A message on salvation
“12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. 13 For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
Kate is a busy young lady. She’s done medical missions work. She visits sick people in the hospital just to encourage them. She teaches Sunday School. She sees her life as one big act of gratitude to Jesus for what he has done for her. She loves to think about what Jesus has done for her. She loves to think about grace. That leads her to gratitude in her life. We will think more about Kate later. Now we will think about us. Grace is our theology too and gratitude is our response. That’s the claim of this sermon. Grace is our theology; gratitude is our response.
We will study this in three points. First: our share of inheritance. Second: from darkness to light. Third: we are redeemed. These three points roughly follow the three verses of this passage. Point one—verse 12, point two—verse 13, point three—verse 14.
First: our share of inheritance. These verses we are studying are all about the grace that leads us to gratitude. It is three different descriptions of the grace that leads to “joyfully giving thanks to the Father,” as Paul puts it. This first description of grace has to do with a share of inheritance; verse 12, “give thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.”
These words for “share” and “inheritance” regularly occur together in the Old Testament. They refer to portions of the Promised Land. Every tribe and clan and family had their portion or share of the Promised Land. That was their proof that they were part of the people of God.
Land was and is still meaningful. I remember buying our first house and thinking, “I can’t believe this is mine. I can do whatever I want with is and no one can say a thing because it’s mine.” Having part of the Promised Land was even more meaningful to those Israelites because their individual share of the land was physical proof that they belonged to God. They lived in His land because they were His people. That’s part of why their exile to Babylon was so painful. They were sent away from one of the previous proofs of His love.
Paul used that same language of “share” and “inheritance” to say that these Colossians, many of whom were Gentiles, were just as much the people of God as the Israelites were when they divvied up the land. That goes for you. You’ve got just as a much of a claim on the new creation as the Israelites had in the Promised Land. You can look back on the fact that they entered and lived in the land as a promise that you will enter and live in the new creation. That helps because we can’t look forward for certainty that we will be made new in the new creation but we can look back and see that God has done this sort of thing before. He has given people a share of inheritance before and He promises that He will do it again.
Now you might not feel worthy of a share. The vast majority of people have a well-founded suspicion that something is wrong with them. We’ve seen enough of ourselves to recognize that we are sinners. We’ve seen enough of ourselves to recognize that we are fallen. We know that we are not the way that we are supposed to be and we know that we can’t perfect ourselves. This makes us wonder if we are qualified to have a share in the new creation but look at verse 12. Who qualifies us to share in the inheritance of the saints? The Father qualifies you. You haven’t qualified yourself.
That’s grace. I’ve done nothing to qualify myself to be part of the people of God. I’ve done nothing to have my 40 acres so to speak of the new creation. It doesn’t rest on me at all. It never did.
That’s a blessing. Paul was recounting the blessings of grace that God had given these Colossians so they would count them. He would agree with the old song, “Count your many blessings; name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” Paul thought that recounting God’s grace would lead to gratitude; “joyfully giving thanks to the Father.” Maybe God has you here this morning to recount His grace to fuel gratitude in your life. Here’s another blessing: He has rescued you from darkness and brought you into the light. That’s our second point: from darkness to light.
Paul wasn’t just recounting God’s grace in different ways for the Colossians’ benefit. He included himself in this process. You see that in his shift in pronouns from verse 12 to verse 13. Verse 12 uses “you.” Verse 13 uses “us”; “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”
Paul was reminding himself of the good news of grace too because that’s what it took for him to be grateful. We need to train ourselves to think this way. Martyn Lloyd Jones made this point in a message on Psalm 42. He asked, ‘Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you; they bring back the problems of yesterday. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for moment, I will speak to you.”’
That’s part of what Paul was doing here. He was speaking good news to himself and to the Colossians, “God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”
Paul was reminding himself that he was in the darkness but God had brought him into the light. You see the darkness in verse 13, “For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness,” and the light in verse 12, “saints in the kingdom of light.” This is grace described in terms of coming from darkness into the light.
Kids understand what this is all about. Very few kids are afraid of the light. Most kids are afraid of the darkness. I remember being in middle school and riding my bike home in the dark from Justin Noordyke’s house. Justin lived seven houses away. One night a week we would watch The X-Files, which was a thriller show about aliens and everything spooky. I would then ride my bike home in the dark. I’m sure I set land speed records on those nights because the dark can be scary and it is extra scary when you’ve just watched a creepy show.
That creepiness was part of what these Colossians feared about the realm of darkness. The Gentiles lived in fear of dark forces that they thought controlled their destinies. They feared that they were pawns in a very dark game being played by forces beyond their control. They had a bit of that right. The darkness here is Satanic. This is same word that Jesus used when he told the mob who arrested him, “this is your hour—when darkness reigns.” Paul used the same word for “rescue” here that Jesus used in the Lord’s Prayer, “deliver us from the evil one.” The ancients were right to fear the realm of darkness. There is a devil.
The greater the seriousness with which we take the devil, the greater our gratitude will be in being delivered from him. That’s how joy in salvation works. The greater your fear of what you were saved from, the greater your joy in salvation. Someone who was saved from a 400 foot fall is more relieved that someone saved form a 4 inch fall.
Years ago, I was invited over to someone’s house to pray for deliverance from demons. There were bizarre, inexplicable things happening in that home; there was evil at work. That family lived in fear and if I lived there, I’m sure I would have been afraid. The more you see of Satan’s work, the more relieved you are to be saved from his sway. If our culture descends into further paganism, we will most likely see more manifestations of the realm of darkness. That means that the difference between the light and the darkness will also become clearer. That’s a reason for hope for the church.
There is conflict in this world, and it is between two kingdoms—the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light. We can be saved from the kingdom of darkness and brought int the kingdom of light. Now we need to be careful with this language because it is easy for each of us to identify ourselves, by definition, with the light. We are quick to tell ourselves stories in which we are the good guys and those who oppose us are the powers of darkness. When we start thinking that way, we fail to see that the darkness isn’t simply out there. There is also darkness in our in-group and the darkness within each of us. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his book about what it was like to live in a Gulag in Soviet Russia, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.” We need to be careful about us and them language. We need to be careful when we use light and darkness language. Only Satan is all darkness and only Christ is all light. What people need is to be transferred from Satan’s kingdom to Christ’s kingdom.
Paul intentionally uses kingdom language here—“the dominion of darkness” in verse 13, “the kingdom of light” in verse 12. Everyone lives in one of those two kingdoms under one of those two kings. This language of, “the kingdom of the Son He loves,” in verse 13 underlines Jesus’ kingship. This is all about kings and kingdoms and the good news of human history is not that goodness defined as us wins but that goodness defined as king Jesus wins. That goodness is most clearly seen on the cross, which is the throne of the king of the kingdom of light. “The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross,” as Lesslie Newbigin put it.
This is good news on top of good news. We can escape darkness and be part of a kingdom in which the king loves his people so much that he is willing to die to save us. The question here is what do you believe holds sway in your life? Do you think that Murphy’s Law holds sway over your life, “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”? Do you think there is nothing that holds sway in life and that it is all random and meaningless? Paul thought that king Jesus held sway. He thought he lived in a kingdom governed by king Jesus. “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”
What would it look like for you to live as if king Jesus held sway over your life? What questions would you want to ask him? What would living as if king Jesus was in charge free you up to do? There are all sorts of questions worth asking once we remember that, “God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves,” but we need to remember. That’s what we are doing as we consider these three descriptions of grace.
Living as if king Jesus is in charge leads to gratitude—“joyfully giving thanks to the Father.” Living as if we are redeemed leads to gratitude. That’s our final point: we are redeemed.
This word redemption in verse 14 is an Exodus word. Exodus 6:6, “I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.” The Exodus was about God redeeming the slaves.
The word “rescue” up in verse 13 is an Exodus word. Exodus 3:8, “I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
The Exodus was about God redeeming the slaves in Egypt by way of rescue. That’s what the forgiveness of sins is all about as well. You can see that Paul equates these two in verse 14, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Paul wants us to see that Jesus did for us on the cross what God did for the slaves in Egypt in the Exodus.
The Exodus was their story; the cross is our story. The Israelites remembered the Exodus in the Passover meal because that was the moment they went from being slaves in Egypt to children of God. We remember the cross in the Lord’s Supper because that was the moment we went from being slaves in the kingdom of darkness to children of God in the kingdom of light.
The Bible is a rags to riches story. It is about slaves with nothing becoming sharers in God’s country. We love rags to riches stories. Selena Gomez’s mother was just 16 years old when the future pop star was born. Selena remembers them running out of gas all the time and having to scour the car to find quarters to buy gas. Selena Gomez now has $75 million to her name and I’m sure her mom doesn’t need to scour the car for quarters anymore. Jim Carrey lived in a van for a while at the age of 12 after his dad lost his job. The movie star now has about $180 million. We love those stories, but they pale in comparison with the story Paul is telling us and this story is your story—from a slave of Satan under the sway of darkness to a resident of the kingdom of light, from a slave with nothing to a sharer in the new creation. That’s the story of everyone who has become a child of God through the cross of Christ.
That grace is described in terms of sharing in the land, moving from darkness to light, and redemption from slavery. Each of us those should lead to gratitude. When oxygen interacts with hydrogen it leads to an explosion. When grace interacts with the born-again heart, it leads to gratitude. Paul has been detailing grace in these different ways for the purpose of gratitude; “joyfully giving thanks to the Father,” were the words that began this section.
That makes reflecting on God’s grace a very joyful act. That takes us back to Kate. Kate’s busyness for God stopped when she developed a horrible illness and was confined to bed. Before she got sick, Kate loved to reflect on God’s grace and that fueled her life of gratitude in service. When she got desperately sick, she still loved to reflect on God’s grace. She still spent her time, “joyfully giving thanks to the Father.” During her lengthy illness, she wrote a poem. My guess is that you know part of it. “I love to tell the story. It’s pleasant to repeat what seems, each time I tell it, more wonderfully sweet. I love to tell the story, for some have never heard the message of salvation from God’s own holy word. I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it, like the rest, and when, in scenes of glory, I sing the new, new song, it will be the old, old story that I have loved so long.”
As she lay there for months on end, Kate Haney did what Paul did. She recounted God’s grace in different ways. That’s how she continued to joyfully give thanks to the Father. That’s also how she continued to live gratefully for another 45 years after she recovered from that illness.
There are a lot of ways to live a life. If you have a share in the new creation, why not live like you got it? If you have been rescued from the realm of darkness and are now in the kingdom of light, why not live like you’re in the light? If you were slave but are not a child, why not live like a child rather than a slave?
Remember God’s grace. That’s how you live gratefully. We all know how easy it is to live otherwise. We all know how easy it is to live as if we’ve functionally forgotten what God has done and is doing so remember. “When it comes to life,” said Chesterton, “the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” Amen.