seems more interested in the whales than in us.”[iv]

Friends, we must learn to pray, to encourage one another and love one another well. That’s how we mature in Christ. And then, when we pray, we’ll know that we are doing something. Let’s pray.

[i] D.H. DeHaan, Windows on the Word

[ii] Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words

[iii] Adapted from R. Kent Hughes, Preaching the Word: Colossians & Philemon.

[iv] Interview by Susan Wunderink, “Q & A: Frank Wolf on Liberty for the Captives,” Christianity Today (11-17-11)